The Transfer Agreement is Edwin Black's compelling, award-winning story of a negotiated rescue in 1933 between Zionist organizations and the Nazis to transfer some 50,000 Jews, and $100 million of their assets, to Jewish Palestine. In the process, the organized worldwide Jewish-led boycott against Hitler was stopped. 25th Anniversary Edition.
I didn't realize that there was ever such a boycott that actually brought the early Nazi regime virtually to its knees. The German people were on the verge of starvation because they needed a strong export market and couldn't sell their products under the boycott and were also burdened by the payments they had to make under the Treaty of Versailles. Because of the financial distress the Nazi national government created an official movement to create "One Pot Meals" that cost no more than 50 pfennigs so that people could survive the winters.
The Zionists, against the will of the majority of world Jewry, lied about the agreements they had made to get about 50,000 select Jews and a portion of their assets out of Germany and into Palestine. Then the Zionists took 90% of the assets to build Palestine and left them the rest to make their lives there. They also selected certain Jewish youth from other European countries that they put into training programs to teach them to help build Israel and arranged to get them to Palestine through the same program. They decided that the others would be left to deal with their fate in service to the creation of Israel. (I guess they didn't have a voice in that decision.)
The Transfer Agreement and the abandonment of the worldwide boycott was a tremendous struggle among the various Jewish groups around the world and is still not well known or acknowledged.
The author's parents were Holocaust survivors and the afterword was written by Abe Foxman, head of the ADL. He acknowledged the account and basically said that if you disagreed with what they did you were an anti-Semite - as usual. I wasn't impressed with his reasoning since it was a devious plan that created a terrible scandal among Jewish people who were working to create economic problems that were designed to bring down the Nazi government. There has been a continuing discussion about whether it could have worked if not undermined by the Zionists.
Obviously, I have great concerns that the worldwide boycott might have brought about the fall of Nazi government and have resulted in saving millions of lives and possibly even avoided the scourge of World War II.
In case you don't think you've read that right, let me say it again: The labor faction of the Zionist movement were in favor of establishing a trade agreement with the Nazi regime under which there would be a substantial, yet limited, emigration of German Jews to Palestine in exchange for rescinding the call for anti-Nazi boycotts AND agreeing to purchase German goods! This, to me, at least was an astonishing revelation! I believe I've read my fair share of histories dealing with that time period, and nowhere, especially in accounts dealing with the formation of the state of Israel, had this information been revealed.
Leave it to Edwin Black again to expose the machinations that went into the agonizing decisions taken by the international Jewish community to fight for the lives of their brethren while at the same time having the will (yes will!) to look beyond the horrifying reality of 1933 and to building a future where the Jews would never again be victims of the deranged psychosis of anti-Semitism.
It can certainly be stated that Mr Black has reseached a ' gem ' of a finding , if in fact it was this agreement that allowed for the survival of the Jewish culture and the formation of the state of Israel.
This would certainly rank amoung the greatest ' dark secrets ' of a culture , The Third Reich , who was looking to implement the final solution , and ultimately created the haven which allowed the Jewish people to survive and become a dominating world power .
Although I do not forsee any statues of Adolph Hitler being erected in Tel Aviv as a result of these findings , the fact that he may be a positive influence of the ultimate fulfillment of Zionism through the creation of a homeland would rank him as important and influential figure in Jewish lore as Ben Guiron , or Golda Meir .
The magnificient personal courage , and internal conflict and turmoil , that is ever- present in the book of the dilemma of those who sought to deal with the devil in an effort to free the Jewish people is fascinating and awe - inspiring and the ' stuff movies are made of .
I do not know how much it is embellished , and if it is, I can forgive Mr .Black for still presenting an excellent work, which is bound to make one think.
Solid reading/ solid research/ solid book .
Edwin Black is the award-winning, New York Times and international investigative author of 200 bestselling editions in 20 languages in more than 190 countries, as well as scores of newspaper and magazine articles in the leading publications of the United States, Europe and Israel. With more than 1.6 million books in print, his work focuses on human rights, genocide and hate, corporate criminality and corruption, governmental misconduct, academic fraud, philanthropy abuse, oil addiction, alternative energy and historical investigation. He can be found at www.edwinblack.com. His weekly Zoom TV Show can be found at www.theedwinblackshow.com.
Editors have submitted Black's work 16 times for Pulitzer Prize nomination, and in recent years he has been the recipient of a series of top editorial awards. He has also contributed to a number of anthologies worldwide. For his work, Black has been interviewed on hundreds of network broadcasts from Oprah, the Today Show, CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports and NBC Dateline in the US to the leading networks of Europe and Latin American. His works have been the subject of numerous documentaries, here and abroad. Several of his books have been optioned by Hollywood for film, with two in active production. Black's speaking tours include hundreds of events in dozens of cities each year, appearing at prestigious venues from the Library of Congress in Washington to the Simon Wiesenthal Institute in Los Angeles in America, and in Europe from London's British War Museum and Amsterdam's Institute for War Documentation to Munich's Carl Orff Hall.
Black's eleven award-winning bestselling books are IBM and the Holocaust (2001 & 2012), Financing the Flames (2013), British Petroleum and the Redline Agreement (2011), The Farhud (2010), Nazi Nexus (2009), The Plan (2008), Internal Combustion (2006), Banking on Baghdad (2004), War Against the Weak (2003 and 2012), The Transfer Agreement (1984 and 2009), and a 1999 novel, Format C:. His enterprise and investigative writings have appeared in scores of newspapers from the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune to the Sunday Times of London, Frankfurter Zeitung and the Jerusalem Post, as well as scores of magazines as diverse as Sports Illustrated, Reform Judaism, Der Spiegel, L'Express, BusinessWeek and American Bar Association Journal. Black's articles are syndicated worldwide.
See him at TheEdwinBlackShow.com and at The Edwin Black Show on his YouTubeChannel.
