cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3294394

Pictured: An advertisement (in German & Hebrew) from the 1930s encouraging German Jews to use Ha’avara.

Quoting Edwin Black’s The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Secret Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, page 379:

In the period between late 1933 and 1941, over $30 million had been transferred directly via Haavara. Perhaps another $70 million had flowed into Palestine via corollary [Fascist] commercial agreements and special international banking transactions, this during a period when the average Palestinian Jew earned a dollar a day.

Some of [Zionism’s] major industrial enterprises were founded with those monies, including Mekoroth, the national waterworks; Lodzia, a leading textile firm; and Rassco, a major land developer. And vast quantities of material were stockpiled, including coal, irrigation pipes, iron and metal products for companies and enterprises not yet in existence.

From 1933 to 1941, approximately one‐hundred immigrant settlements were established along strategic corridors in western Galilee, the coastal plan, and in the northern Negev. About sixty of these settlements were established between 1936 and 1940. Most were possible only because Haavara or Haavara‐related funds flowed to Zionist agencies for land purchase and development.

And the settlements were made possible in large part because the Haavara economy had expanded the worker immigrant quota, allowing the influx of halutzim and German settlers. In 1948, the outline of these strategic settlements approximated the borders of the [neocolony], for each settlement was not only a demarcation of Jewish life, each was an outpost of [Zionist] defense where battles were fought and a boundary line was ultimately drawn.

Between 1933 and 1941, 20,000 German Jews directly transferred to Palestine via Haav[a]ra. Many of them never collected their money, and often when they did, it was only partially in cash and mostly in mandatory stocks and mortgages. Another 40,000 German Jews emigrated to Palestine during this period via the indirect and corollary aspects of transfer. Many of these people, especially in the late 1930s, were allowed to transfer actual replicas of their homes and factories—indeed rough replicas of their very existences.

(Emphasis added.)

Cheer to PalestineRemembered.com for leading me to this.

  • WaterBear [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Literally posting Nazi propaganda. Both of the NSDAP and Neo Nazis after the war. You can do better. The way you frame the transfers - without mentioning the alternative of death etc. - is the big problem. Don’t weaken your retelling and analysis by such antisemitic errors you could fix by investing more time.

    Quickly after the grab of power the NSDAP started to further physical violence, political, economic and financial repression against their declared enemies. Which includes people assigned as Jewish, socialists and others. The most embellished scape goat were the Jews (as declared earlier with that I mean assigned Jewish).

    The freezing of people’s money, arisation (“Arisierung”), and alike were policies implemented early on (a fraction off the money stolen was what was allowed to leave the country), the stochastic physical violence of the years before 1933 (which was still partially planned by the nazi policies) was supplemented with structured more intense violence. This includes the construction of concentration camps, which political enemies face fast, too, and multiple aligning plans, including several kinds of physical extermination, but were flanked with PR of being law abiding, PR of not having laws that undue restrict Jews.

    In fact the Nazis took a cut from money transfers (else they wouldn’t unfreeze money, or effectively force family members to go into debt to get Ausreisevisa (passports allowing to leave the country)). The majority of the in antiemetic propaganda (literally the term the Nazis used) termed capitalist visas was used by people fleeing their physical extermination, going deeply into debt too acquire the necessary money to pay to leave the country.

    Within the Jewish community the question of whether one ought to work together with authorities which were already crushing down on Jews and in later phases openly exterminated Jews was widely discussed. The voices which spoke against taking refugee were when the people didn’t flee silenced in the vast majority within the Shoa. The visas were a way out for some.

    Are the war the Nazis started to produce contradicting multifaceted antiseptic propaganda and tried to combine antisemitism, anti brit, “anti colonial” (well nazi Germany at the good colonial power), nationalist, warrior ethos of Islam (without any deep understanding of Islam) bits and distributed them within the MENA region.

    Like in plenty regions the Nazis has power a part of the population did actively further those propaganda items. While there were of course also people joining the Allied forces military power (including the British military which was still essential for colonialist power projection), plenty did join the Nazis, too, or took military and political courses in the third Reich. The discussion in other words ought to not paint broad strokes, but look at the mechanisms which furthered sub classes and differentiation of political groups (secular, socialist, anti colonial, nationalist, religious, Islamist etc.)

    Within the region there are plenty examples of helping nazi policies (i.e. expropriation of Jews or even deportations), while in North African Holocaust discourse the exceptions are highlighted and repressions diminished. During the war 450k Jews lived in northern Africa. I want to note that while the intellectual sphere in Egypt was diverse, too, the public intellectuals were establishing good collective antifascism, sadly with less socialist influences than could be hoped for at that time (ie “DEMON AND INFIDEL Egyptian Intellectuals Confronting Hitler and Nazism during World War II by Israel Gershoni”)

    A side note: During the 1930s the Soviet Union would send socialists and Jews back to Germany, leading to their imprisonment, torture and extermination. Why that happened is a complex question and neither previous Russian and then Soviet antisemitism in the wide population are a single explanation (we remember Lenin’s speech against antisemitism), nor antisemitism of the party or it’s leadership explain it enough. The pressure to remain somewhat entangled with the Nazis economically during preparation for war also played a role in accepting Nazi demands.

    Imagine how much more strongly those real power decisions have to be done when you are within the grasp of the Nazi regime and want to get your family, loved ones and family out. A reading of the “Kapitaltransferabkommen” without context is easily repeating Nazi propaganda and we can do better.

    Of course the Jewish refugees from the regime had a right to flee and societies and states which hindered them (or turned back ships of refugees) did further the Holocaust.

    • chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      Woah, what’s going on? They posted some stuff, it’s real, I’ve looked into it a lot. It just links the crisis in Palestine today to some of what preceded the Holocaust: Less-violent encouragement to relocate elsewhere on the planet, much like Israel does with the ghettoization of those it has illegally evicted from other parts of Palestine, in Gaza. Israelis try to make these people go as far away as possible, whether that’s 20km, 100km, or 3000km it’s still ethnic cleansing.

      Nobody worth listening to is blaming Jews for conditions then or now, only fascists.

      • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mlOP
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        8 months ago

        They added,

        The way you frame the transfers - without mentioning the alternative of death etc. - is the big problem.

        This is mostly anachronistic. While there were isolated homicides of Jews in the 1930s under Fascism (most infamously during Kristallnacht), the attempt at systematic extermination hadn’t begun until the early 1940s. Either way, though, participating in neocolonialism was not the answer to antisemitism:

        In defense of Zionism, Isaac Deutscher, a pained but ambivalent Zionist, soberly asserted that what happened to the Palestinian people as a result of Zionist colonialism cannot “in fairness” be blamed on the Jews: “People pursued by a monster and running to save their lives cannot help injuring those who are in the way and cannot help trampling over their property.”19 Deutscher, it would seem, never stopped to consider that European Jews could have still fled as refugees without becoming colonists. He never investigated the transformation of European Jews from refugees into colonial soldiers.20

        (Emphasis added. Source.)