Zionists Sign Transfer Agreement With Hitler

The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine is a book written by author Edwin Black, documenting the agreement between Zionist Jews and Adolf Hitler to help create a Jewish state in Palestine, in return for an end of a global boycott of Nazi Germany that had threatened to bring it down in its first days of power.

This book documents the agreement between Adolf Hitler and an organization of Zionist Jews in 1933, which made Hitler "the chief economic sponsor of the state of Israel". A sweeping, worldwide economic boycott of Germany by Jews helped spur a deal between the Nazis and Zionists. 

At that time, there were few Jews in Palestine, but from 1933 through 1936, 60,000 German Jews immigrated into the region, bringing with them $100,000,000 dollars ($1.6 billion in 2009 dollars)

There was no effort to deny the history documented in this book, but Jewish groups around the world decried it as "sensationalism". The author, himself a Jew, was disowned by his own mother, although they reconciled later.

German Expulsion From Eastern Europe

While German aggression has been well documented, comparatively little attention has been paid to the expulsion of ethnic Germans living in Eastern Europe after the war, somewhat vindicating the saying that "history is a tale told by the victors".

The Allies oversaw the largest forced population transfer in history: 12 million German-speaking civilians living in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland were forced to leave their homes and made to resettle in defeated Germany. Figures vary, but between 500,000 and 1.5 million of these expellees died, of maltreatment in the holding camps before they left, of starvation on the expulsion trains, or of disease when they arrived in the Fatherland.

In spite of the wording of the Potsdam Agreement, which declared that the expulsions should be carried out in an "orderly and humane" fashion, Douglas convincingly shows that the Allies had a very clear idea of the scale of suffering that implementing such a policy would bring.

As early as 1942, a Foreign Office think-tank investigated the implications of a mass expulsion of ethnic Germans. The report concluded that "If the Allies did not wish to see central Europe's road and rail network congested with expellees, a timescale of five to ten years would be required." It went on to say that because it was unlikely that the expelling states would wait that long "the surviving Germans would have to be herded into concentration camps in Germany" while adequate settlement plans were organised.

These findings, it seems, were far too negative for the politicians, who were determined to pursue the policy irrespective of the human cost. The Allies knowingly pursued this course of action in the firm belief that the consequent suffering would have an educational effect on the defeated Germans.

Even before the war was over, Eastern Europeans took matters into their own hands, expelling ethnic Germans from their territories. With little warning, they were forced from their homes and pointed west. Taking no more provisions than they could carry, expellees were forced to beg and steal. Even this did not ensure their survival.

A number of occupation troops stationed in Germany voiced their shock at the terrible state of the refugees arriving from the East. One soldier declared that "the removal of the dead in carts from the railway stations was a grim reminder of what I saw in Belsen".

In overseeing the expulsion of ethnic Germans, the Allies soon found that they had created a humanitarian crisis in which refugees were pouring into bomb-ravaged Germany with little more than the clothes on their backs. At the end of 1947 the Allied Control Council declared "opposition to all future compulsory population transfers, particularly the forcible removal of persons from places which have been their homes for generations."

The expulsion of Germans is understandably a politically-charged topic. Until recently it has been taboo to examine the depths of German suffering after 1945, because of the suffering they themselves had caused.

Via: "The Independent"