First published to international acclaim in 1984, The Transfer Agreement stunned readers worldwide with its revelations of a pact between Zionist leaders and Hitler's Third Reich. Concluded in 1933, this controversial pact transferred 55,000 Jews and $100 million to Palestine on the condition that Zionist organizations call a halt to their economic boycott of Nazi Germany -- a potent tactic that was threatening to topple Hitler's government, then only in its first year in power. The debate over this controversial deal virtually tore apart the Jewish world in the pre-World War II era, and it remains unresolved today. Whereas the transfer agreement indeed ultimately saved lives, rescued assets, and helped lay the foundation for what would become the Jewish state in 1948, it also -- arguably -- allowed the Nazi regime to survive its first year and, over the next twelve, to plumb the depths of ethnic intolerance and implement massive genocide. With the world today confronting such morally complex issues as the compensation for slave labor during the Holocaust and the refusal of Swiss banks to return Jewish assets to their rightful heirs, the transfer agreement and the boycott that preceded it stand out even more startlingly as early examples of Jewish initiatives against Nazi terror. However ambiguous the choices made by the Jewish leaders in the turbulent prewar 1930s, they stand in a new and different light today. The Transfer Agreement is a remarkable and revelatory book that has now found its time.
