Original subtitles

between Hitler's government and a group of Zionist leaders in 1933.

The agreement called for the transfer of 55 ,000 Jews and $100 million to

Palestine in exchange for calling off a planned economic boycott of Nazi Germany

by Jewish organizations.

Barnes & Noble booksellers in Rockville, Maryland, host the hour -long event.

So we're here with Edwin Black and...

Most people know you for some of the bestsellers, some of the books that

Mitchell has just referred to. IBM, The Holocaust, War Against the Weak,

Internal Combustion, Banking on Baghdad. All of these books, bestsellers, were

written, however, in the 21st century.

You have, I understand, somewhere around 69 different editions published in

about 14 languages in 61 countries. The question that we're focusing on today...

was actually your first book called The Transfer Agreement.

The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine.

This book was published in 1984, so it's been 25 years ago.

And at the time that it came out, I remember there was a tremendous amount

media attention.

And also, it was a very controversial book. It was one that there was a

tremendous amount of discussion about it. And so that's really what brings us

here today.

Let's go first to that issue. What was it about the publication of this book

the thesis that you were putting forth that garnered so much attention and so

much controversy?

The story of the transfer agreement is the story of the pact between the

Zionists and the Nazis that was launched in the first weeks of the Third Reich

in 1933.

It began in the spring of 1933 and was consummated in August of

1933.

Most people don't know that when Hitler came to power, Jews actually fought back

and they fought back hard and they fought back immediately.

Hitler came to power on January 30th, 1933.

The first concentration camp was actually opened up then

between March 8th and March 10th of 1933.

The anti -Jewish laws followed shortly thereafter.

And by March 27th of 1933, the Jewish war veterans...

had actually started a series of international protests and

marches. And on March 27th of 1933, one million

protesters jammed Madison Square Garden and there were boycott and protest

movements all over the globe, led by the Jews, but certainly

involving...

It's certainly involving the interfaith community, the labor unions, anyone who

wanted to profit any expense and to protest the Nazi regime.

So we're talking about 10, 12 years before the onset of World War II.

World War II began at 6 a .m. on September 30, 1939.

So Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Kristallnacht in

1938, the war in 1939.

And most of the genocidal period, the so -called final solution, I get begun

in the summer of 1941, the fall of 1941,

and then commencing at full speed in 1943, 4 and 5.

So what designists did...

was they realized their protest was fruitless. But think about it, let's be

we define Zionists. Those are the people who, what were they doing?

The Zionists?

I believe that most people don't know what the word Zionism means. Well,

at the end of the 19th century, there were a number of stick movements across

Europe. There was the concept of Armenian nationalism. There was East

nationalism. The Ottoman Empire was falling apart. There was a wide group of

people who were seeking to self -govern.

One of these many groups was the Jewish people, and

Zionism is nothing more than Jewish nationalism.

So we're talking the Jewish nationalists.

The Jewish nationalists, the Zionists, seeking to legally organize themselves

into a state under international law, which was done through the League of

Nations, sought to move the Jews who were persecuted, especially in

Europe, into Jewish Palestine. Most people today think of Palestinians as

but the entire world.

In 1933, he thought the word Palestinian meant Jewish Zionist. The Jewish Agency

for Palestine, the Palestine Post, Jewish Palestine. That's why the

the book is Jewish Palestine, because that was the body of the Jews in

what became the state of Israel, Jewish Palestine, and the term for the Jews.

internationally recognized in ordinary parlance and officially was Palestinian.

So they used to refer to Jews as Palestinians.

So these Zionists who were the advocate then for a Jewish homeland... They saw

the end before anyone saw the end.

And they said the only thing that we can do...

to save a remnant, because they saw it coming. They knew the history of the

Jews, the recent history and the distant history. They saw it coming,

and they made a deal with the Reich to transfer out the Jews

of Nazi Germany and other parts of Europe into Palestine.

Now, how are you going to do that?

That's going to be impossible because who's running Palestine?

Palestine is being run by the British.

It is being run under the so -called mandate system, which means the League

Nations mandated Palestine, Turkish territory before that, to be a

Jewish homeland.

But there were rules in place.

And the rules, and this is important, the rules were that Jews could not enter

Palestine.

without 5 ,000 in cash or 1 ,000 British pounds.

And this was called the so -called capitalist immigration certificate.

Now, how does a Jew leave Nazi Germany, where there are currency restrictions,

where he can bring a Reichsmark out of Germany, how does that Jew get into

Palestine as a so -called official refugee?

The answer is... The Germans concocted the idea, and the Zionists concocted it

with them, that German goods would be sold.

And as German goods were sold, money would be produced.

A Jew in Germany, in this complex arrangement, would take his personal

possessions and assets and put them in a special bank.

And that bank was called Paltroy.

Then a second bank was set up called the Anglo -Palestine Bank, and that bank

was in Palestine.

The money would be German bank.

The Nazi goods would be sold by the Zionist organization across the Middle

and especially in Palestine.

When the goods were sold, they generated revenue, which went into the Anglo

-Palestine Bank. The Anglo -Palestine Bank then provided the money for the

to bypass the currency restriction that the british has imposed and they would

come in in the process the nazis could restore their economy economy

the nazis could break the boycott because you could not transfer a jew

by selling the goods and at the same time boycott the goods the

of jewish palestine built up pipes

Steel, breweries, homes, cars, buses, all of these things German made.

And I wondered when I first went to Israel, why are there so many Mercedes

running around? Everybody asks that question. We all ask that question. And

that's where I really start.

Is that what got you interested in the topic?

No, what actually got me interested in it, we'll actually get to that in a

little bit, it was the Martian in Skokie. What did you talk about there?

ahead. So I wrote this book and explained how it happened. And in the

25 years ago, I was the first one to talk about the economic consequences of

Holocaust. At that time... People said, why are you talking assets?

They were still trying to comprehend the enormity, the scope of the bloodshed.

How many people died?

How many people were gassed? How many trains were there?

People were not talking about money.

That dominates the conversation as assets. I want my back. I want my

back. I want all these things back. But in those days, it was all almost

blasphemous. It was a few decades ahead of its time to discuss the money

consequences. But I realized that the scope of the bloodshed was in many ways

linked to the economic impact of the Holocaust.

In addition, I was the first one to use the word Nazi and Zionist in the same

sentence.

Now, it is today everywhere, especially by the enemies of the Jewish state.

But defective at that time, it was completely unexpected.

And so that's why the book was extremely controversial.

That's why the media jumped, went on a giant tour.

And even though I did my best to convey the information as best as I could, it

was quite shocking. And so we have...

people hiring psychologists to go on television and analyze me.

Did people assume you were seeing the Nazis and the Zionists, and that was

of what then was so disturbing? Well, they were trying to say that I was

the Jews.

Right.

For their very own fate, instead of being this whole elaborate theme, and in

terms of a rescue.

In fact, I had a problem with my own parents, who were survivors from the

to Treblinka and forest fires, who thought that I was perhaps revealing

something that should not be revealed.

I do remember the storm of controversy, and there were articles coming out and

this and that, and yet here we are today, and it seems as if the Jewish

community is now much more open to this situation. Well, they're open to it

because, of course, I've been established in the Jewish community. My

credentials of fighting for Jewish causes and for justice in Holocaust

is now well established.

Back when I wrote this book originally, the American Zionist Organization of

America canceled the publication of their

magazine, the American Zionist, on press because they had a cover story about

this topic. Today, Mort Klein of the

VOA has read the book and endorsed it as sensitive.

So do you want to share with us what took you into this line of research?

was your first book, right?

Book. And prior to that, I'd been a local investigative reporter. I had done

some international undercover investigations.

I was involved in an undercover operation on the left slave state in the

of the Indian Ocean.

And when I did that...

My agent, an agent approached me from William Morris and said, we want you to

write a book for us. What are the top five books you'd like to write? And I

said, well, the one book, I gave him ideas.

I said, the one book that is too hot to handle is the Transfer Agreement.

What really motivated me to be involved in this was the Skokie March.

Tell us about that. Well, I think I was fundamentally naive.

I fundamentally, I was in such a cloistered, typical

Jewish neighborhood environment that I couldn't understand how Jews could

operate against their perceived self -interest.

And during the Skokie March, I interviewed the Jewish attorney for the

I said, how can you do this? And at that time, I was schooled by a professor,

Byron Sherwin of Spurters College, who said there are many things we can't

understand. And he told me there was something called the transfer agreement.

And finally, I assembled a team of 20 or 30 historians and Holocaust

survivors and children of Holocaust survivors.

There was no second generation movement.

We went into five or six countries.

I accumulated all of the information.

Some of it was not even in the archive. It was under people's deaths. It was

being protected.

I went into the Jewish agency. I went into the Leo Beck Institute, and I found

the information. I assembled it, and I produced a book. So you're taking it to

the process of putting it together.

It's important to suffer a little, because the elaborate way in which the

scheme... was structured and then to try and uncover it and just what you've

referred to right now at a time pre -internet access to that kind of

must have been quite extraordinary.

So maybe you could shed for our listeners a little something about the

that, the research that went into it and putting together a team to pull all

this information together.

There was no internet.

There were no internet.

There were no computers.

The manuscript was typed.

And every time I changed a footnote, they had to retype the entire

It was retyped 30 times.

By the way, on an IBM Selectric.

So I was using the best IBM equipment even back then.

I did this in the late 70s and early 80s.

We had to assemble everything by hand.

We did everything by carbon paper and by a photocopy. There were very few Xerox

places in Israel. It was hard to make a copy.

But we assembled a team, and we had all these meetings, and we found the

information. Most people didn't know what we were looking for.

And at one point, I ran into an archivist in Israel who seemed to know

the files were hidden.

And I said to him, how is it that you know so much about this? He says, I was

the transfer agreement.

And the word transfer in Hebrew is Havara, which means transfer.

Transfer Limited, Havara Limited, was the name of the overall company.

And you must remember, this was by the Nazis.

cooperated with by the Nazis, and the Nazis and the Zionists actually worked

together because they had an intersecting interest.

The Nazis wanted the Jews out of Germany, designed them

into Palestine.

The Nazis wanted to seize German assets, German Jewish assets.

The Zionists wanted to save.

german jewish assets and the only way they could do it was by this treatment

the nazis were willing to work with jews on this is that what you're saying

that's right but their desire was to to ultimately to exterminate the jewish

people so was this before they had gone down that path or it just was it was

serving their greater interest in her interest explain that to us a little bit

understanding the nazi period for real

is understanding a complex set of situations.

It was actually Byron Sherwin from Spurters College who schooled on the new

approach to understanding both the reality and the perception of reality.

And the perception of reality often dictates the real set of facts that

occur on the ground and tumbling down the road.

saw working with the Zionists as the best, most expedient way to stop the

boycott and to get the Jews out of

Germany. Where were they going to go? They were going to go to Palestine. Now,

there's another train of thought here.

The Nazis believed in something called Volkisch Thought.

That means ethnic supremacy.

And they believed that the Germans had the Völkisch primacy in Europe,

and they thought that the Jews needed to go to Palestine, quote, where they

belonged. And so you had the fantastical idea of

Goebbels and others publicly endorsing Jewish emigration to

Palestine. The Nazis actually struck a coin.

with a Jewish star on one side and a swastika on the other.

While all the Jewish organizations were shut down, the Zionists were allowed to

maintain their operation and were allowed to grow.

But you must understand, when the Zionists published their newspaper, they

Nazi censors in the office.

Overlooking every line. People don't understand exactly what the nature of

invasive Nazi regime was.

It is easy to say they could have fought back, and on many levels people did

fight back.

But what the Zionists did is they were the realists, the cold -heart realists.

So let's talk about within the context of the Jewish community then.

And there are some important issues here.

There's a lot of misunderstanding.

Were Jews passive?

Were they resistant?

You alluded a little while ago to the nature of an anti -Nazi boycott.

So if you could just share with us a little bit about the backlash and what

Jewish community was trying to do in response to Hitler's early rise to

Okay. We need to look at this as two titanic forces.

The boycott.

to cripple the Reich, to cripple the Reich, and the transfer effort

to save the Jews.

They seem to be on competing, parallel competing tracks here, yeah?

No, they are on a collision course. That's what I meant, collision course,

They're on a collision course. The boycott movement did what had to be

The Jews condemned the Nazis. They had million -man marches.

There was a boycott in every city.

It was led by the American Jewish Congress.

by Stephen Wise, a famous name in Jewish history.

There were rogue boycotts, organized boycotts. And these were things to all

Americans as well as Jews. No, it wasn't just Americans.

It was in Czechoslovakia. It was in England. It was in France.

Don't buy German goods and services.

Was there opposition to that, by the way, boycott?

Yes, there was opposition within the American Jewish community. It's very

for people who look at the American Jewish community today and believe it.

monolithic. But you and I both know that the Jewish community back in the 30s

was anything but monolithic. It's a very complex story.

But the Jewish community was comprised, the Jewish leadership in the country was

mainly run by what were known as German Jews.

which is the courtly Jews.

They didn't want to rock the boat so much. Not only did they not rock the

they had led all the vigorous boycotts and protests, Czar, against France,

against Damascus.

They were the ones who fought back whenever Jews were persecuted.

And whether or not the regime in question, the Tsar, would take

retaliation or revenge upon the inhabitants was never an

issue. They always had to stand up for Jewish rights.

And they successfully defended Jewish rights all over the planet.

In this case, the Jews who would be retaliated against were not some Russian

called Sasha.

This would now be their uncle Heinrich, their cousin, their daughter.

It would hit home. So they were afraid there would be a backlash against Jews

Germany, and some were counseling, wait a minute, we should back off on this.

Yes, and who am I talking about? Let's get names.

American Jewish Committee, they were anti -Zionist.

In those days.

In those days, not now, of course.

And B 'nai B 'rith, anti -Zionist, also German Jewish in its major composition.

And these guys wanted to work quietly, behind the scenes, petitioning

officials. They wanted nothing to do with any vigorous protest, Nazi Germany.

Contrast that with the other Jewish organization, not the committees and

the elite, but the democratic Jewish people. And that was...

the Eastern Jews, the so -called American Congress.

It's really like labor and management. It was really the population against the

elite. And the population said, we're going to protest this. And what did they

have to protest?

What was the weapon that the average Jew had to fight Hitler?

The money in their pocket.

That was it. And not to use it for Nazi goods in Germany. And not to use it for

Nazi goods. Now, at the same time, what are we talking about?

The height of the Depression.

So, if you're going to see the articles in China and film and other

goods and services for Czechoslovakian, French, American, lots of people are

going to join that.

Labor unions, Czechoslovakians, Catholics who were

outraged by what was being done in Germany.

Protestants, this was interracial, this was non -sectarian. True, it was led by

the Jews, but they were very careful to be all -inclusive and never call this a

Jewish boy.

Let's also keep in mind, there's also the nativist movement in America in the

1930s. The Jewish community was nowhere near as well organized or as willing to.

take positions as they are today, advocating on behalf of their fellow

part because of everything you've mentioned here.

In some way, did this boycott feed into German Nazi notions about Jewish

power?

That was the power of the boycott.

You never measure a boycott in nickels and dimes or fennigs

and marks.

You measure a boycott in ergs of fear.

Okay. How afraid are you of the boycott?

And were they, were the Germans? The Nazis believed in Jewish boycotts.

The Nazis were a Jewish conspiracy which controlled money and markets.

Adolf Hitler personally lionized his hero.

Who was his hero?

Henry Ford.

And what brought Henry Ford down?

A Jewish boycott.

by the American Jewish Committee and B 'nai B 'rith and the Congress against

Ford Motor Company, and this was vividly in the minds of the Nazis. So the Nazis

believed in the boycott almost as much as the boycotters believed in the

boycott.

If anyone comes to you with statistics...

They don't know what they're talking about because it's fear. It's economic

that ruled the economy and the relationship. So how did the transfer

play into the drop of the boycott? Without the boycott, the Nazis would

seen no necessity to work with the transfer agreement.

So in that way, the boycott succeeded.

To kind of like succumb and go around it, so to speak. That's right. By

subverting the boycott, they could do the transfer agreement.

The transfer agreement succeeded.

because it did bring the Jews out of Germany into Palestine, created a Jewish

state. And had that not occurred, no one would have been the fate of those Jews.

Were there other areas of cooperation, by the way, between the Nazis and

Palestine at that time?

Yes, there were. There were undercurrents. Economic cooperation.

this is simple.

This was complex, and that's why I had five years putting it all together.

Jewish Palestine was half agrarian, if not mostly agrarian, at that time in the

1930s. The Jews did not own much of the land, which they did buy with transfer

agreement money. They did not have a transfer agreement money. They did not

a big infrastructure, but they had farms.

And what was the biggest product?

I'm going to guess oranges, was it? Oranges was the big product of Jewish

Palestine. It was the economic wherewithal. Who was the number one for

from Jewish Palestine?

Nazi Germany.

So, now Jewish Palestine, which was, of course,

abruptly surprised on January 30th by Adolf Hitler, Jewish Palestine is now

looking at their number one customer.

Which is the Third Reich. And if those oranges are not purchased,

there can be no economic vitality for Jewish Palestine. And there was a

threat by the Third Reich. We won't buy Jewish oranges

from Palestine. We'll buy fascist oranges from Spain.

Valencia's so this is one of Valencia's so this is one of the important unknown

undercurrents it's easy to see this in black and white my challenge of a

challenge of history

is to see the complex grays that established this very murky picture.

at some of those complex things, because obviously, just even those words you

touched upon so far, this was not a simple kind of a thing. It sounds like

there's a lot of moving and shifting and maneuvering going on in terms of

international merchandise purchases. So could you share with us then, what were

the dynamics?

of the transfer agreement? What was the, you know, essence of it? Okay, it

starts out with a Jew in Germany taking his money and

putting it into a blocked account.

Now, Reichmarks were hard to identify.

They had dozens of different types of Reichmarks and Reichmark values.

But generally speaking, across all these...

fictitious and real mark systems.

It was about 5 ,000 Reich marks would equal the amount due. The Jew would put

his money into a blocked account, a spare account, and that account would be

fundamentally a trustee account.

And that would be run by this bank in Germany.

Then they would sell goods.

They would sell pipes.

They would sell taxis. They would sell it in Palestine.

They would sell it in Lebanon.

They would sell it in Turkey. They had all different types of commercial

distribution for German goods.

When the money was made available, the money was deposited in a second bank.

The name of that bank was the Anglo -Palestine Bank.

The Anglo -Palestine Bank renamed itself after the State of Israel was

established, and the name is now Bank...

Same bank.

Anglo -Palestine Bank would take that money, credit through an international

clearinghouse the German trust fund. The German trust

fund would issue the foreign currency

of 1 ,000 British pounds. A capitalist certificate would be given to the German

Jew, and that German Jew would then...

come across, and many times came across with replicas of his own home. He came

across with carpets. He came across with building materials. He came across with

cars. He came across with musical instruments.

And suddenly there was a massive Jewish and infrastructural and economic

infusion into Jewish Palestine.

So let me ask you.

It's complex.

Okay, leaving aside the complexity, let me just ask a simple question.

Was this then a situation whereby the Jewish community somehow was

to the Nazi efforts and helping to finance what it is that they wanted to

able to do?

Yeah.

And that must have been also one of the causes for such an explosive reaction to

your book, right? Yeah.

It's a deal with the devil, not with the angels.

It's a deal with the people who want to kill you. So basically, every time they

rescued a Jew, it paid into the Nazi economy.

And it's worse than that.

I mean, there were many dynamics that I never even wrote about, but the Jews

were compelled.

The Jews were compelled to rescue Jews in this fashion.

It was a terrible choice that was thrust upon the Zionists,

but you do not blame...

the hostage with the gun at their forehead.

Did the Zionists consult with anybody on this, or they just said, do this, and

this is what we need to do? Did they talk with the American Jewish Committee?

assume I know the answer. They just went on their own, is that right? They

didn't care about the American Jewish Committee.

In fact, Zionism was controlled out of London until this time. London

until this time.

And by the time the transfer agreement came to the fore, the access point

for Zionist authority had transferred to

Jerusalem. And so the people on the ground in Jerusalem were making

And they weren't just taking any first -serve basis.

They were actually concomitantly building the state of Israel. And so

consequently, they...

They took the people who had a chance of surviving in Jewish Palestine, not just

anyone. When we've used this term, the Zionist leaders, the Jewish

any particular leaders that we know of who were involved in advocating

for this?

Yes, the entire Jewish agency. We're talking David Ben -Gurion.

We are talking about another.

gray, not black and white fabric.

Just as I said, the American Jewish community was divided between these two

different blocks.

The Zionist community was also not monolithic.

There was what was called at that time the Mabai party.

You're talking about people like Ben -Gurion. You're talking about a guy by

name of Chaim Arlazarov.

Everybody who's been to Israel has been down the street called Arlazarov.

And Al -Azharov was the chief engineer of this agreement,

and he was murdered for it on the beach in Tel Aviv at the

location where the Hilton now stands in Tel Aviv. Right there, there was no

Hilton there at that time, and he was killed presumably.

by the followers of the dissident Zionist faction, and that dissident

faction was led by a group associated with Menachem Begin, but really

with Jabotinsky. The revisionists. And they called themselves revisionists, and

the term revisionists at that time meant we have a new idea for Zionism, and

these were the fighting...

They were the Zionists who said, we want to fight Hitler. We don't want to have

a deal with him. And consequently, as the Jewish community was torn apart on

subsuming and subverting the boycott, the Zionist community was

fighting. They had riots. They had contentious votes.

They were tearing their hearts out saying, how can we cut a deal with these

Nazis?

Common to say, common to say, the Nazis weren't thinking of

extermination. I've gone into the record.

My first use of the word, my first common use of the word extermination in

literature goes back to 1933.

Because that was the word they used in World War I to exterminate the

was extermination. So consequently, it was...

a word of parlance of the day. And the Zionists completely expected everything

because they had a complete grasp on Jewish history, on the worthlessness of

Jewish life at the hands of murderers. They had seen many, many Jews die in

Eastern Europe and in other parts of the world. So I want to fast forward now.

We're talking about the event that occurred then. We're talking about the

controversy about the book on a personal level.

Exposing this, dealing with this, writing about this, obviously must have

lot of, well, I don't know what to say, whether it was ad hominem's attacks or

whatever.

What was it like when the book first came out for you in that context?

Well, this was my first book. I was only, you know, I was in my 20s when I

started it.

It came out in 1984.

I'd been the editor of a city magazine, but I'd never been exposed on the

international stage.

The book was published worldwide,

and people were surprised, confused.

There was a town hall meeting set up in Chicago to discuss this.

and it was supposed to be in some little JCC social room.

And by 1 o 'clock, so many people had made reservation. They moved it to

a large synagogue, and then they moved it to a football stadium.

And I had 1 ,100 people waiting to hear me talk about this, and it was

rough.

They said that Muammar Gaddafi was financing me.

I had picket lines.

They said my parents were from Kuwait. Of course, they're Polish survivors.

They hired psychologists to psychoanalyze me. Why am I doing this

But ultimately, the test of time, the historical veracity, the truth of the

book. Were you surprised or did you anticipate that it may have that kind of

reaction, by the way?

I anticipated because that was my reaction.

Okay.

I hated the project.

But you liked the book.

Well, I wrote the book. Rewrite the book. The book had to be written, and I

wrote it.

So it was a story you felt had to be told. Yeah, I was on a... It was trial

fire for my first book. It prepared me well for IBM and the Holocaust.

So were you surprised as you were doing your research with...

Were you God, in other words, or when you started it, did you think it would

reveal what you ultimately learned about the whole setup?

The entire book covers the minute -by -minute developments in

three countries accounting for time zones in Jewish Palestine, Germany.

and the United States. We have diplomatic messages going back and

only covers the first eight months of 1933.

It's very, very intense.

It accomplished what I wanted to do, which is to understand what had

and... So you went into it wanting to understand, but my question is, were you

surprised by the conclusion, or you kind of, as you started to get into it, I

wanted to find the conclusion that I had.

Okay. It was pretty wide, and it's kind of like that with a lot of my books.

I never believe how far it's going to go, and I take it to the end of the

factual line.

I won't remember you're telling me about the IBM book and saying you just stood

at the Holocaust Museum staring at the IBM machine there and wondering, the

computer, why is that there? So I know that you just process it and think about

it. Tell us about what would be, when it first would come out, the worst moment,

your most gratifying moment as well.

Well, the worst moment, the worst moment, what was the worst moment?

The worst moment was probably when I had a

guy, there were people attending one of my lectures.

He was an undertaker.

And he said to me, we want to bury your son's book.

Wow.

And the best moment was when I won the Carl Sandburg Award from the best book

the year.

And I became a cost celeb in the Jewish media. There I developed a syndicated

column.

in 50 Jewish newspapers on the strength of the transcripts. The Jewish media

actually, well, I didn't even know there was a Jewish media. I didn't know there

were, at that time, Jewish newspapers in every city, and the Jewish newspapers

plastered this all over and gave it a great deal of credence, and it gave me

entree to pursue my wider mission.

of exposing ingested Jews, Holocaust factuality and verity, and to do

the other things that I've done.

So it really launched your career. You went on, you became a columnist in

newspapers, as well as, I believe, for the Jerusalem Post and elsewhere.

Yes, I was syndicated throughout the world. In fact, Louis Farrakhan granted

the first interview.

to the first interview for a Jewish journalist because he had read the

agreement. And that book, he actually made a statement, often quoted Jews have

gutter religion.

The Jews made a deal with the Nazis. And I know what he's referring to. And I

know because the Jewish author wrote it.

And so there are a lot of antagonists who use this information

to invalidate the Jewish state.

and who used this information falsely to claim that the Holocaust

did not exist.

But people will use the Bible, the biography of Golda Meir, the

Ben -Gurion, Moshe Dayan. They will use anything that they have. And they are

frustrated by the fact that I have brought out the truth, which is that the

Jews...

that the Zionists rescued Jews.

Now, there were transfer agreements in other countries.

There was the potentiality of rescuing millions of Jews.

Millions of Jews could have been rescued. You have to ask whether or not

Nazis would have been stopped by people running up and down the street with

placards.

or whether it took something more. The Zionists were the only realists of the

time. And by the way, there was no country, there was no major corporation,

there was no major organization that did not have vibrant relations,

commercial and diplomatic, with the Nazis at that time. Let me ask you a

question. Your website lists the many different books you've written on topics

you've talked about, whether it's oil addiction, whether it's the Holocaust,

other topics.

If I'm not mistaken, this is not one that you usually talk about.

Right. About 300 events a year. I talk about IBM and the Holocaust. I talk

oil addiction, Nazi nexus, all of these books. I don't talk about the transfer

agreement.

It almost seems to me, if I can say this, I don't want to be psychoanalyzing

this. I don't want to be psychoanalyzing what you said before. I almost feel

like you have a love -hate relationship with it. Yeah, I do.

Yeah.

I always tell people, read this book last.

I've got eight, eight, eight, eight, nine books.

In fact, I told her from the Miami Herald, if you review this book, you're

to hate it.

It's not a comfortable book to read.

Well. It was a less comfortable book to write.

But. The Holocaust is not comfortable.

And the truth is never comfortable.

Now, in the back of the book, as well as when you signed it, and you did this

for me as well, you asked the question, was it madness or was it genius?

Yeah.

Do you want to shed any light on that?

Well, all genius is based on madness.

So it was both.

Well, it's a brilliant work and an important one. What I want to do now is

want to turn things over to Mitchell Bard, who is going to share with us some

questions scholars have submitted.

And we'll take it from there.

Well, it's hard to know where to start with this subject. But Martin Gilbert,

who, as you know, is Winston Churchill's biographer.

and he's the author of a number of books on the Holocaust and author of a

forthcoming book on Muslim rules of 1 ,400 -year history. He wrote, what do

think would have been the impact on the Israeli ability to absorb Holocaust

survivors in the 1940s had the transfer agreement not occurred in the 1930s? The

main value of the...

Transfer agreements is 1 .9, 1 .4 to 1 .7 to 1 .9 billion dollars, equivalent

dollars in today's money that was transferred over, was not trinkets.

It was fundamentally infrastructure.

When Jews came over during the Hitler period and en

masse and after the fall of the Third Reich, they came over in huge waves.

Where were they going to live?

What water were they going to use?

Where were the roads going to be?

Where were the lands?

Had the transfer agreement never occurred in the 1930s, there would not

been the infrastructure to rapidly absorb all these Jews. Let's remember

this. The Nazi program was continued, as you well know, after

World War II by the Arabs.

They expelled approximately a million Jews from Arab lands.

in the years after the fall of the Third Reich. These people were not put into

refuge. They were quickly absorbed.

The name of the immigration ministry in Israel is called the Ministry of

Absorption. And they absorbed these people.

And so the answer to Martin Gilbert is that...

Had the state of Israel not been aided with this important impetus

during the Depression years, it would have been, I think, difficult to

absorb hundreds of Jews who came en masse during the years to follow. And

was, in fact, anticipated.

I have another question from Professor Samuel Edelman in Chico, California,

who's the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. He asks,

for other transfer agreements across Europe, such as one in Czechoslovakia,

Romania, Hungary, why didn't those succeed in transferring more Jews to

Palestine?

This is true. There was a transfer agreement in Italy. There was a transfer

agreement in Czechoslovakia, in Romania. They each had their own financing

schemes. And as the situation became more dire for the Jews in Europe,

remember Hitler went into Czechoslovakia and he went into Austria and he began

to take over Europe, the Zionists rushed frantically to set up more transfer

agreements to save the Jews.

You must remember this very important statement, and I will quote you a phrase

you know well, that Chaim Weitz divided into two places.

Those places where Jews cannot live, and those places where Jews cannot go.

There were...

Most people think that Evian is just water you buy at the store. The Evian

conference lived with us in 1938 and what to do with

hundreds of thousands of refugees where the doors were shut.

So Palestine was the only door open to the Jews.

They weren't allowed into nations of the world.

So these transfer agreements had the possibility.

to transfer hundreds of thousands of more Jews. Romania, Hungary, most of the

Hungarian Jews were wiped out in ports.

They were organized in Hungary by one of the members of the board of directors

of IBM, Edmund Wiesenmayer. And imagine if these Jews had come

by the boatload, literally, into Jews. What happened?

The war happened.

Economics stopped.

International trade became illegal, and the Zionists were not able

to continue transferring these monies out in

an effective and meaningful fashion. And so the war caught up with the transfer

agreement before the transfer agreement could catch up with the genocide.

Professor Byron Sherwin of this college, the author of many books on ethics and

most recently, The Life Worth Living, who was also, you mentioned the scholar

who first told you about the transfer agreement, asked, you first heard about

the agreement in an interview you did with me in the 1970s. I recall that

it in very general terms, you found it hard to believe that it actually

happened. Now, after all your research, writing and thinking about it, do you

still find it hard to believe that it happened?

I didn't believe it happened in those days because I wasn't smart enough to

that it happened. I wasn't wise enough to know.

I'd barely been out of Chicago.

The march in question was one in Skokie where my parents lived. It was just

outside.

If I was presented with this information now, I would have never believed

that IBM would have had a 12 -year pact.

a widespread commercial coalition with the Third Reich to identify the Jews and

even to create the basis of the Auschwitz tattoo.

I would have believed that the Rockefeller Foundation would have

program that sent Mengele into Auschwitz. I believe all of these things

I believe them because of the trial by fire that I had when I did the transfer

agreement.

Professor Sherwin, a very penetrating question.

If the revision of Zion is led by Vladimir Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin

been controlling the Jewish agency instead of Chaim Hora, would there have

a transfer agreement?

Would there have been German reparations to the State of Israel in the 90s? And

what might have been the economic and political outcomes for the State of

in its very early history?

Well, I'm often asked, I'm constantly asked what -if questions on the transfer

agreement. What if the boycott had succeeded?

What if the transfer agreement had never been there? What if the transfer

agreement had never been there? But here's one I think I can answer. And

very dangerous. If is the sketchiest word in history.

What if?

I believe if the revisionists had controlled the transfer agreement, the

agents at the time, I doubt very strongly that there would have been a

agreement with the Nazis.

Now, it's important for me to explain here the delicate fabrics of the

revisionist movement.

They had actually good relations with the fascist Italian regime because they

believed in a very strict organization.

They believed in that. But I do not believe, based upon the immense...

a vituperative reaction vision is that they would have ever allowed a Zionist

organization and movement to cut a deal with the Nazis. They would have rather

fought them, and they did fight them.

And by the way, from that you can extrapolate on your own

what the economic consequences would be. Now, would there have been reparations

to Israel?

Those reparations were actually calculated.

In 1938, by Nachum Goldman, I

had access to his unprocessed papers at the American Jewish Archives in 1938.

In 1938,

before the war broke out, years before it was established,

the Zionists were already anticipating the worst. Why?

Because they were realists. Because when Hitler said we're going to destroy the

Jews, they actually paid attention.

And they actually went out and did mathematical calculations on Nachum

I have the report.

I've never mentioned him until this moment.

On what the anticipated destruction, economic and human, would be if Hitler

succeeded. And Hitler almost succeeded. He succeeded 99%.

in many countries, and he was stopped, but just barely.

You mentioned 1938.

That was also the year of Kristallnacht. We're coming up on the 71st anniversary

in another week or so. And you wrote a distinguished book on Kristallnacht.

Right. And one of the things I found in my book, 48 Hours on Kristallnacht, was

that even after seeing what went on, the government wasn't willing.

to actively rescue Jews.

What did you find in your book and your research about the U .S. government's

position back in 1933 in the time of this agreement?

Well, I think that the doors began closing for Jews very quickly after

the first months of 1933.

There were refugees everywhere.

We're talking about South Africa.

We're talking about Australia.

It was very common for Jews in Germany to escape

to Austria.

And in 1938, they went from Austria to Czechoslovakia, and then the Germans

followed them there. And from Czechoslovakia, they went to France in a

bifurcated fashion.

And so the Jews, when Chaivitzman said the

world is divided into places where Jews are not allowed to be and not allowed to

go, it was the reality.

And this was the dire

challenge of the Zionists.

There's an important dichotomy here.

Are we going to make an effort?

to restore Jewish civil rights or to rescue Jews for national rights.

He's going to take a dollar to keep a Jew where he is and help him get through

the starvation imposed upon him with a dollar and transfer him. This is real

politic. Remember, even the relief packages.

that were given to German Jews to get through starvation, those also went into

the German economy.

This is too complex to be black and white and too complex for, it was almost

too complex for me. That's why it took about five years to figure out.

Wally Ferris in Washington, D .C., who is an expert on Middle East affairs and

the author of The Confrontation, Winning the War Against Future Jihad.

asks, what do you think would have been the impact or lack of it on the Israeli

economy in modern Israel if there had never been a transfer agreement?

There are many institutions today...

such as Mekarot, the water company, which are taken for granted. These are

infrastructural companies.

And these companies occurred due to the investment that came over the

transfer of assets.

Now, it's common for some people to say, the transfer agreement did not rescue

people, it rescued money.

That's not true.

It rescued people.

It's true that the rescue of the individuals went out in cadence with the

purchase and distribution of Nazi goods.

But the fact of the matter is they had to buy these goods in order to rescue

people.

Now, what's interesting is when the Jews were in concentration camps, they

didn't say, I'm German.

They didn't say, I'm Polish. They said, I'm a Zionist. I wish to live.

And the Zionists endorsed that. Jews have a right to live, and they saved the

remnant, and they saved it with the gun to the head. And that gun has never been

removed from the temple, even though it's gone an inch or two away. The gun

still always cocked, and if I could just put an asterisk in for modern times, we

still have today.

The Iranians trying to do in 12 minutes what Hitler could not do in 12 years,

which is wipe out the Jews. And so the Zionists understood that there needs to

be a strong Jewish state whose have the same national aspirations other groups

do.

Martin Cohen, a student in Jerusalem, asks, why did so many other historians

fail to write about the transfer agreement and the anti -Nazi boycott?

They didn't want...

The transfer agreement was understood.

There were several treatises in German and in Hebrew academic circles.

It's not like today, where somebody does a master's thesis, it's up on the

Internet, and suddenly a million people have access to it. When I went to the

Leo Beck Institute in New York,

And I looked at the user guide, the finder's aid, and I said, where are the,

said, the files are supposed to be, I said, the files are supposed to be in

folder. Where are they?

They're not in this file. They're not in this cabinet. Where are they? He said,

they're underneath my desk.

And he gave them to me.

The book tried to do what historians do, does not seek to do.

which is to be all -encompassing on a narrow topic instead of doing

a very slender matter. And so I had to work not in one or two archives, but

in...

20 or 30, and I had to put all this together.

And this was how I'd be, this was the invention of the Edwin Black approach to

Holocaust documentation.

Never to look at one place, but 20 places, and to put it all together in a

puzzle. But the short answer is, why they didn't want to, why they didn't do

they didn't want to.

And by the way, I didn't want to.

I could see why, given...

and comfort of the whole subject.

James Matthews in Sydney is a reader who wrote, could the worldwide anti -Nazi

boycott have toppled the Hitler regime, not undermined by the Zionists, or if it

was endorsed by the Zionists?

It's another one of these questions that is impossible to answer and

inappropriate to answer, but I'll try.

The boycott...

would not have been, was not capable of ruling the German regime.

Because remember, we're talking about a regime, people who quote statistics on

the German economy don't know what they're talking about.

This was an illegal, corrupt economy that stole other people's money as their

own economic wherewithal. When they stopped stealing it from their citizens,

they stole it from neighboring countries. It was a fascist economy.

So it would only make the Hitler regime more desperate. But what the boycott

could have done, possibly,

in its early stage had an impact on some of the policies. And we see it did have

an impact, because without the boycott, there would be no transfer agreement.

The only reason the Nazis felt compelled to negotiate with their enemies,

nationalists, was because this boycott was a weapon that the Nazis, in their

mythical confusion, actually feared.

On the subject of the boycott, Joyce Nelson in New York, another reader

was the anti -Nazi boycott just a boycott of Jews, or was it bigger than

Bigger than that.

It was never called a Jewish boycott.

There were Catholics involved, some of the greatest figures in the...

New York Archdiocese and Boston Archdiocese were involved.

The Polish were involved.

Labor unions were involved.

The Protestant community was involved.

The organizers of the boycott against the Nazis were very careful to sculpt

as not a Jewish tragedy, but one which was threatening the world. You know what

they say, the Jews first and everybody else second.

And that's why they did it the way they did. It was extremely credible.

But then when the Jewish organizations backed off the boycott

because of the transfer agreement, it was left to a bunch of unsupported,

people who for years...

walked up and down the streets with protest signs and still carry a torch,

I'm glad that they did.

Both were necessary.

We needed to protest the Hitler regime, and we needed to save the Jews.

I am not unhappy that both occurred.

Kenneth Babu in Fresno, California, a computer programmer, asked a related

question. Granted, what you're saying about the importance of the boycott, he

wonders, did the Zionists cooperate too soon?

For too little.

People need to understand the minute -to -minute life in

Nazi -occupied, in Nazi -dominated.

He could be killed.

He could be sent to a concentration camp.

There was a limit for the Zionists could play their own cards. And the best card

that they had.

The best card was that people over there who we can't control, these American

Jewish organizations, are protesting by the hundreds of thousands, protesting by

the hundreds of thousands, and bankrupting your companies, which were

the wayside.

And we have the ability to circumvent that.

So from the Nazis' point of view, they were dividing the Jewish community.

with the trance agreement as well as serving all these other interests that

discovered. No, they didn't do too little too soon. They did

as much as they could as soon as they, but they did it in a different set of

modalities.

I think it was always understood by many that

Hitler thought of Palestine as a great big prison camp for the

Jews. They'd be put there in Palestine, and then they could take over

the Middle East.

But I think design is thought.

Let's save the Jews on Monday, and we'll figure out what happens on Friday.

You know, it's always been a Jewish aspiration.

We don't want to be killed before Shabbos.

Let's finish with a last question from Joseph Myers, a retired teacher here in

Montreal. How did your work on the transfer agreement affect you

and why is this one event in Washington your only event on this book so often on

your other books?

Well, it's an appropriate final question.

It affected me personally in that it set me off on a

circumnavigation of the world of evil.

And as circumnavigating the world of evil and injustice against

the Jews and other groups,

The further I go, the more at the same point.

And I always end up where I started.

So it's done that to me.

As to why this is my only event, because

I choose to.

I want to thank Rabbi Weinblatt for a stimulating discussion and Edwin for

A very important book, which even 25 years later, as you say, still covers

offers a very powerful message for us. Thank you. And thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Mitch.

Edwin Black is the author of many books, including IBM and the Holocaust, War

Against the Weak, and Internal Combustion.

He's the editor of The Cutting Edge News.

For more information, visit TransferAgreement .com.