The Transfer Agreement (20 page)

As an afterthought, Rosenbluth and company decided that a member of the non-Zionist Central Verein should also join the mission. This way, Rosenbluth reasoned, if the mission failed, Zionists as a group would not be blamed. Still, it was important to locate a Central Verein member who was not
anti-Zionist.
The men selected Dr. Ludwig Tietz, son of Alfred Tietz, the German department store magnate and philanthropist. Tietz quickly agreed.
²⁷

By Monday morning March 27, Rosenbluth, Lichtheim, and Tietz arrived in Britain. They were met at the train station and immediately driven to the Zionist Organization headquarters at 77 Great Russell Street, just near the British Museum. About forty Jewish leaders, Zionist and non-Zionist, had assembled in the board room awaiting their report. The three explained Goering's demands to stop the anti-Nazi protests in England and America. As ordered, they placed a transatlantic phone call to Stephen Wise in a futile effort to cancel his Madison Square Garden rally. That done, the Zionist delegation forecast to their audience that the end of Jewish life in Germany was an inescapable reality. Only Palestine was left as a solution. But most of the assembled Jewish leaders represented the Board of Deputies of British Jews, a long-established, traditionally anti- or non-Zionist group. These men, and even some of the Zionist officials, seemed to disbelieve the German delegation's prediction.
²⁸

After the briefing session, Rosenbluth, Lichtheim, and Tietz reported to German Ambassador Leopold von Hoesch as Goering had instructed. Von Hoesch, a non-Nazi holdover from the Weimar Republic, had no taste for National Socialism. Nonetheless, for Germany's sake, and perhaps his own, he asked the Jewish delegation to convince Lord Reading not to resign his presidency in the Anglo-German Association as a protest against Reich anti-Semitism. Von Hoesch also asked that more atrocity denials be sent to anti-Hitler circles in London and New York. Contrary to Berlin's expectations, sympathetic embassy officials allowed the three Zionist leaders a reasonable freedom to move about. So several secret meetings were quickly scheduled.
²⁹

Lichtheim and Tietz also secured an interview with Lord Reading and implored him to delay his resignation from the Anglo-German Association. Reading became suspicious. In desperation, Lichtheim and Tietz described in detail the Nazi reign of brutality, and how this small achievement might somehow satisfy Goering and in some way delay violence. Reading agreed to delay his formal resignation two weeks, but insisted on venting his outrage about persecution in Germany a few hours later in Parliament.
³⁰

Late at night on March
29,
Rosenbluth, Lichtheim, and Tietz were seated in the lobby of the Russell Hotel, located a short walk from the Zionist Organization. Unsure of their success, uncertain of future events, the tired emissaries somberly awaited their early departure back to Germany the next morning. But in a corner of the lobby, a world news ticker, scarcely noticed before, became a sudden hub of activity. The Nazis had officially announced their boycott of Jewish businesses and professionals commencing April
I
to last until commercial Jewish life was utterly obliterated. In the delegates' minds, this development changed everything. They immediately contacted Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann.
³¹

The next day, still relying on the liberty granted by the German embassy, Rosenbluth went from meeting to meeting debating solutions to the German Jewish problem. The tone of many of the conversations changed. The April First boycott represented a turning point in the foreign perception of the crisis. Jewish leaders and British officials who had previously doubted the severity of German Jewry's plight could now see a doomsday rising. Weizmann began talking with wealthy British Jews, including Anthony Rothschild, Lord Reading, Lord Sieff of the Marks and Spencer department stores, and Pinchas Rutenberg.
³²
After these initial conversations, Weizmann suddenly departed for Palestine. Ostensibly he left to survey the prospects for emigration in the developing Jewish homeland. But his secret plans involved clandestine meetings with Arab, British, and Zionist leaders to discuss a solution on a vast scale.

While Weizmann and the wealthy Jews of London were conceiving plans to help German Jews within a Zionist context, the German Jews themselves became increasingly desperate. When it was learned Hitler might be dissuaded by formal declarations against any anti-German boycott, Berlin Zionists sent an urgent telegram to the Zionist Organization in London asking for such a proclamation. The cable reached Rosenbluth, Lichtheim, and Tietz about midnight on March 30.
³³

The German Zionist delegation in London panicked. Rosenbluth and Lichtheim dispatched cables to Stephen Wise and the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, instructing them to notify Adolf Hitler formally that no anti-German boycott would be organized. Rosenbluth and Lichtheim discussed the cables with no one, but signed them in the name of the Executive Committee of the Zionist Organization, thus making the instructions direct orders.
³⁴

Within a few hours, the Executive Committee discovered the desperate deception and immediately instructed the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem to disregard the cable and delay any message to Hitler. But it was too late. The Jewish Agency had already complied.
³⁵

"OFFICIAL PALESTINIAN JEWRY HAS NOT PROCLAIMED BOYCOTT GERMAN GOODS STOP ARE SURE BOYCOTT SO FAR SPONTANEOUS ACTION BY INDIVIDUALS AND MAY BE STOPPED IF GERMAN AUTHORITIES WILL NOT CONTINUE ACTIONS AGAINST JEWS."
The cable was sent directly to Hitler's office. The Jewish Agency acknowledged the blind execution of the order from London with a telegram reading,
"CABLE DISPATCHED TO BERLIN AS REQUESTED DESPITE MISGIVINGS SUPPRESSED BY YOUR SIGNATURE."
³⁶

Although the ruse had been quickly uncovered, two leading Zionist newspapers in Jerusalem,
Doar ha-Yom
and
Haaretz,
reported the communication, but with no mention of the background.
³⁷
Thus, rank-and-file Zionists in Palestine were put on notice that their leadership opposed any involvement in the fight against Hitler.

Up to the moment the Jewish Agency dispatched its cable to Hitler, Palestinian Jewry had closely followed the dictates of the Zionist Organization in London. However, after the April First action this power flow would be suddenly reversed. Palestine would now make the decisions, especially when it came to the German Jews and Adolf Hitler.

To understand the sudden power shift, one needs to understand exactly what the Jewish Agency for Palestine was. Most observers had long believed that the Jewish Agency for Palestine was an independent entity established in
I922
by the international community after the Allies decreed that Britain work with "an appropriate Jewish agency" to build the Jewish national home. As such, most believed the Jewish Agency was a quasi-governmental unit, with its own appointed bureaucracy exercising its own limited authority over emigration and development in Jewish Palestine, and officially answerable to the League of Nations.
³⁸
However, in
I922
the Allies designated the Zionist Organization in London as the "appropriate" agency. The Zionist Organization then merely created the Jewish Agency for Palestine to function as the officially recognized administrative body. In reality, the Jewish Agency simply acted as an alter ego of the Zionist Organization, coordinating most of its important policy decisions in advance with London.
³⁹
Thus, the Jewish Agency became the governmentally recognized half of what Herzl had earlier named "the Society of Jews"—the bargaining agent of the Jewish people. And in the spring of I933, the Jewish Agency began to do just that.

B
ARGAINING
in earnest with the Hitler regime began on March
16,
1933, a political light-year before the April First Nazi boycott that
would radically change Jewish life in Germany. Four men gathered in Jerusalem to discuss the German Jewish situation. They were Arthur Hantke, Avraham Landsberg, Felix Rosenbluth, and David Werner Senator, all prominent German Zionist émigrés to Palestine. Felix Rosenbluth (who later changed his name to Pinchas Rosen) was a former president of the Zionist .Federation of Germany; he would later become Israel's first minister of justice. Felix's brother, Martin, led the late-March Zionist delegation to London. David Werner Senator was an immigration expert and a member of the Agency's Executive Committee.
¹

The men talked of the potential for Palestine in the German crisis. Although by March
16
no overt anti-Jewish government action had occurred, thousands of Jewish professionals, especially in the provinces, had already been ousted from their positions. They knew that Jews who had never considered emigrating to Palestine were now inquiring en masse at British consulates throughout Germany. But uniformly, the German Jews discovered the same problem: Existing Reich currency restrictions forbade taking assets out of the country unless it was "in the national interest."
²

The four German Zionists also knew that middle-class Jews would not leave Germany without their property. Yet middle-class Jewish professionals were ideal prospects for emigration to Palestine because they possessed the equivalent of
£1,000,
satisfying British entry requirements. The question was how to allow them to take that much of their money out of Germany.

It
was Felix Rosenbluth who first suggested negotiating with the German government. Perhaps the government would allow a special concession allowing Jews to take the requisite equivalent of
£1,000
if they emigrated to Palestine?
³

The others reacted with astonishment—not at the thought of negotiating with the Nazis, but because Rosenbluth thought it feasible to approach them. Rosenbluth was asked what the Zionists could possibly offer the Nazis to induce them to allow Jews a legal exception to the currency restrictions and help Palestine in the process. Rosenbluth answered: the emigration of a few thousand Jews.
⁴

The others were still skeptical. Hitler had vowed never to negotiate with the Jews of Germany, even though Goering had already met twice with Central Verein leaders in an effort to contain Jewish protest in New York. The four men wondered if the British ambassador in Berlin could make contacts and relay the information to the Zionist Organization in London. So they decided to sound out their associates in the international Zionist movement.
⁵

A few days later, Senator wrote to the Zionist Organization Executive Committee in London: "We all received the plan with skepticism, even if this should be proposed in an honourable way. But at least it might be important to request an opinion from the ZVfD.... In these times you have to consider all the possibilities."
⁶

Currency restrictions in Germany were indeed the barrier to an orderly transfer of the wealth and the citizens of Germany's Jewish middle class. Enacted in August
1931
by the Bruning government at the height of a fiscal crisis, the currency restrictions prohibited anyone—Jew or Christian, German or foreigner—from taking currency out of Germany without permission. The restriction was aimed not at Jews, but at speculators and hoarders.
⁷
But it now loomed as the unbreachable obstacle to Jews emigrating to Palestine—especially since British entry regulations limited all categories of Jews except those in possession of
£1,000
[about
$5,000
]. The restriction ironically suited the German Zionists in Jerusalem because it was precisely those Jews with enough money to qualify whom they wanted. As one German Zionist warned the Jewish Agency, "There is a danger that German Jews with money will go to other countries and those lacking means will come here. We must work on this matter."
⁸

Breaching the currency barrier required negotiation. But in late March
1933,
what Jew was in a position to negotiate with the Third Reich? Certainly not the traditional German Jewish organizations. As loyal Germans, they would never promote Jewish emigration, precisely because it dovetailed with Nazi intentions. Certainly not the Berlin Zionists, whose organization had already been identified as "the enemy" by the Nazi party.

A go-between would be needed. He would need to be sympathetic to Zionism, but not directly associated with the Zionist Movement. He would need important connections in the holdover German government, especially in the financial sphere. And he would need to operate in secret. Not even the Zionist Organization in London or the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem could know of his activities. Only the German Zionist Federation hierarchy in Berlin would be aware of his work. The man selected for this mission was a businessman, Mr. Sam Cohen.

Few were undecided about Mr. Sam Cohen. In the minds of some of those he worked with or affected, Sam Cohen was an evil rogue, interested in no more than his own greed at the expense of his people; he was a traitor, a collaborator, a wealthy manipulator, a liar and a fraud, a schemer, a sower and seeker of influence, a man whose fortune bore the bloodstains of Jewish liberty and Jewish aspirations. To others who were closer, Sam Cohen was a munificent man of the Jewish cultural movement, a man who worked tirelessly, often selflessly, to help the Jewish people fight starvation, cultural dissolution, and national dispossession; a deeply religious man, a committed Zionist, a rescuer; a man whose contributions were often unseen but rarely unfelt; a little-known man whose immense importance to Israel deserved a special honored place in the saga of the Jewish people and their redemption.