Image by Karsten Winegeart.

From 1933 to 1939, Hitler provided the future government of Israel with the assets of German Jews in exchange for aid undermining an international anti-Nazi boycott.

On March 19, 1933 — less than three months after Adolph Hitler had been elected chancellor of Germany — flags of the reigning National Socialist German Workers’ Party bearing black swastikas against blood-red fields were unfurled from the German consulates in Jerusalem and Jaffa, both then part of British-controlled Palestine. Already aware of the Nazi’s rabid anti-Semitism, the residents of nearby Tel Aviv, one of the relatively few Jewish settlements in Palestine at the time, prepared to tear down and burn the swastikas. But before they could storm the consulates, the erstwhile anti-fascists were halted by a combination of forces: the colonial authorities of the British, who were still in the mode of appeasing Hitler, and more surprisingly, the leadership of the Zionist movement, which sought a Jewish state in Palestine. While the British were fearful of igniting what would inevitably become World War II, the Zionists looked to preserve their own organizing and fundraising activities in Germany, then home to more than half a million Jews.