Ken Livingstone Warns He Will Sue Labour If He Is Expelled For Anti-Semitism

The agreement was controversial at the time, and was criticised by many Jewish leaders both within the Zionist movement (such as the Revisionist Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky) and outside it.^[4] For German Jews, the agreement offered a way to leave an increasingly hostile environment in Nazi Germany; for the Yishuv, the new Jewish community in Palestine, it offered access to both immigrants and some economic support; and for the Nazis it was seen as a way of breaking the Anti-Nazi boycott of 1933, which had mass support among European Jews and was thought by the German state as a potential threat to a fragile German economy.

The Haavara Agreement was thought among some Nazi circles to be a possible way to rid the country of its supposed "Jewish problem." The head of the Middle Eastern division of the foreign ministry, the anti-Nazi Werner Otto von Hentig, supported the policy of concentrating Jews in Palestine. Hentig believed that if the Jewish population was concentrated in a single foreign entity, then foreign diplomatic policy and containment of the Jews would become easier. Hitler's own support of the Haavara Agreement was unclear and varied throughout the 1930s. Initially, Hitler criticized the agreement, but reversed his opinion and supported it in the period 1937-1939.
After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the program was ended.