The Hitler government's agreement with a Zionist organization for a transfer of German Jews to Palestine is often fodder for conspiracy theorists and can be quite confusing. Lenni Brenner for example uses the Haavara agreement to conflate Zionism with fascism by asserting they are two birds of a feather. Brenner's claim has also been taken up by Ken Livingstone quite recently to assert Hitler was a Zionist. Brenner and Livingstone's claims are nonsense though. There was nothing contradictory about the Haavara Agreement and the Third Reich's Jewish policy on a basic level.

The fundamental core tenet of Nazi antisemitism was that Jews needed to be removed from Germany. The idea of a Jew-free state is of course easier said than done. Emigration in a time of global Depression was difficult and many states like the US adapted highly restrictive emigration laws. Antisemitism also made it difficult for Jews to emigrate out of Germany as many countries' governments did not want to change immigration laws on account of German Jews. The Germans also created a problem in that the Reichsfluchtsteuer (Reich Flight Tax) had been transformed under the Nazis into a mechanism to fleece German Jews emigrating of a good deal of their worldly possessions. While there were quite a few German Jews who left Germany in 1933, these domestic and international factors encouraged some German Jews to hunker down and wait Hitler out.

The Haavara Agreement was one of several means to encourage German Jews to leave the country. The Zionist groups that brokered the deal perceived that this was a chance to increase Jewish emigration to Palestine. The Havaara Agreement did allow for German Jews to keep more of their wealth than other Jews leaving Germany, although the German government still got to keep some of the migrants' wealth. While the German government probably wanted more money from Havaara, it did allow for a number of German Jews to leave the country.

This last reason was why Haavara was not incompatible with Nazi genocide. Although it was not until 1941 that the state moved into direct mass-murder of Jews, the basic foundations for a mass genocide were already apparent as early as 1933. The fundamental idea of Nazi Jewish policy was this: Jews should be gone. Haavara was an expedient solution in line with other means of ostracizing Jews and eliminating them from German social life. Tellingly, it was not so much the transfer agreement as much as it was dealing with Jews that aroused the most controversy within Nazi circles. The Haavara Agreement was something not to be repeated. When Zionists contacted Eichmann in 1937 for a further agreement with Germany, Hitler personally shot down this proposal because facilitating a Jewish state and allowing fleeing Jews to keep their wealth was contrary to the interests of the Third Reich. Haavara may have represented an earlier iteration of "out of sight, out of mind" impulse, but the Nazi antisemitism was genocidal in its intents and mass murder was the logical end point of Nazism.