Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (4 page)

The radicals’ influence should not be overrated, however. They never compelled Hitler to take steps he did not want to take. When their demands were deemed excessive, their initiatives were dismissed. The anti-Jewish decisions in the spring of 1933 helped the regime channel SA violence into state-controlled measures;
⁴⁸
to the Nazis, of course, these measures were also welcome for their own sake.

Hitler informed the cabinet of the planned boycott of Jewish-owned businesses on March 29, telling the ministers that he himself had called for it. He described the alternative as spontaneous popular violence. An approved boycott, he added, would avoid dangerous unrest.
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The German National ministers objected, and President Hindenburg tried to intervene. Hitler rejected any possible cancellation, but two days later (the day before the scheduled boycott) he suggested the possibility of postponing it until April 4—if the British and American governments were to declare immediately their opposition to the anti-German agitation in their countries; if not, the action would take place on April 1, to be followed by a waiting period until April 4.
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On the evening of the thirty-first, the British and American governments declared their readiness to make the necessary declaration. Foreign Minister Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath made it known, however, that it was too late to change course; he then mentioned Hitler’s decision of a one-day action followed by a waiting period.
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In fact, the possibility of resuming the boycott on April 4 was no longer being considered.

In the meantime Jewish leaders, mainly in the United States and Palestine, were in a quandary: Should they support mass protests and a counterboycott of German goods, or should confrontation be avoided for fear of further “reprisals” against the Jews of Germany? Göring had summoned several leaders of German Jewry and sent them to London to intervene against planned anti-German demonstrations and initiatives. Simultaneously, on March 26, Kurt Blumenfeld, president of the Zionist Federation for Germany, and Julius Brodnitz, president of the Central Association, cabled the American Jewish Committee in New York:
WE PROTEST CATEGORICALLY AGAINST HOLDING MONDAY MEETING, RADIO AND OTHER DEMONSTRATIONS. WE UNEQUIVOCALLY DEMAND ENERGETIC EFFORTS TO OBTAIN AN END TO DEMONSTRATIONS HOSTILE TO GERMANY
.
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By appeasing the Nazis the fearful German-Jewish leaders were hoping to avoid the boycott.

The leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine also opted for caution, the pressure of public opinion notwithstanding. They sent a telegram to the Reich Chancellery “offering assurances that no authorized body in Palestine had declared or intended to declare a trade boycott of Germany.”
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American Jewish leaders were divided; most of the Jewish organizations in the United States were opposed to mass demonstrations and economic action, mainly for fear of embarrassing the president and the State Department.
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Reluctantly, and under pressure from such groups as the Jewish War Veterans, the American Jewish Congress finally decided otherwise. On March 27 protest meetings took place in several American cities, with the participation of church and labor leaders. As for the boycott of German goods, it spread as an emotional grass-roots movement that, over the months, received an increasing measure of institutional support, at least outside Palestine.
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Goebbels’s excitement was irrepressible. In his diary entry for March 27, he wrote: “I’ve dictated a sharp article against the Jews’ atrocity propaganda. At its mere announcement the whole
mischpoke
[
sic
, Yiddish for “family”] broke down. One must use such methods. Magnanimity doesn’t impress the Jews.” March 28: “Phone conversation with the Führer: the call for the boycott will be published today. Panic among the Jews!” March 29: “I convene my assistants and explain the organization of the boycott to them.” March 30: “The organization of the boycott is complete. Now we merely need to press a button and it starts.”
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March 31: “Many people are going around with their heads hanging and seeing specters. They think the boycott will lead to war. By defending ourselves, we can only win respect. A small group of us hold a last discussion and decide that the boycott should start tomorrow with fullest intensity. It will last one day and then be followed by an interruption until Wednesday. If the incitement in foreign countries stops, then the boycott will stop, otherwise a fight to the end will start.”
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April 1: “The boycott against the international atrocities propaganda broke out in the fullest intensity in Berlin and all over the Reich. The public,” Goebbels added, “has everywhere shown its solidarity.”
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In principle the boycott could have caused serious economic damage to the Jewish population as, according to Avraham Barkai, “more than sixty percent of all gainfully employed Jews were concentrated in the commercial sector, the overwhelming majority of these in the retail trade…. Similarly, Jews in the industrial and crafts sectors were active largely as proprietors of small businesses and shops or as artisans.”
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In reality, however, the Nazi action ran into immediate problems.
⁶⁰

The population proved rather indifferent to the boycott and sometimes even intent on buying in “Jewish” stores. According to the
Völkischer Beobachter
of April 3, some shoppers in Hannover tried to enter a Jewish-owned store by force.
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In Munich repeated announcements concerning the forthcoming boycott resulted in such brisk business in Jewish-owned stores during the last days of March (the public did not yet know how long the boycott would last) that the
Völkischer Beobachter
bemoaned “the lack of sense among that part of the population which forced its hard-earned money into the hands of enemies of the people and cunning slanderers.”
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On the day of the boycott many Jewish businesses remained shut or closed early. Vast throngs of onlookers blocked the streets in the commercial districts of the city center to watch the unfolding event: They were passive but in no way showed the hostility to the “enemies of the people” the party agitators had expected.
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A Dortmund rabbi’s wife, Martha Appel, confirms in her memoirs a similarly passive and certainly not hostile attitude among the crowds in the streets of that city’s commercial sector. She even reports hearing many expressions of discontent with the Nazi initiative.
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This atmosphere seems to have been common in most parts of the Reich. The bimonthly police report in the Bavarian town of Bad Tölz, south of Munich, is succinct and unambiguous: “The only Jewish shop, ‘Cohn’ on the Fritzplatz, was not boycotted.”
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The lack of popular enthusiasm was compounded by a host of unforeseen questions: How was a “Jewish” enterprise to be defined? By its name, by the Jewishness of its directors, or by Jewish control of all or part of its capital? If the enterprise were hurt, what, in a time of economic crisis, would happen to its Aryan employees? What would be the overall consequences, in terms of possible foreign retaliation, of the action on the German economy?

Although impending for some time, the April boycott was clearly an improvised action. It may have aimed at channeling the anti-Jewish initiatives of the SA and of other radicals; at indicating that, in the long run, the basis of Jewish existence in Germany would be destroyed; or, more immediately, at responding in an appropriately Nazi way to foreign protests against the treatment of German Jews. Whatever the various motivations may have been, Hitler displayed a form of leadership that was to become characteristic of his anti-Jewish actions over the next several years: He usually set an
apparent
compromise course between the demands of the party radicals and the pragmatic reservations of the conservatives, giving the public impression that he himself was above operational details.
⁶⁶
Such restraint was obviously tactical; in the case of the boycott, it was dictated by the state of the economy and wariness of international reactions.
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For some Jews living in Germany, the boycott, despite its overall failure, had unexpected and unpleasant consequences. Such was the case of Arthur B., a Polish Jew who had been hired on February 1 with his band of “four German musicians (one of them a woman)” to perform at the Café Corso in Frankfurt. A month later B.’s contract was extended to April 30. On March 30, B. was dismissed by the café owner for being Jewish. B. applied to the Labor Court in Frankfurt to obtain payment of the money owed him for the month of April. The owner, he argued, had known when she hired him that he was a Polish Jew. She had been satisfied with the band’s work and thus had no right to dismiss him without notice and payment. The court rejected his plea and charged him with the costs, ruling that the circumstances created by Jewish incitement against Germany—which had led some customers to demand the bandleader’s dismissal and brought threats from the local
Gau
(main party district) leadership that the Café Corso would be boycotted as a Jewish enterprise if Arthur B. were to continue working there—could have caused severe damage to the defendant and was therefore sufficient reason for the dismissal. “Whether the defendant already knew when she hired him that the plaintiff was a Jew is irrelevant,” the court concluded, “as the national revolution with its drastic consequences for the Jews took place after the plaintiff had been hired; the defendant could not have known at the time that the plaintiff’s belonging to the Jewish race would later play such a significant role.”
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The possibility of further boycotts remained open. “We hereby inform you,” said a letter of August 31 from the Central Committee of the Boycott Movement (Zentralkomitee der Boykottbewegung) in Munich to the party district leadership of Hannover-South, “that the Central Committee for Defense Against Jewish Atrocities and Boycott Agitation…continues its work as before. The organization’s activity will, however, be pursued quietly. We ask you to observe and inform us of any cases of corruption or other economic activities in which Jews play a harmful role. You may then wish to inform your district or local leadership in an appropriate way about such cases as just mentioned. As indicated in the last internal party instruction from the Deputy Führer [for Party affairs] Party Comrade [Rudolf] Hess, any public statements of the Central Committee must first be submitted to him.”
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At the same time it was nonetheless becoming increasingly clear to Hitler himself that Jewish economic life was not to be openly interfered with, at least as long as the German economy was still in a precarious situation. A fear of foreign economic retaliation, whether orchestrated by the Jews or as an expression of genuine outrage at Nazi persecutions, was shared by Nazis and their conservative allies alike and dictated temporary moderation. Once Hjalmar Schacht moved from the presidency of the Reichsbank to become minister of the economy, in the summer of 1934, noninterference with Jewish business was quasi-officially agreed upon. A potential source of tension thus arose between party activists and the upper echelons of party and state.

According to the German Communist periodical
Rundschau
, by then published in Switzerland, only the smaller Jewish businesses—that is, the poorer Jews—were harmed by the Nazi boycott. Large enterprises such as the Berlin-based Ullstein publishing empire or Jewish-owned banks—Jewish big business—did not suffer at all.
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What looks like merely an expression of Marxist orthodoxy was in part true, because harming a Jewish department-store chain such as Tietz could have put its fourteen thousand employees out of work.
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For that very reason Hitler personally approved the granting of a loan to Tietz to ease its immediate financial difficulties.
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At Ullstein, one of the largest publishers in Germany (it had its own printing plant and issued newspapers, magazines, and books), the Nazi enterprise cell within the company itself addressed a letter to Hitler on June 21, describing the disastrous consequences of a surreptitiously continuing boycott for the Jewish firm’s employees: “Ullstein, which on the day of the official boycott was excluded from the action due to its being an enterprise of vital importance,” the cell’s leader wrote to Hitler, “is at present suffering acutely from the boycott movement. The great majority of the work force are party members and an even larger number are in the cell. With every passing day, this work force is increasingly upset by weekly and monthly dismissals, and it urgently requests me to petition the appropriate authorities in order that the livelihoods of thousands of good national comrades [members of the national-racial community, or
Volksgenossen
] not be endangered. Ullstein’s publication numbers have gone down by more than half. I am daily informed of quite hair-raising boycott cases. For instance, for a long time now the party enrollment of the head of the Ullstein office in Freienwalde has been rejected on the grounds that as an employee of a Jewish publishing house he would actually cause harm to the party.”
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This was complicated enough as it was, but the Communist
Rundschau
would have had even more to ponder if it had been aware of the many contradictions in the attitudes of major German banks and corporations toward anti-Jewish measures. First there were remnants of the past. Thus, in March 1933, when Hans Luther was replaced by Schacht as president of the Reichsbank, three Jewish bankers still remained on the bank’s eight-member council and signed the authorization of his appointment.
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This situation did not last much longer. As a result of Schacht’s proddings and the party’s steady pressure, the country’s banks banished Jewish directors from their boards, as, for example, the dismissal of Oskar Wassermann and Theodor Frank from the board of the Deutsche Bank.
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It is symptomatic of a measure of uneasiness with this step that the dismissals were linked to promises (obviously never fulfilled) of eventual reemployment.
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