IV

Amid all the violence, intimidation and brutality of the Nazi assault on civil society in the early months of 1933, one particular, small group of Germans came in for a particularly intense degree of hatred and hostility: German Jews. This was not because they were outright opponents of Nazism, like the Communists and the Social Democrats, or because they needed to be intimidated and brought into line like other political and social groups and institutions as part of the rapid Nazi drive to create a dictatorial, one-party state. The Nazi attack on the Jews was of quite a different character. As the expulsion of Jews from key cultural institutions such as the Prussian Academy of Arts, the major orchestras, or the art schools and museums, dramatically illustrated, the Nazis saw the Jews above all as the repositories of an alien, un-German spirit, and their removal as part of a cultural revolution that would restore ‘Germanness’ to Germany. Antisemitism had always borne a very tenuous and indirect relation to the real role and position of Jews in German society, most of whom lived blameless, conventional and on the whole politically rather conservative lives. But from the very beginning of the Nazi seizure of power, they felt the full force of the stormstroopers’ pent-up hatred. Already in the autumn of 1932, indeed, brownshirts had carried out a series of bomb attacks on Jewish shops and businesses, synagogues and other premises. In the weeks following Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor, stormtroopers broke into synagogues and desecrated the religious furniture, smashed the windows of Jewish shops, and subjected Jews to random acts of humiliation, shaving off their beards or forcing them, in an imitation of a punishment devised by the Italian Fascists, to drink large quantities of castor oil.⁹⁵ The violence reached new levels in the aftermath of the elections of 5 March. The day after the election, gangs of brownshirts rampaged along the Kurfürstendamm, a fashionable shopping street in Berlin, which many Nazis saw as an area where Jews tended to congregate, hunting down Jews and beating them up. In Breslau, a gang of stormtroopers kidnapped the Jewish director of the theatre, beating him to within an inch of his life with rubber truncheons and dog-whips. A synagogue was set on fire in Königsberg in East Prussia, and a Jewish businessman was abducted and beaten so badly that he later died of his injuries. Gangs of stormtroopers daubed and blockaded Jewish shops in several localities.⁹⁶

In Breslau, stormtroopers assaulted Jewish judges and lawyers in the court building on 11 March. The courts suspended business for three days, and when they reconvened, the President of the Court, under pressure from the brownshirts, ruled that henceforth only 17 out of the 364 Jewish lawyers who had hitherto practised in Breslau would be allowed entry into the court building. Other stormtroopers burst into courthouses all over Germany, dragged Jewish judges and lawyers out of the proceedings and beat them up, telling them not to return. The disruption caused by all this was too much even for Hitler, who called on 10 March for a stop to ‘individual actions’ of this kind if they disrupted official business or harmed the economy (a problem on which he had already received complaints from influential business circles, from the Reichsbank downwards). Hitler also personally forced the Leipzig Party bosses to call off a planned raid on the Reich Court with the object of hauling out Jewish lawyers.⁹⁷ Courts lower down the hierarchy were a different matter, however, and here he did not intervene. The Nazi press continued to print rabid incitements to purge the judiciary and the legal profession of Jews, backed by a flood of petitions to the Reich Justice Ministry from ‘nationalist’ groups of lawyers to the same end. The fact was that while attacks on Jewish shops and businesses were disturbing to Hitler’s Nationalist coalition partners, attacks on Jewish lawyers on the whole were not. In the legal profession, the attacks met with little or no resistance even from those who disapproved of them. The trainee judge Raimund Pretzel was sitting in the library of the Berlin courthouse when the brownshirts burst into the building, loudly expelling all the Jews. ‘A brownshirt approached me and took up position in front of my work table,’ he remembered later. “‘Are you Aryan?” Before I had a chance to think, I had said, “Yes.” He took a close look at my nose - and retired. The blood shot to my face. A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat ... What a disgrace to buy, with a reply, the right to stay with my documents in peace!’⁹⁸

Hitler’s intervention only caused a temporary let-up in the sequence of violent incidents, and altogether failed to halt them completely. Little more than a fortnight later, they had begun again. On 25 March 1933, thirty stormtroopers from out of town broke into Jewish homes in Niederstetten in the south-west, hauled off the men to the town hall and beat them up with barely controlled savagery; the same morning, in the nearby town of Creglingen, a similar incident led to the deaths of two of the eighteen Jewish men subjected to this treatment. Groups of youths smashed the windows of Jewish shops in Wiesbaden. The regional administrator of Lower Bavaria reported on 30 March:

Early in the morning of the 15th of this month, towards 6 o’clock, a truck with several men dressed in dark uniforms appeared before the house of the Jewish trader Otto Selz, in Straubing. Selz was taken out of his house still dressed in his nightshirt and abducted in the truck. Around 9.30 Selz was discovered in a wood near Weng, Landshut District, shot dead ... Several country people claim to have noticed red armbands with the swastika on some of the men in the truck.⁹⁹

As Hitler’s intervention suggested, these incidents were not part of any preconceived plan. Rather, they expressed the antisemitic hatred, fury and violence that lay at the heart of Nazism at every level. The stormtroopers’ brutality had hitherto been directed mainly against the Reichsbanner and the Red Front-Fighters’ League, but it was now released in all directions by the Nazi election victory. Unchecked by the intervention of the police or by any serious threat of legal prosecution, it vented itself particularly in attacks on Jews. Despite their desire to control the violence, the Nazi leaders in practice continually fuelled it with their rhetoric, and with the constant antisemitic diatribes in the Nazi press, led by Julius Streicher’s The Stormer.¹⁰⁰ According to one doubtless incomplete estimate, Nazi stormtroopers had murdered 43 Jews by the end of June 1933.¹⁰¹

These incidents did not go unnoticed abroad. Foreign newspaper correspondents in Berlin reported seeing Jews with blood streaming down their faces lying in the streets of Berlin after having been beaten senseless. Critical reports began to appear in the British, French and American press.¹⁰² On 26 March the conservative Foreign Minister von Neurath told the American journalist Louis P. Lochner that this ‘atrocity propaganda’, which he described as reminiscent of Belgian myths about atrocities committed by German troops in 1914, was most likely part of a concerted campaign of misinformation against the German government; revolutions were bound to be accompanied by ‘certain excesses’. Unlike Neurath, Hitler himself described the stories openly as ‘Jewish atrocity smears’. At a meeting with Goebbels, Himmler and Streicher in Berchtesgaden the same day, Hitler decided to take action, in order to channel the antisemitic energies of the rank-and-file into a concerted action. On 28 March he ordered the Party at every level to prepare a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses to be carried out on 1 April. The action was approved by the cabinet the following day.¹⁰³ Far from being a rapid, spur-of-the-moment response to ‘atrocity propaganda’ abroad, however, the boycott had long been contemplated in Nazi circles, particularly those most hostile to ‘Jewish’ big businesses such as department stores and finance houses. Neither for the first nor the last time, the leading Nazis assumed an identity of interest, a conspiratorial connection even, between Jews in Europe and Jews in America, that simply was not there. It was necessary to show the Jews, wrote Goebbels in the published version of his diary, ‘that one is determined to stop at nothing’.¹⁰⁴

The unreality of such beliefs was illustrated when the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith cabled the American Jewish Committee in New York to ask it to call off ‘demonstrations hostile to Germany’, only to be sharply rebuffed despite divided views in the American Jewish community. Protest meetings in a number of American cities on 27 March were followed by a campaign to boycott German goods that met with an increasing amount of success in the months after 1 April.¹⁰⁵ This only served to confirm Goebbels in his view that the boycott should be carried out ‘with the greatest toughness’. ‘If the foreign smears come to an end, then it will be stopped,’ he added, ‘otherwise a fight to the death will begin. Now the German Jews must influence their racial comrades in the world so that they’re not in for it over here.’ As Goebbels drove through Berlin on 1 April to check the progress of the boycott, he declared himself more than satisfied: ‘All Jewish shops are shut. SA sentries are standing in front of the entrances. The public has declared its solidarity. An exemplary discipline obtains. An imposing spectacle!’ The spectacle was made more dramatic by a mass demonstration of ‘150,000 Berlin workers’ against ‘foreign smears’ in the afternoon, and a march-past of 100,000 members of the Hitler Youth in the evening. ‘There is’, reported Goebbels with satisfaction, ‘an indescribable mood of boiling rage ... The boycott is a great moral victory for Germany.’ So great was it, indeed, that already the next day he could report triumphantly: ‘Foreign countries are gradually coming to their senses.’¹⁰⁶

Germans reading Goebbels’s account when it was published a few months later knew, however, that it put an optimistic construction on the events of 1 April from the Nazi point of view. Certainly there was plenty of activity by the stormtroopers, who posted up garish placards everywhere telling people: ‘Don’t buy anything in Jewish shops and department stores!’, ordering them not to use Jewish lawyers and doctors, and informing them of the supposed reason for all this: ‘The Jew is smearing us abroad.’ Trucks bedecked with similar posters and full of stormtroopers raced through the streets, and SA and Steel Helmet units stood threateningly outside the doors of Jewish retailers, demanding the identity papers of any shoppers going in. Many non-Jewish shops put up posters advertising the fact that they were ‘recognized German-Christian businesses’, just to avoid misunderstandings. And as far as the stormtroopers were concerned, the Nazi leadership had made an important point: this action against the Jews was to be centrally co-ordinated, and they were not to commit individual acts of violence. The stormtroopers who enforced the boycott on 1 April did indeed mostly avoid serious breaches of the peace, and kept their behaviour at the level of threats and intimidation. Little actual physical damage seems to have been done to the shops themselves on the day, although in many places the brownshirts daubed slogans on the shop windows, and in a few localities they were unable to resist breaking the glass, looting the contents, arresting objectors, or taking the Jewish shop-owners out, driving them through the streets and beating them up when they dropped through exhaustion.¹⁰⁷

Crowds gathered to see what was going on and stood outside the boycotted shops. Yet, contrary to reports in the Nazi press, they did not demonstrate their anger against the Jews, but remained for the most part passive and silent. In some places, including two department stores in Munich, there were even small counter-demonstrations by citizens, some of them wearing the Party badge, who tried to get past the brownshirt sentries on the door. In Hanover, determined shoppers tried to enter the Jewish shops by force. In most places, however, few went in. To this extent, at least, the boycott was a success. On the other hand, some smaller towns failed to implement the boycott altogether. Everywhere, numerous Jewish shopkeepers shut up shop anyway, to avoid unpleasantness. Warned of the boycott in advance, many people rushed to purchase their goods in the Jewish shops the day before, much to the annoyance of the Nazi press. A young soldier and his girlfriend were overheard in a cinema the evening before the boycott arguing about what they should do. ‘Actually one’s not supposed to buy anything from the Jews,’ he said; ‘but it’s so terribly cheap,’ she replied. ‘Then it’s poor and doesn’t last,’ was his answer. ‘No, really,’ she riposted, ‘it’s just as good and keeps just as well, really just the same as in Christian shops - and it’s so much cheaper.’¹⁰⁸

Only small shops and businesses were affected by the boycott; the largest Jewish firms, who had borne the brunt of the Nazis’ verbal attacks over the years, were exempted because of their importance to the national economy, and because they were major employers who would be forced to lay off workers if the boycott really had a serious impact on their economic position. The Tietz department store chain alone had 14,000 employees. The Nazi employees’ organization in the huge Ullstein publishing firm noted that while the company was exempted from the boycott, the banning of many of its publications was leading to the dismissal of many ‘good national comrades’, thus illustrating the economic dangers of the regime’s policies.¹⁰⁹ All this made the boycott a good. deal less impressive than Goebbels claimed. The general lack of public opposition to the action was striking, but so too was the general lack of public enthusiasm for it; a combination that was to be repeated more than once in subsequent years when the government launched antisemitic measures of one sort or another. Realizing the problems which the boycott caused, both for the economy and for the regime’s reputation abroad, and conceding privately that it had not met with a great deal of success, Hitler and the Party silently dropped the idea of continuing it on a national basis, despite the fact that American newspapers carried on printing ‘atrocity stories’ about Nazi violence against the Jews in the following weeks and months. But the idea of a boycott took root in the Nazi movement. In the following months, many local newspapers repeatedly called upon their readers not to patronize Jewish shops, while Party activists in a wide variety of localities often placed ‘sentries’ outside Jewish premises, and organized letter-writing campaigns to rebuke and admonish those customers who dared to enter them.¹¹⁰