The anti-Nazi boycott

In the spring of 1933, in response to the persecution of Jews in Germany after Adolf Hitler came to power, a boycott of German goods and services began in many countries. It was not a single organised movement that started on a particular day. Merchants, consumers, trade unions and Jewish organisations in the United States, Britain, Poland, Palestine and elsewhere took it up gradually, each on their own initiative, and for the first few weeks the largest Jewish organisations opposed it. Many chronologies place it under 25 March 1933, but that date does not mark its beginning. The first calls for a boycott had been made a few days earlier, and the great protest rallies in America took place on 27 March. On 25 March, however, something happened that captures the situation well: in Berlin Hermann Göring summoned the leaders of German Jewry and demanded that they stop the protests abroad. The boycott, morally understandable, achieved little economically, and the Nazis used it as a pretext for the first nationwide action against Jews in Germany.

The first weeks of Hitler’s rule

From 30 January 1933 Hitler was Reich Chancellor, and after the Reichstag fire and the decree of 28 February his men dealt with their opponents without any restraint. From the beginning of March the SA stormtroopers increasingly attacked Jews as well: they wrecked and closed shops, dragged Jewish judges and lawyers out of the courts, abducted and beat people, and in several cases murdered them. Göring, as acting Prussian minister of the interior, said in March that he would use the police against anyone who harmed Germans, but would not turn it into a guard for Jewish shops.

News of this violence, passed on by foreign newspaper correspondents and refugees, provoked outrage, above all in the United States, home to the largest Jewish community in the world. On 12 March 1933 the American Jewish Congress, an organisation associated with Rabbi Stephen Wise and the Zionist movement, decided to call a mass protest rally. The more cautious American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith believed that loud protests would only worsen the plight of German Jews and preferred quiet diplomatic efforts. On 20 March, at a meeting at New York’s Hotel Astor attended by some 1,500 representatives of Jewish organisations, the two positions clashed. Judges Joseph Proskauer and Irving Lehman warned that the rally might cost the lives of Jews in Germany. Wise replied that the time for caution had passed, and that what was happening in Germany might happen anywhere tomorrow. The meeting decided that the rally would be held on 27 March at Madison Square Garden. The first to call for a boycott of German goods in those days was the Jewish War Veterans, an organisation of Jewish ex-servicemen, which marched through the streets of Manhattan on 23 March.

In Britain the boycott was taken up by Jewish merchants, especially in London’s East End, but the Board of Deputies of British Jews refused to support it. On 24 March the London Daily Express presented these scattered initiatives under the headline “Judea Declares War on Germany”, which Nazi propaganda eagerly seized upon.

25 March: the meeting with Göring

On Saturday 25 March 1933 Göring summoned representatives of the main organisations of German Jews. Among them were Julius Brodnitz of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Centralverein), the largest organisation of German Jews, Heinrich Stahl of the Berlin Jewish community, the chairman of the Zionist Federation of Germany, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Max Naumann of the ultra-nationalist Association of National German Jews. Göring declared that the foreign press was lying about atrocities against Jews and demanded that they put an end to this “propaganda” and, above all, stop the rallies announced in America. He made it clear that otherwise he could not vouch for the safety of Jews in Germany. They replied that they had no influence over Jews in other countries, and Naumann is said to have shown Göring examples of the violence, including a press cutting about Jews being forced to scrub the streets.

The leaders of German Jewry found themselves in an impossible position. Fearing that the protests abroad would bring reprisals on their community, they agreed to act against them. On 26 March Brodnitz and Blumenfeld sent a telegram to the American Jewish Committee in New York protesting against demonstrations and radio broadcasts directed against Germany, and a delegation of German Zionists travelled to London to urge restraint on the organisations there. These steps changed nothing. On 26 March Hitler had already decided on retaliation: on 1 April the NSDAP was to organise a boycott of Jewish shops throughout Germany.

The rally at Madison Square Garden

On 27 March 1933 some 20,000 people gathered at Madison Square Garden, while tens of thousands more listened to the speeches over loudspeakers in the streets. At the same time rallies were held in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland and several dozen other cities. The speakers on the New York stage included not only Jewish leaders but also the former governor of New York Al Smith, Senator Robert F. Wagner, the president of the American Federation of Labor William Green, and Christian clergy. The rally demanded an end to the persecution, and the proceedings were broadcast on the radio. The American Jewish Congress itself did not proclaim a formal boycott that day, and its leaders hesitated to the end over whether it was wise. But the mood was such that many Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike, began to avoid German goods without any appeal.

The United States government kept its distance. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was then preoccupied above all with the banking crisis and the first New Deal laws, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull believed that the reports of violence in Germany were exaggerated. The government had no intention of joining any boycott or of easing the immigration restrictions that since the 1920s had closed America to most refugees.

The boycott grows

In the months that followed the boycott spread. The well-known New York lawyer Samuel Untermyer took charge of the American League for the Defense of Jewish Rights, later renamed the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to stress that this was not an exclusively Jewish cause. In August 1933, after an international Jewish conference in Amsterdam, he called in a radio address for a general boycott of Germany. The American Jewish Congress and the trade unions gradually joined the movement as well. In Britain the boycott was coordinated by committees independent of the official Board of Deputies and supported by some of the trade unions.

The boycott was strongest in Poland, where Jews played a large role in trade and Germany was one of the main suppliers of goods. It was conducted by associations of Jewish merchants and by committees, of which there were about two hundred by mid-1934. According to research by the Israeli historian Yfaat Weiss, based on Polish statistics, German exports to Poland fell from 173 million złoty in 1932 to 146 million in 1933 and 108 million in 1934, although Polish imports as a whole were rising. The boycott was also taken up in Palestine, where doctors stopped prescribing German medicines, and in France, the Netherlands, the Baltic states and Latin America. The official representative body of the Jews in Palestine nevertheless assured Berlin that it had proclaimed no boycott.

A dispute among Jews

The boycott divided Jews themselves. Its supporters, from Untermyer and Wise to the leader of the Revisionist Zionists, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, believed that economic pressure and moral protest were the only weapons of the defenceless, and that silence would encourage the Nazis to go further. Its opponents, including most of the leaders of German Jewry, feared that any action abroad would fall on them in the form of reprisals. The leadership of the Zionist movement in Palestine chose yet another path, and in August 1933 concluded an agreement with the German economics ministry (the Haavara Agreement) that made it easier for German Jews to emigrate to Palestine but, through the export of German goods, weakened the boycott. The dispute between the advocates of protest and those who favoured saving people and property through arrangements with the Reich authorities lasted throughout the 1930s.

Consequences

The economic effects of the boycott are hard to separate from those of the Great Depression, the collapse of world trade and Germany’s own policies. German exports to the United States and several European countries fell markedly in 1933, and German ministries and embassies followed the boycott movement closely. The Reich leadership took it seriously, because Germany needed foreign currency for raw materials and rearmament. It soon found an answer, however. The trade policy of Hjalmar Schacht, economics minister from 1934, based on barter agreements and bilateral clearing, especially with the countries of south-eastern Europe and Latin America, made Germany independent of the markets where the boycott was strong. Lacking the support of any government, the movement weakened, and in the second half of the decade its significance was mainly moral, although its organisations remained active until the United States entered the war in December 1941.

The boycott did not stop the persecution. On the contrary, the Nazis presented it as proof of a “Jewish war” against Germany and as justification for further repression, the first instance of which was the nationwide boycott of Jewish shops on 1 April 1933.

Significance

The anti-Nazi boycott of 1933 was the first mass international reaction by ordinary people to the policies of the Third Reich, long before governments reacted. At the same time it showed how little citizens can do without the backing of states. The democratic governments, preoccupied with the Depression, did not want to interfere in Germany’s “internal affairs” or to open their borders to refugees. This attitude resurfaced in 1938 at the Évian Conference, when almost no one agreed to take in the Jews being driven out of Germany and Austria. For the Nazis the boycott became one element of the story of a “war declared on Germany by Jewry”. Repeated over the following years, that story served to justify an increasingly harsh policy towards the Jews, culminating in the Holocaust during the Second World War.