The boycott of Jewish businesses

On Saturday 1 April 1933, at ten o’clock sharp, uniformed men of the SA, the SS, the Hitler Youth and the nationalist Stahlhelm took up positions outside Jewish shops, department stores, doctors’ surgeries and law offices all over Germany. They carried placards with slogans such as “Germans, defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!” and “The Jews are our misfortune!”, painted Stars of David and the word “Jude” on shop windows, and drove away, mocked and photographed customers who tried to go inside. The boycott, ordered by the NSDAP leadership and prepared by Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher, lasted one day. The Nazis presented it as “defence” against the boycott of German goods abroad and against “Jewish atrocity propaganda”. In reality it was the first nationwide action directed exclusively against Jews, organised by the ruling party and tolerated by the state. A week later the Third Reich’s first anti-Jewish law removed Jews from the civil service. The exclusion of Jews from German society had begun, and during the war it turned into genocide.

March 1933

In January 1933 about 523,000 Jews lived in Germany, less than one per cent of the population. They included merchants, doctors, lawyers, officials, workers and craftsmen, most of them rooted in the country for generations, as well as several tens of thousands of immigrants from Eastern Europe. From the moment Adolf Hitler became chancellor, Jews, alongside Communists and Social Democrats, became a principal target of the stormtroopers’ violence. After the election of 5 March, the SA and members of Nazi small traders’ associations in many towns forcibly closed Jewish shops, attacked department stores, dragged Jewish judges and lawyers out of the courts and beat up passers-by at random. On 12 March the Jewish lawyer Wilhelm Spiegel was murdered in Kiel, and on 15 March the Jewish merchant Otto Selz was abducted and killed in Straubing in Bavaria. Some of the attackers were driven by racial hatred, others simply by the wish to get rid of competitors. The state authorities did not protect the victims, and on 10 March Hitler merely called for an end to unauthorised actions that were damaging the government’s image.

Reports of the violence provoked a wave of protest abroad. Rallies were called in the United States and Britain, and some merchants and Jewish organisations began boycotting German goods. On 24 March the London Daily Express presented this under the headline “Judea Declares War on Germany”. The NSDAP leaders decided they had a perfect pretext.

The decision

On 26 March 1933 Hitler, surrounded by party leaders at the Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden, decided that the NSDAP would respond with a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. Over the next few days Goebbels directed its propaganda. Its organisation was entrusted to the Gauleiter of Franconia, Julius Streicher, publisher of the antisemitic weekly Der Stürmer, who headed the “Central Committee for Combating Jewish Atrocity and Boycott Propaganda”. The party leadership’s proclamation of 28 March, published the next day in the Völkischer Beobachter and throughout the press, ordered the creation of action committees in every district to identify Jewish shops, goods, doctors and lawyers, and announced that on Saturday at ten o’clock “Jewry will learn whom it has declared war on”.

On 29 March Hitler presented the plan to the cabinet. He claimed that the state had to direct the “defensive action”, since otherwise the people’s anger would erupt of its own accord and take undesirable forms. The conservative ministers did not object to the antisemitic substance of the undertaking, but they feared its consequences. The foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath and the president of the Reichsbank Hjalmar Schacht warned of damage to Germany’s prestige, to exports and to the servicing of foreign loans, and President Paul von Hindenburg tried to persuade Hitler to drop the idea. The compromise was to limit the boycott to one day, with the announcement that it would resume on 4 April if the “agitation” abroad did not stop. In this way the authorities tried at once to intimidate German Jews and to blackmail foreign governments and Jewish organisations.

On 31 March the Reich commissioners in charge of the judiciary in Prussia and Bavaria removed Jewish judges from the bench and barred Jewish lawyers from the courts. Some firms, to avoid the boycott, dismissed Jewish employees at the last minute or demanded the resignation of Jewish board members. The Karstadt department store group dismissed all its Jewish employees with effect from 1 April.

Saturday 1 April

The boycott began at ten o’clock, and in some places the evening before. Pickets stood outside thousands of shops, including Berlin’s great department stores such as the Kaufhaus des Westens, owned by the Jewish Tietz family, as well as outside doctors’ surgeries and lawyers’ offices. Lorries carrying stormtroopers with megaphones drove through the streets, and Goebbels stirred up feeling in his speeches. The organisers had overlooked, however, that 1 April was the Sabbath, when many Jewish shops were closed anyway. The stormtroopers were thus often guarding empty premises.

In the big cities the boycott generally passed off without bloodshed, though not without humiliation. In small towns and in the provinces stormtroopers smashed windows, looted shops and beat their owners. In Annaberg in Saxony SS men stamped the faces of customers of Jewish shops with the words “We traitors bought from Jews”. In some towns gangs burst into court buildings and threw out lawyers who were Jewish or merely looked it.

German society did not react as the organisers had hoped. Crowds of onlookers gathered in the streets, most of them silent and passive. There was little open enthusiasm, and even less open opposition. Some people pointedly shopped in the boycotted stores. Julie Bonhoeffer, the ninety-year-old grandmother of the pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, walked through an SA cordon to do her shopping in a boycotted department store. In the evening the pickets were withdrawn. On 4 April the authorities announced that the boycott would not be resumed – officially because the “agitation” abroad had abated, in reality for fear of the economic consequences and because of the lukewarm response of the German public.

Silence and reactions

Of the institutions that could have spoken out, almost none did. The chairman of the Catholic bishops’ conference, Cardinal Adolf Bertram, when asked to protest, refused, explaining that the matter was economic rather than religious. Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber wrote privately that the Church had more important concerns. The Protestant General Superintendent of the Kurmark, Otto Dibelius, later one of the activists of the Confessing Church, justified the action in a radio broadcast to Americans as having been carried out calmly and in good order. The few clergy who condemned the boycott from the pulpit were arrested. On 4 April Hindenburg wrote to Hitler that the dismissal of Jewish war veterans from public office was unacceptable to him, but he protested only on their behalf.

Abroad the boycott had the opposite effect to the one intended. The British, American and French press described the pickets outside the shops and the beatings in detail, and photographs of SA men with placards in front of shop windows went round the world and long remained a symbol of the new Germany. The democratic governments confined themselves to discreet enquiries by their diplomats, but the movement to boycott German goods, which the Nazis had wanted to intimidate, gained new supporters. The warnings of Neurath and Schacht proved accurate, which was one of the reasons why the authorities did not dare to resume the action.

For German Jews 1 April came as a shock. People who had fought for Germany in the Great War and regarded themselves as Germans had been publicly branded as aliens. On 4 April Robert Weltsch, editor of the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau, published an article whose title became famous: “Wear it with pride, the yellow badge”. In it he urged Jews not to be ashamed of the origins with which the Nazis sought to humiliate them. In 1933 some 37,000–38,000 Jews left Germany, the highest figure for any year between 1933 and 1937.

The April laws

The boycott was a prelude to legal discrimination. On 7 April 1933 the government, using the Enabling Act, issued the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, drawn up by the interior minister Wilhelm Frick. Its Aryan paragraph required the removal from the service of officials “of non-Aryan descent”, defined as anyone with even one grandparent of the Jewish faith. At Hindenburg’s insistence, those who had been officials before 1 August 1914, had fought at the front, or had lost a father or son in the war were exempted. That same day the law on admission to the legal profession made it possible to strip Jewish lawyers of the right to practise. Because of the exemptions for veterans, it affected about a third of them at the time. On 25 April the Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities restricted the number of Jewish pupils and students. Soon Jews were being excluded from the health insurance funds, the press, cultural life and associations.

Streicher’s committee did not cease its activities. Over the following months its men harassed Jewish firms, their suppliers and their customers, forcing many owners to sell their businesses for a fraction of their value. The big banks took stakes in Jewish concerns such as the Tietz department stores. For economic and diplomatic reasons, however, the party leadership – including Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy in the party from 21 April – restrained unauthorised actions. Historians debate whether the boycott was above all a “safety valve” for the radicals of the SA and the small traders, disappointed by the absence of the promised “revolution”, or a deliberate step by the leadership. Saul Friedländer and Peter Longerich stress that Hitler himself wanted the action and that it was meant to prepare society for anti-Jewish legislation.

Significance

The boycott of 1 April 1933 was short and, in the Nazis’ eyes, not entirely successful: it neither sparked a spontaneous outburst of hatred nor ruined Jewish trade. It did, however, set a pattern that was repeated in the following years. First the party’s stormtroopers used violence “from below”; then the leadership took it over as an organised action and justified it as “defence” against the Jews; and finally the state wrote its aims into law. So it was in 1935, when the Nuremberg Laws were passed after a wave of anti-Jewish excesses, and in November 1938, when Kristallnacht ended in the expropriation of the Jews and the deportation of tens of thousands of men to concentration camps. The passivity of society, the silence of the Churches and the compliance of the conservative elites, already visible in April 1933, allowed the regime to go ever further. At the end of that road, during the war Hitler unleashed in 1939, lay the murder of some six million European Jews.