“Judea Declares War on Germany”

On 24 March 1933 the London daily the Daily Express appeared with a headline across the full width of its front page: “Judea Declares War on Germany”. Beneath it were printed the subheadings “Jews of All the World Unite in Action”, “Boycott of German Goods” and “Mass Demonstrations in Many Districts”. The unsigned article described the growing protest movement among Jews in Britain, the United States and other countries against persecution in Germany, which had been ruled by Adolf Hitler for two months, and the talk of a boycott of German goods. No “Judea” existed, and no one had declared war on Germany. Nor had any government or any organisation representing all Jews proclaimed a boycott, and the most important Jewish organisations in Britain and America were at that time opposed to one. Yet this lurid tabloid headline has outlived almost every other from that year. The Nazis treated such reports as proof of a “Jewish war” against Germany and as a pretext for their own boycott, and after 1945 a photograph of the page became one of the favourite “documents” of neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.

March 1933

Since Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933, Germany had been in the grip of terror against political opponents and, from the beginning of March, increasingly also against Jews, of whom there were about 523,000 in the whole Reich, less than one per cent of the population. After the election of 5 March, SA stormtroopers in many towns attacked Jewish shops and department stores, drove Jewish judges and lawyers out of the courts, and beat up and abducted many people. On 9 March in the Berlin district of the Scheunenviertel they seized and savagely beat dozens of Jews from Eastern Europe; on 11 March an “assault on the department stores” was staged in Brunswick; and on 12 March in Kiel the Jewish lawyer and Social Democrat Wilhelm Spiegel was murdered. On 20 March Heinrich Himmler announced the opening of the concentration camp at Dachau, and on 23 March the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler’s government legislative power.

The foreign press reported all this extensively. Correspondents in Berlin described beatings, disappearances and the first camps, and protest meetings were held in New York, London, Paris and Warsaw. On 18–21 March the Jewish War Veterans, an American organisation of Jewish ex-servicemen, called for a boycott of German goods, and on 20 March, at a stormy meeting in New York’s Hotel Astor, Rabbi Stephen Wise’s American Jewish Congress decided to call a mass protest rally at Madison Square Garden for 27 March. Many Jewish merchants in London, New York and Poland began on their own initiative to cancel orders from Germany. The large, moderate organisations, however – the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith – warned against a boycott and mass demonstrations, fearing that the Nazis would take revenge on German Jews. The organisations of Jews in Germany asked for the same thing, indeed begged for it.

What the Daily Express wrote

The Daily Express, owned by the Canadian-British press magnate Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken), was then one of the most widely read newspapers in the world, with a circulation approaching two million copies. It was known for its big headlines and sensational tone. The article of 24 March was unsigned, and it is not known who wrote it or who decided on the headline. It presented the scattered and often contradictory reactions of Jews in various countries as a single, coordinated action. According to the paper, fourteen million Jews dispersed across the world had united “as one man” to declare war on the German persecutors of their co-religionists, and Jewish merchants, bankers and industrialists were to abandon business with Germany. The text described London merchants deliberating on a boycott and protests in America and Europe, and announced that British Jews would discuss the situation in Germany at a meeting of the Board of Deputies.

The content was exaggerated and the picture misleading. The boycott movement was only just emerging, had no common leadership and divided Jews themselves. Describing it in terms of “war”, and portraying Jews as a mighty, united force that could ruin a great state at a stroke, echoed the old antisemitic stereotype of “international Jewry” holding world trade and finance in its hands. Beaverbrook’s paper was not a Nazi newspaper. Its headline nevertheless shows how readily the press of the day, the British press included, reached for such images.

Reactions in London and Berlin

The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the principal representative body of British Jewry, did not join the boycott. As The Times reported on 27 March, its leadership did not support such action. In Britain the boycott was carried on over the following years mainly by small traders, labour organisations and committees in London’s East End, not by the community’s official representatives. It was similar in Palestine, from where the leaders of the Jewish community assured the Reich Chancellery that they had not proclaimed any boycott.

In Berlin the reports of foreign protests were received with fury. That same day, 24 March, the Reich cabinet discussed criticism of Germany in the foreign press, and for several days NSDAP leaders had been talking of “Jewish atrocity propaganda” (Greuelpropaganda) – supposedly invented accounts of violence in Germany. The next day Hermann Göring summoned representatives of German Jewish organisations and demanded that they stop the protests abroad. The party leadership was already preparing a response that would serve both as a punishment for German Jews and as a warning to the world. On 26 March, at the Obersalzberg, Hitler decided that the NSDAP would organise a boycott of Jewish shops throughout Germany, and its preparation was entrusted to Joseph Goebbels and to Julius Streicher, publisher of the antisemitic Der Stürmer. The party’s proclamation of 28 March called it “defence” against a “Jewish campaign of slander and boycott”. The boycott was carried out on 1 April 1933.

Reversing the roles

Nazi propaganda did not need the Daily Express to invent a Jewish enemy. Antisemitism had been the core of NSDAP ideology since its 1920 programme, and in Mein Kampf Hitler had written of the Jews as Germany’s mortal enemies long before any boycott. The violence against Jews in Germany began before the protests abroad and was their cause, not their effect. But sensational reports such as the headline of 24 March made it possible to present each new wave of persecution as a “response” and as “self-defence”. This mechanism of role reversal, in which the victim is accused of aggression, was repeated many times afterwards.

When the Nazis organised the pogrom known as Kristallnacht in 1938, propaganda again spoke of the “people’s anger” provoked by the Jews. On 30 January 1939 Hitler declared in the Reichstag that if “international Jewish financiers” plunged the nations into a world war, the result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”. When war broke out, Goebbels’s propaganda claimed that the Jews had started it. Among the “proofs” it used was a letter from the president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, to the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, at the end of August 1939, in which he gave assurances that the Jews would stand on the side of Britain and the democracies. On 16 November 1941, when the mass murder of Jews in the East was already under way, Goebbels published the article “Die Juden sind schuld!” (“The Jews are to blame!”), in which he announced that the Jews would be punished for the war they had supposedly started. The American historian Jeffrey Herf, who has studied this propaganda, has shown that the story of the Jews as the instigators of the war was, in the eyes of the perpetrators, one of the main justifications for the Holocaust.

A myth that endured

After the war the Daily Express page of 24 March 1933 enjoyed a second career. In the publications of neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers and believers in conspiracy theories, and today above all on the internet, it is presented as proof that “the Jews declared war on Germany first” and that the Third Reich was merely defending itself. Weizmann’s letter is used in a similar way. It was presented as a “declaration of war” by the British writer David Irving, whom a London court in 2000, in the case he lost against the historian Deborah Lipstadt, found to be a Holocaust denier who deliberately falsified history. During the German historians’ dispute (Historikerstreit) of the 1980s, Ernst Nolte took up a similar idea, suggesting that the letter might have given Hitler grounds to treat German Jews as enemy aliens and intern them. Historians reject this thesis as antisemitic manipulation.

It does not stand up to the facts. The headline was the title of one tabloid newspaper, not the act of any authority, for there was no Jewish state, and the world’s Jews had no common leadership. The boycott was a reaction to violence that had been going on for weeks, not its cause. In March 1933 the largest Jewish organisations in Britain, America and Germany were opposed to it, and where it was taken up it was a voluntary, scattered and economically rather weak protest by consumers and merchants. A boycott of goods, however widespread, is not war, and it does not justify stripping people of their rights, plundering them and murdering them when they had nothing to do with it. Meanwhile the victims of the Nazis’ retaliation were German Jews, who had themselves asked for the protests to be called off.

Significance

The headline of 24 March 1933 did not change the course of events, but it illustrates well the mechanism that led from the boycott of shops to the Holocaust. From its first weeks the Nazi state presented persecution as defence against a “Jewish war”, and turned every voice of protest abroad against the victims. The same logic justified, a week later, the boycott of Jewish shops, then the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht and finally the killings during the war that Hitler had announced as a war against “Jewry”. The story of this headline is also a reminder that antisemitic clichés were not exclusively German. The great, respected press of a democratic country could repeat them without ill intent, and the propaganda of a dictatorship and its later imitators knew how to exploit them.