The anti-Nazi boycott was an international boycott of German products in response to violence and harassment by members of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party against Jews following his appointment as Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Examples of Nazi violence and harassment included placing and throwing stink bombs, picketing, shopper intimidation, humiliation and assaults. The boycott was spearheaded by some Jewish organizations but opposed by others.
Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor in January 1933, an organized campaign of violence and boycotting was undertaken by Hitler's Nazi Party against Jewish businesses. [1] The anti-Jewish boycott was tolerated and possibly organized by the regime, with Hermann Göring stating that "I shall employ the police, and without mercy, wherever German people are hurt, but I refuse to turn the police into a guard for Jewish stores". [1]
The Central Jewish Association of Germany felt obliged to issue a statement of support for the regime and held that "the responsible government authorities [i.e. the Hitler regime] are unaware of the threatening situation", saying, "we do not believe our German fellow citizens will let themselves be carried away into committing excesses against the Jews." [2] Prominent Jewish business leaders wrote letters in support of the Nazi regime calling on officials in the Jewish community in Palestine, as well as Jewish organizations abroad, to drop their efforts in organizing an economic boycott. [3] The Association of German National Jews, a marginal group that had supported Hitler in his early years, also argued against the Jewish boycott of German goods. [4] [5] [6]
In Britain the movement to boycott German goods was opposed by the conservative Board of Deputies of British Jews. In the United States a boycott committee was established by the American Jewish Congress (AJC), with B'nai B'rith and the American Jewish Committee abstaining. [7] At that point, they were in agreement that further public protests might harm the Jews of Germany. [1]
Unrelenting Nazi attacks on Jews in Germany in subsequent weeks led the American Jewish Congress to reconsider its opposition to public protests. In a contentious four-hour meeting held at the Hotel Astor in New York City on March 20, 1933, 1,500 representatives of various Jewish organizations met to consider a proposal by the American Jewish Congress to hold a protest meeting at Madison Square Garden on March 27, 1933. An additional 1,000 people attempting to enter the meeting were held back by police.
New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph M. Proskauer and James N. Rosenberg spoke out against a proposal for a boycott of German goods introduced by J. George Freedman of the Jewish War Veterans. Proskauer expressed his concerns of "causing more trouble for the Jews in Germany by unintelligent action", protesting against plans for and reading a letter from Judge Irving Lehman that warned that "the meeting may add to the terrible dangers of the Jews in Germany". Honorary president Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise responded to Proskauer and Rosenberg, criticizing their failure to attend previous AJC meetings and insisting that "no attention would be paid to the edict" if mass protests were rejected as a tactic. Wise argued that "The time for prudence and caution is past. We must speak up like men. How can we ask our Christian friends to lift their voices in protest against the wrongs suffered by Jews if we keep silent? … What is happening in Germany today may happen tomorrow in any other land on earth unless it is challenged and rebuked. It is not the German Jews who are being attacked. It is the Jews." He characterized the boycott as a moral imperative, stating, "We must speak out," and that "if that is unavailing, at least we shall have spoken." [1] The group voted to go ahead with the meeting at Madison Square Garden. [1] [8]
In a meeting held at the Hotel Knickerbocker on March 21 by the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America, former congressman William W. Cohen advocated a strict boycott of German goods, stating that "Any Jew buying one penny's worth of merchandise made in Germany is a traitor to his people." The Jewish War Veterans also planned a protest march in Manhattan from Cooper Square to New York City Hall, in which 20,000 would participate, including Jewish veterans in uniform, with no banners or placards allowed other than American and Jewish flags. [9]
A series of protest rallies were held on March 27, 1933, with the New York City rally held at Madison Square Garden with an overflow crowd of 55,000 inside and outside the arena and parallel events held in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia and 70 other locations, with the proceedings at the New York rally broadcast worldwide. Speakers at the Garden included American Federation of Labor president William Green, Senator Robert F. Wagner, former Governor of New York Al Smith and a number of Christian clergyman, joining in a call for the end of the brutal treatment of German Jews. [1] [10] [11] Rabbi Moses S. Margolies, spiritual leader of Manhattan's Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, rose from his sickbed to address the crowd, bringing the 20,000 inside to their feet with his prayers that the antisemitic persecution cease and that the hearts of Israel's enemies should be softened. [12] Jewish organizations — including the American Jewish Congress, American League for Defense of Jewish Rights, B'nai B'rith, the Jewish Labor Committee and Jewish War Veterans — joined in a call for a boycott of German goods. [1]
The boycott began in March 1933 in both Europe and the US and continued until the entry of the US into the war on December 7, 1941. [13] [14] [15]
By July 1933, the boycott had forced the resignation of the board of the Hamburg America Line. German imports to the US were reduced by nearly a quarter compared with the prior year, and the impact was weighing heavily on the regime. Joseph Goebbels expressed that it was a cause for "much concern" at the first Nuremberg party rally that August. The boycott was perhaps most effective in Mandatory Palestine, especially against German pharmaceutical companies when nearly two-thirds of the 652 practicing Jewish doctors in Palestine stopped prescribing German medicines. [16]
A significant event in the boycott took place on March 15, 1937, when a "Boycott Nazi Germany" rally was held in Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Both inside and outside of Germany, the boycott was seen as a "reactive [and] aggressive" reaction by the Jewish community in response to the Nazi regime's persecutions; the Daily Express , a British newspaper, ran a headline on 24 March 1933 stating that "Judea Declares War on Germany". [13]
Nazi officials denounced the protests as slanders against the Nazis perpetrated by "Jews of German origin", with the Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels proclaiming that a series of "sharp countermeasures" would be taken against the Jews of Germany in response to the protests of American Jews. Goebbels announced a one-day boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany of his own to take place on April 1, 1933, which would be lifted if anti-Nazi protests were suspended. [13] This was the German government's first officially sanctioned anti-Jewish boycott. If the protests did not cease, Goebbels warned that "the boycott will be resumed... until German Jewry has been annihilated". [1] [17] [18]
The Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses threatened by Goebbels occurred. Brownshirts of the SA were placed outside Jewish-owned department stores, retail establishments and professional offices. The Star of David was painted in yellow and black on retail entrances and windows, and posters asserting "Don't buy from Jews!" (Kauf nicht bei Juden!) and "The Jews are our misfortune!" (Die Juden sind unser Unglück!) were pasted around. Physical violence against Jews and vandalism of Jewish-owned property took place, but the police intervened only rarely. [19]
The boycott was not successful in ending the harassment of Jews in Germany, which instead continued to build towards the Holocaust. [3]
The Haavara Agreement, together with German rearmament and lessened dependence on trade with the West, had by 1937 largely negated the effects of the Jewish boycott on Germany. [20] [16] Nevertheless, the boycott campaign continued into 1939. [16]
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German Nazi politician and philologist who was the Gauleiter of Berlin, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest and most devoted followers, known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent antisemitism which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.
Kristallnacht (German pronunciation:[kʁɪsˈtalnaχt]lit. 'crystal night') or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (German: Novemberpogrome, pronounced[noˈvɛm.bɐ.poˌɡʁoːmə] ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The euphemistic name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination, on 9 November 1938, of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.
The German American Bund, or the German American Federation, was a German-American Nazi organization which was established in 1936 as a successor to the Friends of New Germany. The organization chose its new name in order to emphasize its American credentials after the press accused it of being unpatriotic. The Bund was allowed to consist only of American citizens of German descent. Its main goal was to promote a favorable view of Nazi Germany.
Stephen Samuel Wise was an early 20th-century American Reform rabbi and Zionist leader in the Progressive Era. Born in Budapest, he was an infant when his family immigrated to New York. He followed his father and grandfather in becoming a rabbi, serving in New York and in Portland, Oregon. Wise was also a founding member of the NAACP.
The Rosenstrasseprotest is considered to be a significant event in German history as it is the only mass public demonstration by Germans in the Third Reich against the deportation of Jews. The protest on Rosenstraße took place in Berlin during February and March 1943. This demonstration was initiated and sustained by the non-Jewish wives and relatives of Jewish men and Mischlinge,. Their husbands had been targeted for deportation, based on the racial policy of Nazi Germany, and detained in the Jewish community house on Rosenstrasse. The protests, which occurred over the course of seven days, continued until the men being held were released by the Gestapo. The protest by the women of the Rosenstrasse led to the release of approximately 1,800 Berlin Jews.
Michael Ritter von Faulhaber was a German Catholic prelate who served as Archbishop of Munich for 35 years, from 1917 to his death in 1952. Created Cardinal in 1921, von Faulhaber remained an outspoken monarchist and denounced the Weimar Republic as rooted in "perjury and treason" against the German Empire during a speech at the 62nd German Catholics' Day of 1922. Cardinal von Faulhaber was a senior member and co-founder of the Amici Israel, a priestly association founded in Rome in 1926 with the goal of working toward the Jewish people's conversion to Roman Catholicism, while also seeking to combat antisemitism within the Church.
Haim Arlosoroff was a Socialist Zionist leader of the Yishuv during the British Mandate for Palestine, prior to the establishment of Israel, and Head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency. In 1933, Arlosoroff was assassinated while walking on the beach with his wife in Tel Aviv.
The American Jewish Congress (AJCongress) is an association of American Jews organized to defend Jewish interests at home and abroad through public policy advocacy, using diplomacy, legislation, and the courts.
The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens. The remainder were classed as state subjects without any citizenship rights. A supplementary decree outlining the definition of who was Jewish was passed on 14 November, and the Reich Citizenship Law officially came into force on that date. The laws were expanded on 26 November 1935 to include Romani and Black people. This supplementary decree defined Romani people as "enemies of the race-based state", the same category as Jews.
Max Naumann was the founder of Verband nationaldeutscher Juden, which called for the elimination of Jewish ethnic identity through Jewish assimilation. The league was outlawed by the Nazi government on 18 November 1935.
Joachim Prinz was a German-American rabbi who was an outspoken activist against Nazism in Germany in the 1930s and later became a leader in the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s.
The Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany began on April 1, 1933, and was claimed to be a defensive reaction to the anti-Nazi boycott, which had been initiated in March 1933. It was largely unsuccessful, as the German population continued to use Jewish businesses, but revealed the intent of the Nazis to undermine the viability of Jews in Germany.
Anti-Jewish legislation in pre-war Nazi Germany comprised several laws that segregated the Jews from German society and restricted Jewish people's political, legal and civil rights. Major legislative initiatives included a series of restrictive laws passed in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and a final wave of legislation preceding Germany's entry into World War II.
The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. These included books written by Jewish, half-Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist, and sexologist authors among others. The initial books burned were those of Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky, but came to include very many authors, including Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, writers in French and English, and effectively any book incompatible with Nazi ideology. In a campaign of cultural genocide, books were also burned en masse by the Nazis in occupied territories, such as in Poland.
The Haavara Agreement was an agreement between Nazi Germany and Zionist German Jews signed on 25 August 1933. The agreement was finalized after three months of talks by the Zionist Federation of Germany, the Anglo-Palestine Bank and the economic authorities of Nazi Germany. It was a major factor in making possible the migration of approximately 60,000 German Jews to Palestine between 1933 and 1939.
The Association of German National Jews was a German Jewish organization during the Weimar Republic and the early years of Nazi Germany that eventually came out in support of Adolf Hitler.
The Nazi Party and its ideological allies used cartoons and caricatures as a main pillar in their propaganda campaigns. Such techniques were an effective way to spread their ideology throughout Nazi Germany and beyond. The use of caricatures was a popular method within the party when pursuing their campaign against the United States, in particular its then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
On February 20, 1939, a Nazi rally took place at Madison Square Garden, organized by the German American Bund. More than 20,000 people attended, and Fritz Julius Kuhn was a featured speaker. The Bund billed the event, which took place two days before George Washington's Birthday, as a pro-"Americanism" rally; the stage at the event featured a huge portrait of George Washington with swastikas on each side. Approximately 100,000 anti-Nazi counter-protesters gathered outside, attempting to break through lines of police officers guarding the rally on three occasions. The Bund rapidly declined in the aftermath of the rally, with Kuhn being imprisoned for embezzlement by the end of the year.
During a speech at the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, German Führer Adolf Hitler threatened "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" in the event of war:
If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
The Madison Square Garden protest of 1933 was convened by the American Jewish Congress in New York City to protest the deteriorating circumstances of Jews in Nazi Germany after Hitler's rise to power. The protest was held on March 27, five days after the opening of the first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau.