Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 Read Online Free PDF

prominent American political commentator of the day and himself a Jew, found words of praise for Hitler and could not resist a sideswipe at the Jews. These notable exceptions notwithstanding, most American newspapers did not mince words about the anti-Jewish persecution. 42 Jewish and non-Jewish protests grew. These very protests became the Nazis’ pretext for the notorious April 1, 1933, boycott of Jewish businesses. Although the anti-Nazi campaign in the United States was discussed at some length during a cabinet meeting on March 24, 43 the final decision in favor of the boycott was probably made during a March 26 meeting of Hitler and Goebbels in Berchtesgaden. But in mid-March, Hitler had already allowed a committee headed by Julius Streicher, party chief of Franconia and editor of the party’s most vicious anti-Jewish newspaper, Der Stürmer , to proceed with preparatory work for it.
    In fact, the boycott had been predictable from the very moment the Nazis acceded to power. The possibility had often been mentioned during the two preceding years, 44 when Jewish small businesses had been increasingly harassed and Jewish employees increasingly discriminated against in the job market. 45 Among the Nazis much of the agitation for anti-Jewish economic measures was initiated by a motley coalition of “radicals” belonging either to the Nazi Enterprise Cells Organization (Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation, or NSBO) headed by Reinhold Muchow or to Theodor Adrian von Renteln’s League of Middle-Class Employees and Artisans (Kampfbund für den gewerblichen Mittelstand), as well as to various sections of the SA activated for that purpose by Otto Wagener, an economist and the SA’s former acting chief of staff. Their common denominator was what former number two party leader Gregor Strasser once called an “anti-capitalist nostalgia”; 46 their easiest way of expressing it: virulent anti-Semitism.
    Such party radicals will be encountered at each major stage of anti-Jewish policy up to and including the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. In April 1933 they can be identified as members of the party’s various economic interest groups, but also among them were jurists like Hans Frank (the future governor-general of occupied Poland) and Roland Freisler (the future president of the People’s Tribunal) and race fanatics like Gerhard Wagner and Walter Gross, not to speak of Streicher, Goebbels, the SA leadership, and, foremost among them, Hitler himself. But specifically as a pressure group, the radicals consisted mainly of “old fighters”—SA members and rank-and-file party activists dissatisfied with the pace of the National Socialist revolution, with the meagerness of the spoils that had accrued to them, and with the often privileged status of comrades occupying key administrative positions in the state bureaucracy. The radicals were a shifting but sizable force of disgruntled party members seething for increased action and for the primacy of the party over the state. 47
    The radicals’ influence should not be overrated, however. They never compelled Hitler to take steps he did not want to take. When their demands were deemed excessive, their initiatives were dismissed. The anti-Jewish decisions in the spring of 1933 helped the regime channel SA violence into state-controlled measures; 48 to the Nazis, of course, these measures were also welcome for their own sake.
    Hitler informed the cabinet of the planned boycott of Jewish-owned businesses on March 29, telling the ministers that he himself had called for it. He described the alternative as spontaneous popular violence. An approved boycott, he added, would avoid dangerous unrest. 49 The German National ministers objected, and President Hindenburg tried to intervene. Hitler rejected any possible cancellation, but two days later (the day before the scheduled boycott) he suggested the possibility of postponing it until April 4—if the British and