ABSTRACT
THE vast majority of the Jews in Germany were engaged in commerce and industry. The elimination of the Jews from the Civil Service, professions, and the cultural field, affected roughly 25,000 families. The statistics based on the last census, in 1933, show that about 18,000 Jews belonging to the Jewish community were engaged in the Civil Service, the professions, and the cultural vocations. This figure does not include baptized Jews or those “non-Aryans” who did not belong to the Jewish community. It is certainly not an exaggeration to estimate the figure of these at about 7,000, so that some 25,000 families were either driven to emigration, or had to try to create a new livelihood for themselves in Germany. Only a very limited number of these 25,000 received a pension, or were able to live on their income or savings. The others had to be supported by charities, and naturally Jews had to rely almost exclusively on Jewish charities. Apart from the mental distress and the great difficulties created by the sudden loss of their positions, the Jewish community might have been able to master this problem if Jews had been left unhampered to earn their livelihood in industry and trade. According to the results of the census, over 200,000 of the 500,000 Jews living in Germany were engaged in commercial callings; 21,000 as manual workers, 83,000 as clerical workers and shop assistants, and the rest as independent craftsmen, tradesmen, and industrialists.1*
THE BOYCOTT The first onslaughts left Jews in trade, industry, and commerce in the main unmolested. There were some attacks, which never quite ceased, against Jewish department stores, but they touched only a small fringe of the problem. The one-day boycott on the 1st April, 1933, was, at least from a material point of view, a mere pinprick which alarmed the Jews but did not do any lasting material harm. When Hitler came to power, the economic position of Germany was rather shaky, as the country had just started to emerge from the worst economic crisis it had ever passed through. There was a large army of unemployed, exports had dropped by leaps and bounds, any new dislocation might have proved fatal, and, in consequence, the responsible men in the commercial sphere insisted on stopping all Jew-baiting in business life. None of the first three holders of the office of Minister of Economics, Hugenberg, Schmitt and Schacht, was a true-brown Nazi. The same is true of the Minister of Finance. Hitler himself never took a very keen interest in things economic, and at any rate at first allowed his non-Nazi advisers a free hand. It is true, Jews
were excluded from certain limited fields of business, such as supplying uniforms for the Party formations. Further, the State dowries introduced by the Nazis could not be spent in Jewish shops. But these various regulations did not affect Jewish business too severely. Of course, some of the hot-heads in the Nazi Party wanted to extend the persecution to the economic field too. A special organization, the N.S.Hago (National-Socialist Trade and Commerce Organization) staged sporadic boycotts against Jewish shops and stores in various provincial places, or published lists of the names of Jewish firms, but the central Government authorities invariably stepped in as soon as they heard of it, and prevented these hot-heads doing any damage to the shaky economic structure of the country. They were allowed to let off a certain amount of steam, but they were soon brought to a halt. Declaration after declaration was issued by the central authorities, pointing out that the Jews were to be left alone in the economic field. They were naturally excluded from leading positions in the various trade organizations, such as Chambers of Commerce, etc., but they were accepted as ordinary members. The Press Service of the retail trade, for instance, published a circular of the Central Trade Estate, an organization which embraced all traders, stating: “The National-Socialist movement regards the Jews as guests who are permitted to engage in trade in Germany.”2 The Minister of the Interior very sternly advised all local authorities to stop any possible encroachments against the activities of “non-Aryans” in economic life. “It is inadmissible, it is even serious,” so he stated, “if the principles of the so-called ‘Aryan clause’ are extended to fields for which they were not intended. This applies particularly, as the National-Socialist Government has stated over and over again, to commerce.”3 Such declarations were not made once, but several times.
