The Ruling Elite Read online

  On March 23, 1933, thousands of Jewish war veterans marched in the streets. The head of the JWV appealed for financial warfare against Germany in the midst of the Depression. On March 23, at New York’s City Hall, at least twenty thousand Jews protested while other Jews held demonstrations outside the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American shipping lines. New York City Jews called for boycotts throughout the city against German goods. On March 24, the Daily Express of London announced in a front-page headline, “Judea Declares War on Germany,” reporting that Jews worldwide had initiated a boycott of all German goods. Their goal was to destroy Germany and Germans forever.464

  In the early spring of 1933, Samuel Untermeyer launched an aggressive economic boycott against Germany. On March 24, the Daily Express reported the boycott of German goods. The statement read, “The Israeli people around the world declare economic and financial war against Germany. Fourteen million Jews stand together as one man, to declare war against Germany… to join together in a holy war against Hitler’s people.”465 Dr. Loewenstein, chairman of the Reich League of Jewish Front-line Soldiers, sent a letter to the US Embassy in Berlin. He said the league had heard all of the publicity about alleged atrocities against the Jews in Germany. Without minimizing the incidents, he said there had been mistreatment and transgressions, which happen in “every revolution.” He assured embassy officials that “irresponsible elements” had committed these acts and that the government condemned them. He further criticized the foreign “Jewish so-called intellectuals” who were waging an exaggerated, “irresponsible campaign of hatred” against Germany. By interfering in German-Jewish affairs from their safe distance abroad, he said, they were abandoning the very people whom they pretended to be helping.466

  On March 24, the Reich League issued a statement to the front-line soldiers of the world, reiterating that the atrocity propaganda was false. The group maintained that political and economic interests were manipulating circumstances and that the defamation of Germany had been going on for fourteen years.467 The League of Red Cross Societies received a report from the German Red Cross, which said, “The reports of atrocities which have been spread abroad for reasons of political propaganda are in no way in accordance with the facts. Arbitrary and unauthorized acts, a few of which occurred in the first days of the national revolution, have been effectively stopped by energetic measures on the part of the government.” On March 25, the Central Union of German Citizens of Jewish Faith issued a statement, saying, “All such reports are pure inventions. The Central Union states emphatically that German Jewry cannot be held responsible for these inexcusable distortions which deserve the severest condemnation.”468

  Meanwhile, in large American cities, people were perpetrating numerous outrageous crimes and atrocities against blacks. However, apparently exercising selective indignation, no one called for a holy war against the instigators or the United States. The NAACP, cofounded in 1909 by Julius Rosenwald, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, and Rabbi Wise, was supposed to counter such social injustice.469 Jewish businessmen and academics, Jacob H. Schiff, Jacob Billikopf, and Rabbi Wise, who ran the NAACP, remained silent.470 They did not declare an economic war against America, where they lived and where they controlled the major organization that could have waged such a campaign.471

  On March 26, 1933, the Zionist Organization for Germany sent a telegram to leading Jews in America, saying, “In a declaration disseminated March 17, 1933 by the Jewish Telegraphic Union to the entire Jewish world press, we set forth, with great determination, our opposition to any anti-German propaganda. We objected to the untruthful atrocity reports, and to the unconscionably sensationalized accounts. Today, we repeat our protest publicly. We object to every attempt to make the Jewish cause subservient to the interests of other states or groups… their economic position cannot and must not be tied to political actions against Germany or against the international political standing of the German Reich.”472

  Göring remarked that Rabbi Wise was one of Hitler’s “most dangerous enemies.” On March 26, 1933, Hitler was at Berchtesgaden when he received word that Congress was unable to halt the boycott. He met with Goebbels to discuss an emergency plan for countering the boycott and the atrocity stories. Goebbels had already advised the London Sunday Express that the atrocity accounts were false, but such efforts failed to neutralize the massive propaganda campaign.473 On March 27, Goebbels released a statement about “legal proceedings” against German Jews if Jews in New York and London continued their anti-Reich operation. He said, “We work through [media] interviews as much as possible; but only a really extensive movement can now help us out of our calamity.” Hitler approved of Goebbels’s plan, announced on the radio, for the NSDAP’s preemptive national boycott, not an official government policy, against Germany’s Jews, scheduled for April 1.474

  On March 27, Rabbi Wise called his close friend, Justice Brandeis, to ask his opinion about whether to go ahead with the rally that night. Brandeis responded, “Go ahead and make the protest as good as you can.” He confirmed Wise’s decision to proceed.475 Even though the rally would not start until 8:00 p.m., people began lining up outside Madison Square Garden by 2:30 p.m. and traffic in the area congested the streets.476 Rabbi Wise (Weisz), founder of the New York Federation of Zionist Societies in 1897 and later the president of the AJC, joined the efforts to bash Germany by announcing a “holy war.”477 He delivered a speech that night in which he called for an end to anti-Semitism in Germany and promoted the boycott.

  The rally attracted fifty-five thousand supporters inside and outside the arena. There were corresponding rallies in Chicago, Washington, San Francisco, Houston, and seventy other American cities. Loudspeakers were set up in another two hundred US cities where as many as another million people, both Jewish and Gentile, listened to the live broadcast. Hundreds of Europeans also heard the proceedings. AJC president Bernard Deutsch cabled Jewish leaders in Latvia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other places where anti-Reich protesters planned to hold rallies in conjunction with the one in New York. A group of rabbis held a national day of fasting in Poland, fully supported by the Polish government, which sanctioned anti-Hitler parades and extended the boycott to all of Poland. Officials banned rallies by German sympathizers. The three key Warsaw Jewish trade organizations vowed to “use the most radical means of defense by boycotting German imports.”478

  Speakers at Madison Square Garden included labor union president William Green, Senator Robert Wagner, former New York governor Al Smith, and several clergymen. Rabbi Moses Margolies, from Manhattan’s Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, read the declaration of an economic boycott against Germany. Representatives from Jewish organizations, including the AJC, the American League for Defense of Jewish Rights, B’nai B’rith, the Jewish Labor Committee, and the JWV, joined in the appeal for a boycott.

  Rabbi Wise disregarded the Jewish leaders in Germany who pleaded for Jews in the United States to stop the protests. He thought that they should have fought against Nazism before Hitler became chancellor. The crowd at Madison Square Garden agreed with Wise, who said, “Every form of economic discrimination is a form of violence.” He also claimed that “racial exclusion” represented violence. Wise threatened the Third Reich that if things worsened because of the protest or if Germany imposed new penalties, then “Providence would deal good or ill fortune to nations according as they dealt well or ill by the Jews.”479

  Given Jewry’s economic assault on Germany, one can certainly understand how anti-Jewish sentiment erupted in Germany. It was predictable and inevitable. Wise’s speech “turned the Jews of Germany into the Enemy inside the gates. This declaration was a Jewish initiative and the reason why the Jews of Europe were later herded into concentration camps.”480 When Chamberlain suggested that Jews go to the former German colony of Tanganyika, Wise said, “I would rather have my fellow-Jews die in Germany than live in lands which bear the imprint of yesterday’s occupation by Germany a
nd which may tomorrow be yielded back.”481

  Hitler’s revival of the German economy and eradication of massive unemployment was the most important aspect of the NSDAP program. The Jews’ economic boycott, threatening financial chaos, could produce political unrest among the German masses, which would end the NSDAP and Germany’s revival and lead the rest of Europe to reject the National Socialist economic model. But officials elsewhere would follow Germany’s lead and throw the predatory, monopolistic Jewish bankers and businessmen out of their countries.

  Germany’s committee for defense against Jewish boycott agitation warned the agents involved in the effort to avoid violence or force against Jewish businesses or their customers. If businesses failed to close their doors voluntarily, officials were to seek assistance from their superiors. The defensive action would begin at 10 a.m. on April 1. The committee strictly forbade agents, SA or SS members from entering any Jewish establishment, causing property damage, or posting provocative posters. They were only to inform the public that the proprietor was a Jew, and this had to irrefutable.482

  On March 28, 1933, the Berliner Tageblatt, which was edited by Jews, said, “Deeply shocked, our whole people observe the new hate campaign against us that has been raging abroad over the last few weeks.” The editorial accused the perpetrators of the grossest self-interest “in trying to make Germany appear contemptible… In opposing the senseless reports that some of the world press still publishes… we must declare emphatically that there can be no talk of pogroms or of anti-Jewish excesses in Germany. Whoever, on the outside, says otherwise, lies, or is an ignorant tool of dark powers.”483

  The Jewish community in Salonika, Greece, planned a boycott against Germany’s local film business. Trade unionists in London participated in boycott activities. Groups in Paris, Warsaw, Cairo, Dublin, and Antwerp organized boycotts. By March 29, alarmed German business owners feared the expansion of what had become a worldwide anti-German boycott, which had already cost millions of Reichmarks in lost business for transportation firms, machine manufacturers, chemical companies, fur companies, and other major concerns.484

  On March 29, German officials, also anxious about foreign trade, acquiesced to the Jews and opposed Hitler’s one-day campaign in an attempt to preserve Germany. Cabinet members demanded that Hitler rescind the boycott orders, but he reiterated that the boycott was a defensive measure to fight the “atrocity propaganda” and the Jewish economic onslaught. Hitler would not and could not budge, arguing that if the NSDAP had not countered the Jews, violence might have erupted among a resentful population. That evening, Goebbels devised a fourteen-point boycott program that prohibited violence and the breaking of any law. One of the stipulations forbade Jewish store owners from discharging their non-Jewish employees. In the case of store closures, owners were to pay two months’ wages.485 Edwin Black suggests that this “national boycott… within months would force Germany’s Jews into pauperism.”486 If that were so, there would have been no Jewish businesses to suffer an assault on Kristallnacht. One cannot have it both ways. If Germany forced all Jews to relinquish their business and flee the country in 1933, who would function as victims on November 9 and 10, 1938?

  On March 30, newspapers in Germany and elsewhere verified the anti-Jewish boycott decree. Worried German Jews begged their New York coreligionists to cancel additional boycott activities. Hamburg banker Eric Warburg asked his New York cousin, Frederick Warburg, for assistance. Frederick called Cyrus Adler, head of the AJC. Adler, whose uncle was David Sulzberger, issued a statement disavowing atrocity stories and any boycott.487 Adler worked for the Smithsonian Institution for a number of years, was a founder of the Jewish Welfare Board, an editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia, and participated in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

  On March 30, 1933, in Berlin, the Central Verein Zeitung, the newspaper of the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, published an editorial saying that 565,000 German Jews lodged a “solemn protest” against the “unbridled atrocity-propaganda campaign against Germany” then “raging about the world.” The Central Union said that the anti-German boycott wounded German Jews just as “deeply” as it did every other German. Foreign elements were “slandering the honor of the German name, harming the land of our fathers and the land of our children,” the editorial said. The German Jews protested against the “monstrous accusations… before all Germany and before the world.”488

  Author Francis Neilson, a former member of the British Parliament, reviewed Hitler’s speeches during the first six months he was in power and could not find a single reference to the Jews. In March 1933, some German and foreign newspapers reported that people were regularly finding the mutilated bodies of Jews at the entrance to the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, a suburb of Berlin. They also reported that Germans were forcibly herding Jewish girls into public squares and that hundreds of mistreated German Jews, including many children, had escaped to Geneva. Those spreading this hype had an amazing amount of power and influence. Some of the top newspapers published refutations of the stories, which Untermeyer ignored. The Patriotic Society of National German Jews issued a statement against those who were pushing for a “holy war.”489

  The New York Times reported that the State Department, leading members of Congress and key American Jews “have decided to take an attitude of silence toward the situation of the Jews in Germany.” However, German officials intended to implement their policies. They replaced the Jewish deputy in charge of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. They also forced a leave of absence on the head of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and twenty-five of its thirty-three Jewish members. They made plans to replace the chairman of the executive board of the Federation of German Industry.490 On March 31, 1933, the Times reported that financiers in London, fearing for their commercial interests in Germany, were “uneasy” over the German attitude toward Jews. The financiers were concerned that Hitler’s anticommunist movement might “antagonize” Russia. They were relieved when Hitler appointed Schacht as president of the Reichsbank since he would be able to maintain German credit abroad.491

  Also on March 31, the Neues Wiener Journal of Vienna reported that Dr. Max Naumann, honorary chairman of the Association of National German Jews, absolutely opposed the “atrocity campaign against Germany.” He pointed out that it was merely the latest edition of the same tactics that the Allies had used in World War I. Naumann and his group were committed to opposing the “foreign atrocity propaganda” against “our Germany” and said that the hate campaign was “extraordinarily bad” for Jews living in Germany.492

  An economic war against Germany would serve certain interests. Bernard Baruch prompted Britain to prepare for a military assault against Germany. In his 1961 book, Baruch: The Public Years, he said, “I emphasized that the defeat of Germany and Japan and their elimination from world trade would give Britain a tremendous opportunity to swell her foreign commerce in both volume and profit.”493 He said, “I never had the slightest illusion about Hitler. At a time when most people were inclined to dismiss his boasts and threats as the hollow rantings of an excitable demagogue, I was one of that small minority in the democracies, of whom Churchill was the most prominent, who took Hitler seriously.” Baruch said he recognized Hitler as “the greatest menace to world safety,” and “from the end of World War One, the problems of preparedness, particularly those of its economic and industrial aspects, had been foremost in my mind.”494

  Baruch had an enormous amount of money and used it to influence public perceptions. In 1926, he invested fifty thousands dollars to help David Lawrence found the United States Daily, which became United States News and, after World War II, USA News and World Report. He also helped Maxwell Schuster and Dick Simon to form Simon and Schuster. He invested in Vogue, Vanity Fair, the Raleigh News and Observer, Our World Magazine, and other publications. He financially backed columnists including Arthur Krock, who wrote for the Louisville Courier-Journal. Krock h
ad attended the Paris Peace Conference with Hoover and Baruch. In 1932, Baruch convinced Adolph Ochs of the New York Times to hire Krock, who reorganized the paper’s Washington bureau.495

  In April 1933, certain Zionist leaders wanted to work with the Third Reich to relocate Jews and their wealth from Germany. The International League against Anti-Semitism declared a boycott in Paris on April 1, 1933, to continue until Hitler restored civil rights to German Jews. French Cardinal Jean Verdier of the Roman Catholic Church promised to support the boycott.496 Rabbi Wise and Bernard Deutsch of the AJC, which held sessions on April 1 and 2, announced that they would refrain from commenting on the situation of the Jews in Germany in deference to a request by the State Department, which apparently was attempting to ease the situation.497

  On April 2, throughout Canada, Jewish and Christian clergy held meetings to protest the “alleged mistreatment” of German Jews. They met in Toronto, Hamilton, London, Windsor, Ontario, Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary, and other cities. The groups proposed resolutions to create a fund to aid those who had suffered from the German boycott. Representatives from Christian churches and political groups spoke at most of the meetings, urging the British government to lower Palestine’s immigration limits to admit refugees from Germany.498 On the same day, Jewish shop owners in Havana, after a meeting of the Jewish Merchants Association, opted to close their businesses after 3 p.m. to protest the anti-Jewish boycott in Germany.499