ZIONIST LEADERS, during April 1933, sought to cooperate with the Nazi Reich to arrange the orderly exit of Jewish people and wealth from Germany. But during the very same weeks, Jewish groups throughout the world were struggling to resist and topple the Reich to keep Jews in Germany as citizens. Boycott and protest were everywhere.
April I: Paris, the International League Against Anti-Semitism made good on its threat to declare a boycott, effective 10:00 A.M. until the downfall of Adolf Hitler or the resumption of full rights for German Jews. Istanbul, Jews distributed circulars urging a boycott of all German products.1
April 2: Toronto, a mass protest meeting cosponsored by Jewish and Christian clergy adopted the boycott. Paris, Cardinal Verdier publicly assured the chief rabbi of Paris that Catholics would actively support the anti-Hitler movement.2
April 3: Salonika, 70,000 Greek Jews gathered in a mass protest against Hitler. Panama, fifteen leading Jewish firms announced the cancellation of all orders of German merchandise.3
April 4: Bombay, Jewish protest meetings condemned the Hitler regime.4
April 5: New York, 15,000 leftists protested both Nazism and those Jewish and governmental leader's going slowly in the fight against Hitler.5
In Poland, the national boycott against Germany was enforced by mob violence. On April 6, Reich Ambassador Hans Moltke officially demanded an end to the violent boycott and its semiofficial encouragement. The Polish Undersecretary of State angrily told Moltke to his face that the Polish government did not desire to interfere with the boycott. Anti-German boycott violence was so extensive in Upper Silesia that the German Foreign Ministry declared "the situation altogether unbearable" and threatened to complain to the League of Nations.6
In England, on April 9, the fear of Polish-style boycott violence prompted police in London and Manchester to insist all storeowners, under pain of prosecution, remove "Boycott German Goods" window posters. The next afternoon, boycott suppression was excitedly debated in Parliament. Home Secretary Sir John Gilmour denied that the police were acting on express government orders. Just to make sure, Winston Churchill called for an official end to the suppression, to which the home secretary answered, "Certainly."7 Meanwhile, Britain's Labour-dominated boycott movement continued to expand. By April 15, The Daily Herald, quoting industry sources, estimated the fur boycott alone would cost Germany $100 million annually.8
Similar scares faced the Reich from all over Europe.
April I3: Bucharest, German trade was already suffering from a semi-official boycott because the Rumanian National Bank refused to allocate foreign currency for German imports (in retaliation for Reich barriers to Rumanian goods), Now Rumanian Jews formally joined the popular purchasing embargo, thus eliminating many barter deals as well. In Ploesti, Jewish merchants refused three carloads of German porcelain despite frantic price reductions by the shippers. Other German industries in Rumania were similarly afflicted.9
April I7: Antwerp, the fur boycott was extended to Belgium following a binding resolution by Jewish fur traders.10
April I9: Belgrade, the anti-German boycott in Yugoslavia was so damaging that local Nazi surrogates began an intense but futile counterboycott to pressure Jews to abandon the fight.11
The spirit of the anti-Nazi boycott was fueled not only by persistent organizers, but by encouraging press reports. For example, the sudden termination of Germany's April First action was explained by the world press as Hitler's retreat from economic retaliation.12 This convinced many that the best defense was a better offense.
Encouragement continued. Berlin newspapers began to report Germany's foreign trade for the first quarter in a dangerous decline.13 On April 9, Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler's newly appointed head of the Reichsbank, surprised a conference of international bankers in Basel by reducing Germany's foreign debt with a $70-million dollar check. Although the payment severely drained reserves, Schacht hoped to inject some believability into Germany's credit. But the financial press reported the "show of strength" as a mere desperate maneuver.14 Financial writers pessimistically pointed to the extraordinary German economic dislocation directly caused by Hitler's anti-Jewish policy. The press emphasized that the economic problems included both external backlash and massive internal disruption resulting from the sudden subtraction of the Jewish middle class from the commercial mainstream.15
On April I0, Germany announced that Jewish veterans would be exempted from sweeping anti-Jewish occupational expulsions—at Hindenburg's request, in the name of fairness. The New York Times attributed the "softening" not to sentimentality, but to the world protest and resulting economic chaos within the Reich. A week later, the Times carried another story repeating the theme, adding that a quiet but cohesive lobby within German economic circles opposed continued anti-Semitic activity.16
In a radical move on April 22 that would have been impossible in later years, a group of German industrial associations unanimously rejected official government reports citing a recent 9 percent gain in manufactured exports, especially machinery, textiles, and steel. In their daring announcement, the industrialists admitted they had actually suffered a heavy decline.17
Pessimistic newspaper and radio reports were vital to keeping the anti-Nazi boycott movement alive, because every boycott thrives on the appearance of success. It matters little whether a business decline is actually due to a boycott or to seasonal fluctuations, strikes, material shortages, or the phases of the moon. People want to see evidence of damage. When they do, the devoted redouble their devotion and the uncommitted see real value in the protest and jump on the bandwagon. In April 1933, such evidence was abundant for those opposed to Adolf Hitler.
On April 26, British Embassy Commercial Counsellor F. Thelwell in Berlin ended a twenty-two-page economic forecast with the words "If as time goes on the effects of bad foreign trade make themselves felt in industrial employment in Germany and money is not forthcoming for schemes of work and settlement, the pressure of economic distress may yet prove strong enough to break the political stranglehold which Hitler has put upon the country."18 Germany could not afford a boycott.
What's more, the American Jewish Committee in New York, the State Department in Washington, the Foreign Office in London, and the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem were all becoming aware that protest and boycott were the only effective restraints on Nazi policy.
For example, on April 5, Berl Locker of the Zionist Organization Executive Committee in London readily acknowledged the power of the protest in a letter to a colleague: "It is clear that these [British protest] actions, added to the general anti-Nazi attitude of the press . . . have surely caused the [April First] anti-Jewish boycott to be limited to a single day." Despite this awareness, Locker admitted in the same letter, "My friends and I have attempted to energetically counter the so-called Greuelpropaganda [atrocity stories]. . . . We also made efforts to counteract the proclamation of an [anti-Nazi] boycott [in Britain] and we were successful, at least with the official organizations. Of course, we cannot directly influence the individual merchant. . . ."19 In the first week of April, Locker also advised the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem that for tactical reasons, Zionists in all countries should avoid participating in the struggle against Hitler. Locker feared that open criticism of Hitler would precipitate crackdowns on German Zionism and jeopardize contacts with the regime.20
Both the American State Department and the British Foreign Office were equally aware that pressure and only pressure was restraining the Reich. British and American legations around the world reported the distress the anti-Nazi protest and boycott movement was causing the German government. But while aware of press reports attributing the so-called softening of Hitler's campaign to sudden economic distress, the British and American diplomatic communities continued to preach noninterference, political reassurance to the Reich, and economic cooperation as the wisest method of reducing anti-Semitism in Germany.
In the case of Zionism, the State Department, and the Foreign Office, their hands-off policy was in pursuit of ideals. Zionists, of course, were seeking détente with an enemy to achieve Jewish nationalism. American and British diplomats were seeking an illusory peace by an ineffective strategy later to be labeled appeasement. But the American Jewish Committee's antagonism to anti-Nazi activity defied even their own definition of Jewish defense.
In early April, Committee president Cyrus Adler received an anguished letter from a friend writing from Paris. The man was ruined, living from moment to moment as a refugee. Adler's frightened friend sought to debunk the Committee's belief that German atrocities were in the least bit exaggerated. Over several neatly typed pages, the refugee listed typical disappearances, beatings, and murders: Herr Kindermann disappeared for several days until his frantic family received a letter from a Nazi commander to pick up his body. Herr Krell disappeared until one of the Nazi torture houses called with the news that he had thrown himself out a fourth-floor window. Herr Naumann, seized by Brownshirts, dragged through the streets, beaten over his entire body, and then forced to suffer as pepper was sprinkled on his wounds, died shortly thereafter of a skull fracture and blood poisoning from the pepper.21
Adler's friend beseeched the Committee to "not take the slightest notice of assurances . . . whether they come from Jewish or non-Jewish sources, from within Germany or from without. The real truth is only known to those Jews who are condemned to live in Germany under the present government, and they dare not breathe a word about what is going on, because they would pay for such information with their lives."22
In a final insistent paragraph, the refugee begged Adler, "You free Jews in free countries, demand restoration to German Jews of their civic, social and economic rights. The only practical way to attain this end is to boycott all German goods except where they come, without a doubt, from a Jewish manufacturer or producer."23 But Adler would not change his position.
Unshakable evidence about Nazi horrors arrived on April 6, when Adler and B'nai B'rith president Alfred Cohen received a cable completely invalidating the denials of German atrocities that German Jewish leaders had issued and the Committee had earlier published. But instead of making the information public to expose the truth, Adler and Cohen wired the news verbatim to Secretary of State Cordell Hull: "APPEAL OF GERMAN JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS TO AMERICAN JEWS TO CEASE PROTESTS DEFINITELY MADE UNDER INTIMIDATION STOP GOERING INVITED FOR SECOND TIME JEWISH LEADERS STOP . . . HE WAS EXTREMELY ABRUPT DEMANDED IMMEDIATE INTERVENTION THAT JEWS ABROAD DISCONTINUE HORROR LEGEND/BOYCOTT CAMPAIGN OTHERWISE GERMAN JEWS WOULD BEAR CONSEQUENCES STOP . . . JEWISH LEADERS OBLIGED OUTLINE PLAN TO GOERING TAKE UP CONTACT WITH JEWISH LEADERS ALL COUNTRIES FOR DENYING HORRORS/DISCRIMINATION/BOYCOTT."24
Adler and Cohen assured Hull that the facts would be temporarily "with-held from publication." Hull acknowledged in kind within hours: "I HAVE RECEIVED YOUR TELEGRAM . . . SHALL BE GLAD TO FIX A TIME FOR FURTHER DISCUSSION OF THE SITUATION."25
Adler and the Committee continued to deprecate publicly Jewish efforts to boycott Germany or even organize protest. Committee people would always point to the instructions of German Jewish leaders to stop all protests and boycotts and not believe the exaggerated stories of Nazi brutality. Yet Adler and his colleagues knew those German Jewish admonitions to be false, spoken under the truncheon, and, in fact, no more than tools of Nazi propaganda.
At first, the Committee was partly successful in muzzling Jewish protest. For example, on April 2, while many were still trying to determine the truth about German atrocities, the Joint Distribution Committee held a relief conference. The Joint traditionally avoided political controversy to protect its internationally recognized status as a neutral relief agency, analogous to the Red Cross. Officiating at this April 2 meeting were Committee leaders Cyrus Adler and Joseph Proskauer. Quickly, the Joint's position at the conference was seen not as neutral, but committed against anti-Hitler activism. The rostrum speakers openly repudiated efforts by Jewish organizations to boycott German imports. Finally, Rabbi Jacob Sunderling from Hamburg rose to recite the truth about Nazi tortures in Germany. Proskauer and another gentleman cut short the rabbi's remarks, arguing that such speeches had no place in a relief conference. The crowd objected loudly. One person shouted, "We don't want to hide anything. Let him go on!" Rabbi Sunderling tried to make himself heard, his eyes welling with tears as his words were being ruled out of order. Finally, since Rabbi Sunderling would not be muffled and the audience demanded he be heard, the chairman summarily adjourned the meeting. But the audience would not leave, so Proskauer stepped to the platform to emphasize the point: The meeting was over. Rabbi Sunderling would not be heard.26
On April 6, Adler wrote to a leader of the Jewish War Veterans accusing the JWV of having "furnished a pretext for the German [anti-Jewish] boycott." A copy of Adler's letter reached J. George Fredman, commander in chief of the JWV and head of its boycott committee. Fredman bluntly answered Adler: Our action "needs no apology. . . . Our organization was the only one which started right, kept straight and is still right on the situation. . . . Jewry should be united in this movement—it is the only weapon which will bring the German people to their senses." Adler, in an April 19 reply, lectured back, "I wish to reiterate and even strengthen the statements I made heretofore. The American Jewish Committee, in objecting to boycotts, demonstrations, parades, etc. was acting in accordance with the wishes of leading Jews in Germany as directly conveyed to them over the long distance phone from Paris where they were entirely free to talk. . . . I cannot use language sufficiently strong to indicate my hope that you will discontinue the form of agitation which you started."27
Soon the Committee's reluctance was no longer seen by the great masses of American Jews as wisdom and behind-the-scenes tactics. Instead, the Committee—together with B'nai B'rith—was viewed merely as meek and silent; or worse, a saboteur of the anti-Nazi movement. So although the Committee and B'nai B'rith retained some element of "establishment" recognition and access, the American people opposed to Hitler—Jewish or not—rejected them.
The rejection soon became public. In conjunction with an early-May protest action, an editorial in the leading Yiddish daily, Der Tog, bitterly attacked the Committee and B'nai B'rith for their "policy of fear and silence." In a stunning rebuke, the editorial asked, "What do Messrs. Adler and Cohen propose? . . . Silence and nothing else! . . . [Our] people are determined to fight for their very life. . . . The voice of the masses will be heard."28
Their voices were indeed heard, not only in America, but in Nazi Germany.