The Transfer Agreement (48 page)

The events of July
1933
represented more than a series ofreversals in the evolution of the Jewish response to Hitler. They represented a reprieve for the Third Reich, a letup in the anti-German offensive. This reprieve could not have come at a more decisive moment.

T
HE
THIRD REICH'S
campaign of social, economic, and political terrorism
against Jews was endless. During June
I
933,
the chain of anti-Jewish government decrees was itself overshadowed by numberless unofficial acts of repression. For example, Jews were no longer allowed to advertise in the phone book or rent stalls in the Frankfurt markets, and were terminated en masse from hundreds of German companies. Even companies owned by Jewish principals could no longer withstand the popular demand to fire all Jewish employees.
¹

The paper pogrom against Jewish economic participation was the dull edge of the knife. The sharp edge was a continual stream of anti-Jewish boycott actions, many of them violent. For example, in late June, scores of Jewish merchants in Essen and Muenster were picked up and delivered to concentration camps. In Frankfurt, thousands of frenzied Storm Troopers paraded through the streets chanting "Kill the Jews" and demanding that Jewish shops be closed.
²

These acts of terror were widely publicized throughout the world. In fact, in mid-June
The London Sunday Referee
actually published a Berlin street map locating a dozen Nazi torture houses.
³
The daily outrages in Germany only heightened the moral justification for anti-Reich action. So in spite of the Zionist hierarchy, the Deputies, and the American Jewish Committee, the grass-roots anti-Nazi boycott continued to widen. In simple terms, men and women all over the world of all religious and political beliefs were repulsed by the very thought of conducting business as usual with Nazi Germany.

The crippling effects of international retaliation were only magnified by domestic business disruption caused by the disintegration of the Jewish economic sector, and the pillaging of non-Jewish German companies by NSDAP cells. The battering from without and the deterioration from within weakened Germany during late June to a state of near collapse, and the hairline cracks were beginning to show.

The greatest pressure came from those without jobs. Chain-reaction unemployment triggered revolutionary chaos as the jobless began redefining their loyalties. Nazi splinter groups became rampant. Many such groups consolidated their popularity with time-buying employment tricks. For example, local Nazi groups began forcing factory owners to rehire men let go because business was down. Companies refusing to do so were subject to a thorough financial review. Those with any cash reserves were obligated to rehire the men until those reserves were totally depleted. In Upper Silesia, managers of closed coal mines were arrested; the mines were then reopened by a Nazi kommissar determined to keep them operating until the very last moment. Elsewhere throughout Germany, bankrupt Jewish storeowners were threatened with a charge of "economic sabotage" unless they reopened. Once again, the intent was to keep the employees working beyond the moment of economic infeasibility and right up to the instant of economic exhaustion.
⁴

Such employment tricks did buy the Third Reich a little more time. But in many ways the time was not bought in the name of Adolf Hitler as much as in the name of dissident Nazi splinter groups unhappy about rampaging unemployment. To survive, these dissident groups needed to guarantee their adherents—for just a little while longer—what every political machine needs to guarantee its followers: jobs.

To head off political insurrection, Hitler set in motion a series of party absorptions that digested allied right-wing parties, such as the Center party and the Nationalist party. But the real threat was not vestigial parties, it was Nazi splinter groups, which in their fanatic frustration were about to stage a second coup, this one more violent than the first.
⁵
Goebbels, a chief fomenter of this second wave, did not fail to egg on his supporters. In a speech in Hamburg on June
24,
he declared, "The revolution is not yet finished. Worse events are still in store."
⁶

In June
1933,
Hitler named businessman Kurt Schmitt to be Economics Minister. In Schmitt's view, saving Germany's economy stipulated a return to normalcy, a drastic reduction in anti-Jewish provocations, and an end to interference by kommissars. Hitler approved of Schmitt's approach, but when Schmitt tried to impose his restrictions, Nazi fanatics refused. On June
30,
the four highest-ranking NSDAP subordinates in the Economics Ministry began rallying Nazi commercial organizations to oppose Schmitt's appointment. They favored Dr. Otto Wagener, Reich Kommissar for Business and Industry, a longtime party economic leader, chief of the kommissars, and a man of immense power due to his control over thousands of private-sector jobs.
⁷