Just a week after the Enabling Act made Hitler dictator of Germany, a national boycott

of Jewish shops and department stores was organized by Nazis under the direction of
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
The boycott was claimed to be in reaction to unflattering newspaper stories appearing
in Britain and America concerning Hitler's new regime. The Nazis assumed most
journalists were either Jewish or sympathetic to Jews and thus they labeled the bad
publicity as "atrocity propaganda" spread by "international Jewry."
The boycott began at 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 1st, 1933, and lasted only a day. Nazi
Brownshirts, the SA storm troopers, stood at entrances to Jewish shops, department
stores, professional offices and various places of business. They held poster signs
saying: "Germans, defend yourselves against the Jewish atrocity propaganda, buy
only at German shops!"
Most Germans ignored them. They were more interested in a bargain or in getting
their Saturday shopping chores out of the way. And since it was Saturday, the Jewish
Sabbath, most of the smaller neighborhood shops owned by observant Jews were
already closed.
In addition to the SA activities, Propaganda Minister Goebbels appeared before
several thousand persons gathered in the Berlin Lustgarten and delivered a tirade
"against the atrocities of world Jewry." His speech was broadcast nationally on all
German radio stations. Goebbels asserted that if the Jews of Germany could not stop
their fellow Jews around the world from dishing out anti-Nazi propaganda, then the
Nazis would be forced to deal out justice to Germany's Jews.
Goebbels, the little man (five feet tall) with a big voice would become the most
influential anti-Semite in the Nazi hierarchy, second only to Hitler, in calling for
continued persecution and eventual extermination of the Jews. This propaganda
genius, who had sometimes been teased in his youth about his own Jewish looks,
would subject the people of Germany to a never-ending barrage of anti-Jewish slander
on the radio, in the cinema, and in newspapers.
"Propaganda," Goebbels once wrote, "has absolutely nothing to do with truth."
In contrast to the Nazi caricature of them, most Jews in Germany were actually quite
cosmopolitan in nature and considered themselves to be Germans by nationality and

Jews only by religion. They had lived in Germany for centuries but constituted only
about one percent of the overall population. Before Hitler, over half of the Jews in big
German cities married non-Jewish Germans.
Politically, Jews in pre-Hitler Germany occupied the entire spectrum. Some were
radicals on the left who would have welcomed a Russian-style revolution on the
streets of Munich or Berlin. Others had been staunch supporters of Kaiser Wilhelm
and the old German monarchy dating back to the days before World War I. Some of
these conservatives might have even supported the Nazis were it not for the antiSemitism so avowed by Hitler. Most Jews were middle-of-the-road politically. They
wanted the same things for themselves and their families that everyone else wanted
a good place to live, a good job, quality education for their children and so forth.
During World War I, German Jews by the tens of thousands fought bravely for the
Fatherland, earning numerous medals and serving as officers. One of the Army
officers in command of Hitler during the war was a Jewish lieutenant who
recommended young Corporal Hitler for the Iron Cross 1st Class, a rarity for a
common foot soldier. To his dying day, Hitler wore that Iron Cross, passing on all
other Nazi decorations and paraphernalia with the exception of his gold Party
membership pin.
However, for the new dictator, Adolf Hitler, no amount of patriotism or love of
country by the Jews could overcome the very fact that they were Jews, and thus in
Hitler's mind, the "eternal enemies" of the German Volk (racial community).
The boycott of Jewish stores in April 1933 marked the beginning of a downward
spiral for Jews that would eventually end in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The
boycott was followed by a series of laws and decrees which robbed the Jews of one
right after another. There would be, in the twelve years of Hitler's Reich, over 400
laws and decrees targeting Jews alone.
Six days after the boycott, "The Law of the Restoration of the Civil Service" was
introduced which made "Aryanism" a necessary requirement to hold a civil service
position. All Jews holding such positions were dismissed or forced into early
retirement. On April 22nd, Jews were prohibited from serving as patent lawyers and
from serving as doctors in State-run insurance institutions. On April 25th, a law
against the overcrowding of German schools limited the number of Jewish children

allowed to enroll in public schools. On June 2nd, Jewish dentists and dental
technicians were prohibited from working with State-run insurance institutions. On
May 6th, the Civil Service Law was amended to close loopholes in order to keep out
honorary university professors, lecturers and notaries. On September 28th, all nonAryans and their spouses were prohibited from government employment. On
September 29th, Jews were banned from all cultural and entertainment activities
including literature, art, film and theater. In early October, Jews were prohibited from
being journalists and all German newspapers were either shut down or placed under
Nazi control.
In better times, the creative spark of the Jewish community in Germany had helped
propel the country to unprecedented heights of scientific achievement, academic
scholarship and artistic vision. Under Hitler, the vitality of the once-thriving Jewish
academic and artistic communities in Berlin, Frankfurt and other cities was quickly
snuffed out via endless rules, regulations, restrictions, prohibitions, and outright bans.
The time was coming when a Jew would be forbidden even to share a park bench with
a non-Jew, let alone marry one.
Seemingly within days of Hitler's coming to power in 1933, Germany began a rapid
evolution into a police state where individual freedoms were permanently lost for
everyone. Jews and Germans alike were living under what would become one of the
most violent and repressive regimes ever known. The principle terror mechanism
would be a new secret organization, whose name to this day can still send a shudder
through anyone who remembers Hitler's Germany the Gestapo.