Summary
The 1933 campaign to boycott German exports in response to Nazi anti-Semitism, announced by New York’s Jewish War Veterans on 19 March 1933, which in Lenni Brenner’s account was hampered by timid leadership, opposed by the main Jewish establishment organisations, and broken in Palestine by the World Zionist Organization’s Ha’avara (Transfer Agreement) agreement with Nazi Germany (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, PDF p.44-46).
Details
- Brenner opens the chapter by noting the regime’s vulnerability: Germany depended on the world market, Jews were powerful in two of its biggest markets, Eastern Europe and America, and the regime’s own economic experts feared the New Order might not survive resolute opposition abroad (PDF p.44-45).
- The Jewish War Veterans announced the boycott on 19 March 1933 and organised a protest parade on 23 March, but spurned the Communists in New York’s Jewish community, whose unity Brenner calls elementary to any boycott’s success (PDF p.45).
- Samuel Untermyer’s Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League would not picket because picketing was illegal; Stephen Wise at first opposed a boycott, and the American Jewish Congress called one only in August 1933, in Wise’s absence, while timidly opposing picketing until its youth group picketed a department-store chain in autumn 1934 (PDF p.45).
- The American Jewish Committee, the B’nai B’rith and the Board of Deputies of British Jews refused to back the boycott, confining themselves to charity; Agudas Yisrael opposed it on religious grounds; trade union leaders pledged opposition but did not mobilise their ranks (PDF p.46).
- The most important active opponent, in Brenner’s account, was the WZO, which “not only bought German wares; it sold them, and even sought out new customers for Hitler and his industrialist backers” through the Ha’avara (Transfer Agreement) (PDF p.46).
- At the August 1933 Prague Congress, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s boycott resolution was defeated 240 to 48 (PDF p.49-50).
- German officials treated breaking the boycott in Palestine as the way to break it on the main front, the United States: Consul Heinrich Wolff in June 1933, and Gestapo agent Fritz Reichert’s report that the London Boycott Conference “was torpedoed from Tel Aviv” (PDF p.48).
Related pages
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, Ha’avara (Transfer Agreement), World Zionist Organization, Stephen Wise, Vladimir Jabotinsky