Final Sale in Berlin: The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945 [1 ed.] 9781782388135, 9781782388128

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Final Sale in Berlin

Final Sale in Berlin : The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest

Copyright © 2015. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Final Sale in Berlin : The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest

Final Sale in Berlin The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930–1945

 Christoph Kreutzmüller Translated by

Copyright © 2015. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Jane Paulick and Jefferson Chase

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Final Sale in Berlin : The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest

First published in 2015 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com English-language edition ©2015, 2017 Berghahn Books First paperback edition published in 2017 German-language edition ©2012, 2013 Metropol Verlag Ausverkauf. Die Vernichtung der jüdischen Gewerbetätigkeit in Berlin 1930–1945 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kreutzmüller, Christoph, author.   [Ausverkauf. English]   Final sale in Berlin : the destruction of Jewish commercial activity, 1930-1945 / Christoph Kreutzmüller ; translated by Jane Paulick and Jefferson Chase.    pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-78238-812-8 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78533-512-9 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-78238-813-5 (ebook)  1. Anti-Jewish boycotts—Germany—Berlin—History—20th century. 2. Antisemitism—Germany--Berlin. 3. Jews—Persecutions—Germany—Berlin. I. Title.  DS134.255.K7213 2015  338.7089’924043155—dc23 2015003137 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78238-812-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78533-512-9 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-78238-813-5 (ebook)

Final Sale in Berlin : The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest

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This book is dedicated to the memory of Lea Fränkel (1893–?) and Emil Julius Gumbel (1891–1966).

Final Sale in Berlin : The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest

Copyright © 2015. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Final Sale in Berlin : The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest

Contents

List of Tables and Illustrations

ix

Foreword to the Paperback Edition

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction

1

Part I.  Context Chapter 1. Berlin

33

Chapter 2. Economy

48

Chapter 3. Jewish Commercial Activity

74

Part II.  Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

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Chapter 4. Violent Persecution

97

Chapter 5. Bureaucratic Persecution

151

Chapter 6. Voyeurs and Profiteers

189

Chapter 7. The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity

211

Part III.  Asserting Jewish Commercial Activity Chapter 8. Institutional Counter-Strategies

227

Chapter 9. Individual Counter-Strategies

259

Chapter 10. Emigration

287

Chapter 11. Case Studies

300

Part IV.  Deportation

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Contents

319

Final Sale

334

Bibliography

341

Index

365

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Chapter 12. The Deportation of Jewish Businesspeople

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List of Tables and Illustrations

Table 3.1. Jewish companies according to branch (1933)

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Table 7.1. Decline in Jewish businesses from 1933 to 1938 according to sector

81 214

Figure 3.1. Distribution of Jewish businesses in Berlin. Database of Jewish Businesses in Berlin.

87

Figure 4.1. Slightly retouched original of a press picture taken by an unknown photographer on 1 April 1933. The placards read: “Germans, defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!” Collection Wolfgang Haney, Berlin.

106

Figure 4.2. Picture by Fritz Steppuhn; Berlin, 31 March 1933. From the author’s private archive.

109

Figure 4.3. Picture of Hans Jeschke, Berlin, 16 July 1935. Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, E 39, 1183/1. On the back of the photograph, sent to Der Stürmer, Jeschke had written that it showed the customers leaving the Balsams ice cream parlor, because of his and his fellow picketer’s verbal threats.

115

Figure 4.4. Picture by an unknown photographer of the Lasker & Rynarzewski fabric shop in Berlin, 1937, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, E 39, Nr. 2246/9.

120

Figure 4.5. Photograph by the local Nazi group “Mühlendamm,” Berlin, 1938. Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, E39, Nr. 2246/10.

123

Figure 4.6. Photo of Leo Schmuckler’s tobacco store on 10 or 11 November 1938 by an unknown photographer. bpk/Bayerische Staatsbibliothek/Heinrich Hoffmann, Bild-Nr. 50049865.

131

Figure 4.7. Cover of the camouflage brochure on the November pogrom. Joseph Wulf library, House of the Wannsee Conference, Berlin.

134

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List of Tables and Illustrations

Figure 6.1. New York Times photo, Berlin, 1 April 1933. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Photo Archive, Photo Nr. 78589.

191

Figure 6.2. Associated Press photo, Berlin, 10 November 1938. Wiener Library, London.

194

Figure 7.1. Destruction of Jewish commercial activity in Berlin. Possession transfers and liquidations in 1938

215

Figure 7.2. Destruction of Jewish commercial activity in Berlin. Possession transfers and liquidations in 1939

215

Figure 7.3. Destruction of Jewish commercial activity in Berlin. Possession transfers and liquidations from 1933 to 1945.

216

Figure 8.1. Photo by an unknown photographer of the staff of the Wirtschaftshilfe, Berlin, undated (1936–1937). Archive of the Jewish Museum Berlin, 2000/321/0.

232

Figure 9.1. Photo by Klaus Mirbach of the Groß-Berliner Möbel-Vertrieb Cohn, Berlin, 1938. Stiftung Neue Synagogue Berlin—Centrum Judaicum, 7.82,10.

266

Figure 11.1. Picture taken by an unknown photographer, Berlin 1933. bpk Picture No. 30013837.

305

Figure 12.1. Letter from Siegfried Engel to the District Court, 26 August 1941. District Court, Berlin-Charlottenburg, HR A 90, 99908, 1941 (Siegfried Engel).

322

Figure 12.2. Felix Schleier’s inventory, 1 September 1942. Brandenburg Main State Archive, Rep 36 A II, 33905.

327

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Foreword to the Paperback Edition

Publishing books is sometimes like throwing a message in a bottle into the sea. You neither know who might find and decipher the message, nor what the response of the finder is going to be. In March 2017, Chanan Naveh, a grandson of Elias Feuerstein contacted me to obtain more information on the fate of his family. I had mentioned Feuerstein was beaten to death by a—drunken—mob in the November pogrom (262–263). His fate had touched me—and served as an example of the (still unknown) number of victims of the frightening outburst of racist mass violence on 10 November 1938. This is why Bjoern Weigel and I dedicated a little study on photographs of the “crystal night” to his memory. And now I got to know (albeit through the Internet) a family member. In the course of our email exchange the grandson send me four pictures of his family—including Elias Feuerstein, finally adding a face to a fate. I am very grateful to him—and to many others who freely shared their family’s history, documents, and photos with me! Alas, it is not possible to add the newly-found photos to this book. Neither it is possible and, of course, would be a never-ending process, to add all the studies that have been published on the topic of the destruction of the commercial activity of Jews in Nazi Germany since the first English edition of this book. While a comprehensive, modern analysis of the process is still missing, there are quite a few that studies that deserve a mention.1 Perhaps the most important is Ingo Loose’s contribution on the changing role of the Reich Ministry in the destruction of Jewish commercial activity within the new history of the Reich Economics Ministry.2 Claudia Flümann offers new insights into both the dispossession and restitution in the important commercial centre of Krefeld,3 while Eva Balz, who was connected to the project that lead to this book from its very beginning, will publish her study on the early restitution in West Berlin next year.4

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Notes

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1. Christoph Kreutzmüller, Vernichtung der jüdischen Gewerbetätigkeit im Nationalsozialismus. Abläufe, Blickwinkel und Begrifflichkeiten, Version: 1.0, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 04.11.2016, http://docupedia.de/zg/Kreutzmueller_ vernichtung_der_juedischen_Gewerbetaetigkeit_v1_de_2016. Forthcoming is: Zatlin, Jonathan, and Christoph Kreutzmüller (eds.), Dipossession: Robbing German Jewry, 1933–1953, forthcoming: Michigan, 2018. Also forthcoming is: Idem, A Portable Market Place? Newspaper Advertisments of Jewish Owned Businesses, Jerusalem, 2017. 2. Ingo Loose, “Das Reichswirtschaftsministerium und die nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung“ in Albrecht Ritschl (ed.), Das Reichswirtschaftsministerium in der NS-Zeit. Wirtschaftsordnung und Verbrechenskomplex, Berlin/Boston, 2016, 357–532. Cf. Ludolf Herbst: “Gab es ein nationalsozialistisches Wirtschaftssystem?“, in: Albrecht Ritschl (ed.), Das Reichswirtschaftsministerium in der NS-Zeit. Wirtschaftsordnung und Verbrechenskomplex, Berlin/Boston, 2016, 611–644. 3. Claudia Flümann, ”. . . doch nicht bei uns in Krefeld!“ Arisierung, Enteignung, Wiedergutmachung in der Samt- und Seidenstadt 1933 bis 1963, Essen 2015. 4. Eva Balz, Eigentumspolitik im Kalten Krieg. Die Rückerstattung jüdischer Vermögen in West-Berlin. Forthcoming: Berlin, 2018.

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Acknowledgments

The idea of researching and contrasting the destruction of Jewish business in the three largest communities of the German Reich—Berlin, Breslau, and Frankfurt—was first mooted by Ludolf Herbst. The Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture generously agreed to fund the Berlin section of the project, the seed out of which this book grew, and also stepped into the breach when we failed to secure follow-up funding. The project was also partly financed by the city of Berlin, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin / Centrum Judaicum, as well as the vice president for academic and international affairs at Berlin’s Humboldt University. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International. I owe a debt of gratitude to the bodies that funded the project. Special thanks go to Hermann Simon, director of the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin, who personally fought for the project on multiple occasions, especially when Ludolf Herbst fell ill. I would also like to thank Michael Wildt, who in 2009 took over the chair for Twentieth Century German History at Humboldt University. He took a great interest in my work and helped me see the project through to its end. I would like to extend my warmest thanks to my excellent team, who graciously worked their way through the dry data and contributed key insights: Eva Balz, Gerd Herzog, Stefan Hördler, Jonas Kreienbaum, Henning Medert, Moritz Niemöller, Anne Paltian, Eva Reimer, Jan Schleusener, Elisabeth Weber, Bjoern Weigel, and Peter Woitkowski, who took charge of the final edit of the Database of Jewish Businesses in Berlin that is the backbone of the project and was created by Nicolai Zimmermann and programmed by Thomas Meyer. Several members of the team were also involved in the 2008 exhibition “Final Sale: The End of Jewish Owned Businesses in Nazi Berlin,” which served as a progress report on the project. It is largely thanks to the efforts of Kaspar Nürnberg and Christine Fischer-Defoy from the Aktives Museum Fascism and Resistance, our partner in the project, that the exhibition has since been shown among others at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, in Boston University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. – xiii –

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Acknowledgments

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Any history study inevitably begins in the archives. I would therefore like to thank the staff at the many archives I visited while researching this book. A special mention goes to Anne Rothschenk and Bianca WelzingBräutigam at the Berlin State Archive (Landesarchiv Berlin), as well as Dorothea Hauser from the Warburg Archive Foundation in Hamburg. The project also drew on many files that had not been archived. Judge Ralf Wohlfeil, Hans Pfau, and Ingo Püschel not only granted my team access to the files of the commercial register in the Charlottenburg District Court for a period of many months but also introduced us to previously unseen material, stored in a former prison. The staff at the library of the Federal Archive in Berlin also merit a mention. They accommodated our needs for the approximately eighteen months it took us to gather the empirical information the project is based on. Without Gaby Oelrichs, Ewa Runge, and Monika Sommerer from the Joseph-Wulf-Mediothek in the House of the Wannsee Conference, many publications would never have come to my attention. It is a real pleasure to work in this wonderful library! For their feedback and support I would like to thank Torsten van Deel, Wolf Gruner, Peter Heuss, the late Dietrich Jacob, Robert Kain, Dan Michman, Benno Nietzel, Ingo Loose, Reinhard Rürup, Susanne Willems, Jonathan Zatlin, and my father, Werner Kreutzmüller. Rebecca Even-Zohar, Jerry Kay, the Schimek Family, and many other descendants of Jewish businesspeople gave me valuable information and many useful insights. I hope that my work justifies their confidence in me. Last but not least, I would like to thank Charlotte, Damian, Jimmy, and Josephine for keeping a loving eye on me.

– xiv –

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Introduction

 What is this Book About?

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Perspectives On 3 January 1941, 86-year-old Max Kulies left his apartment in the southern Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg and set off for the District Court in Wedding in the north. There he asked for the wholesale feather business he had run for sixty-six years to be removed from the commercial register.1 For almost four years Kulies had been engaged in a dispute with officials at the Industrie und Handelskammer (IHK; Chamber of Industry and Commerce) and the District Court, battling the authorities’ attempts to dissolve his business—his life’s work.2 The tenacity of this Jewish businessman and the success he had—albeit temporary—serve as a first key point of reference in this book. Research all too often depicts Jewish businesspeople in Nazi Germany solely as passive victims, seen only in the light of the predictable, violent end to their commercial activities. It is time to correct this shortsightedness, which historian Frank Bajohr criticized over ten years ago, and to ask how Kulies managed to stave off the liquidation of his business for so long.3 Was this elderly gentleman an exception, or were there other businesspeople in other trades who managed to hold on to their enterprises or firms even after the “Night of Broken Glass” in 1938, the three-day-long pogrom that historians generally agree marked the end of Jewish commercial activity? What strategies did these people pursue? Did they demonstrate solidarity toward one another? Did such a thing as a Jewish economic sector develop in Berlin after 1933? If so, which institutions supported it? To answer these questions, the structure of Jewish business activity in Berlin around 1933 needs to be considered. To return once again to Kulies, it is worth exploring how many Jewish feather wholesalers there were in Berlin in 1933. In what other economic –1–

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Introduction

sectors, streets, and districts were Jewish owned businesses represented? Did the structure and type of Jewish commercial activity in the capital of the German Reich differ from that of other large Jewish communities on the one hand and what role did Jewish entrepreneurs play in Berlin’s economy on the other? In our present-day modern society based on the division of labor, businesses are an organized form of human coexistence. Exercising a trade is a way to make a living and to acquire property that has become a central reference point in our legal thinking and sense of justice. In this respect, business cannot be regarded in isolation from society’s basic framework. This brings us to the second methodological approach taken in this book. Before we can begin to analyze Jewish owned businesses, we first need to reconstruct the relevant socioeconomic framework data. This involves briefly outlining the context—i.e., political and economic developments in Berlin at the time. The process of deliberate destruction of Jewish commercial activity that fully began in 1933 “represents the most radical and as such the most ‘successful’ change in the direction of the economy,” states the historian Ludolf Herbst.4 This analysis places the processes that are the focus of this book in a broader context and indicates that, in this case, “success” is an exceptionally complex category.5 What were the goals of this radical destructive process? Who were the perpetrators? How violent was it? What role did administrative measures play in the destruction of Jewish commercial activity in Berlin? How did non-Jewish customers, colleagues, and the general public react to the persecution of Jews? Did they try to benefit from it, did they demonstrate solidarity, or did they simply sit tight? How many Jewish owned businesses were openly forced into liquidation; how many of them were taken over by non-Jews, and when did this happen? This book sets out to contribute to research on the destruction of Jewish business in Germany by answering these questions. In the wake of Bajohr’s pioneering study “Aryanization in Hamburg,” debates in Switzerland about old bank accounts and the extent of compensation and restitution of Jewish property, and studies on various major banks and large undertakings, a considerable amount of research on this subject has appeared in recent years.6 Even though the process was first summarized in 2008 by Martin Dean,7 our picture is far from being complete. Hence, the goal of the book is to shed light on unanswered questions by taking a microhistorical approach to deepen understanding of the destruction of Jewish commercial activity in Nazi Germany. Berlin promises to be an especially interesting case study, not only because of the size of the local Jewish population in 1933, but also because it was in the Reich’s capital that, politically speaking, center and periphery overlapped.

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Introduction

If, in addition, in the following pages a contribution can be made toward bridging the division between economic and political history—a division also to be found in research into National Socialism—we must never lose sight of the specific fates of Jewish businesspeople. It is the human catastrophes rather than statistics that are pivotal to our understanding of the process of the persecution and murder of the Jews in Europe, 8 as Saul Friedländer showed in his incisive study. For Max Kulies, being forced to give up his business was, as he himself wrote, much more than an economic sacrifice. It was a “tragedy.”9 Businesses were not only an integral part of family tradition; those running them saw themselves as “ehrbare Kaufleute,” reputable businesspeople, a term that implies a code of conduct and determined their perception of themselves. For many good will was more than a figure. A good reputation was priceless, and to see it destroyed was an immeasurable loss. Taking this sufficiently into account is the third perspective of this book. This study focuses on small- and medium-sized businesses for three reasons. Firstly, these businesses made up the major share and backbone of Jewish commercial activity. Secondly, small- and medium-sized businesses were managed by a limited number of proprietors or partners. Decision making did not have to take place in committee, which allowed companies to react directly and immediately to changing circumstances. Thirdly, small- and medium-sized businesses were part of their environment in a way that large companies were not. This is best illustrated by the fact that the destruction of the business of larger Jewish companies, inasmuch as this was possible, was supervised by central bodies, the Reich ministries. An analysis of the fate of small- and medium-sized companies is therefore more likely to illustrate everyday socioeconomic patterns of coexistence as well as the daily experience of persecution and self assertion. In contrast to a study of large enterprises, this allows for a more differentiated depiction of both processes. But to focus on small- and medium-sized companies does not mean that large undertakings should be ignored, since they were vital to the overall significance of Jewish business in the economic development of the German capital. It is common knowledge that the persecution of Jews in Germany began long before 1933. The mid-1920s saw a marked rise in the number of attacks on businesses believed to be Jewish, in particular in smaller cities and the provinces.10 The extent to which this early anti-Semitism was felt in Berlin, however, still needs to be researched.11 For practical reasons, the core period I have examined begins in 1930, shortly before the Great Depression set in with full force, and ends in 1945, with only a brief look at the early postwar years and the launch of the restitution process, which

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Introduction

remains ongoing in Berlin and cannot therefore be evaluated yet. The history in particular of the early restitution that took place in Berlin, where the issue is especially interesting in the light of the division of the city, is currently the subject of a research project.12 The goal of my endeavours was not just to analyze a period of history, but also to document it. With few exceptions, the Jewish businesses that once existed in Berlin are forgotten and all traces of them have vanished from the cityscape. Yet the families involved have a right and German society the responsibility to know exactly where they were and what happened to them. This is why the basic data (the name of the company, its legal form, address, partners, managing director, sector, date of its entry in the commercial register and of its removal) relating to 8019 businesses regarded as Jewish have collected in the Database of Jewish Businesses in Berlin. In order to allow the general public access to this database, which also includes raw data on a further 44,000 businesses as well as sources and cross-references, it was made available to archive of the New Synagogue Berlin—Centrum Judaicum Foundation and the Berlin State Archive in 2012. Ahead of the English edition of this book, the database was also given to Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, and the Wiener Library, London. An excerpt of the database can also be viewed at http://www2.hu-berlin.de/djgb.

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Categories The focus of this book is on small- and medium-sized Jewish owned businesses. How can we define those entities? The Handelsgesetzbuch (HGB; German Commercial Code) defines commercial activity as any continuing activity that is exercised for profit. Commercial activities take place at two levels, which can to be distinguished semantically. The first is that of a business, covering either a shop, an office, or manufacturing premises. The second is that of a firm, meaning an undertaking’s bureaucratic structure, consisting of its name and legal status. Defining small- and medium-sized businesses is more complex. The tricky sociological category “Mittelstand” (mid-tier) has been deliberately avoided. Even at the time, the question of where to draw the line between large- and medium-sized companies was a controversial one. In general, the threshold was one thousand employees. However, given the dearth of information relating to the number of employees in many businesses in Berlin and the sheer number of companies to be taken into consideration, differentiation in simple but clear terms is required, so large undertakings are defined as all public limited companies and businesses with a partner or a managing director registered in the Reichshandbuch der deutschen Gesellschaft, the German “Who’s Who.”13 –4–

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Introduction

While the difficulty regarding large companies is one of definition, the problem with smaller ones is a lack of source material. The structure of the surviving files, forced me to concentrate on businesses listed in the commercial register. However, business persons were only required to list their companies if they were substantial enough to necessitate commercial procedures. These were outlined in the HGB as double-entry bookkeeping, a requirement of regular auditing and the filing of copies of all outgoing communications. When defining a business, the rule of thumb employed in the 1930s by officials at the Berlin IHK was whether the company’s investment or working capital amounted to at least 4000 reichsmarks and its annual profits at least 30,000 reichsmarks.14 This meant that 80 percent of all the companies were simply too small to leave traces in the commercial register. Quite apart from missing data, small businesses often fell through the administrative cracks. Many businesses were never on record because authorities were unaware of them or because their owners either did not want to register their business for reasons relating to tax or criminal liability or persecution, or they simply never got around to it. In Pünktchen und Anton, Erich Kästner’s wonderful children’s novel published in 1931, the two young protagonists sell matches and shoelaces in the evening on the Weidendamm Bridge in Berlin and, as minors, would undoubtedly not have been able to apply for a trade license. Against that background, it is impossible to examine systematically all the small businesses operating in Berlin at the time. Nevertheless, wherever possible, I took them into account. However difficult it is to distinguish between small- and medium-sized businesses, it is even harder to define “Jewish.”15 Businesses were often said to be Jewish if one of the owners or top managers was identified as Jewish. This is illustrated particularly clearly by the case of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. He was the great-grandson of the German-Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, but his father’s family had been Protestant for more than two generations.16 This did not stop anti-Semites, such as the publishers of Sigilla Veri. Lexicon der Juden—Genossen und Gegner aller Zeiten und Zonen, an anti-Semitic encyclopedia of Jews, Jewish organizations, and practices, from denouncing MendelssohnBartholdy as Jewish.17 The renowned private bank Mendelssohn & Co., of which he was a partner, was also generally seen as a Jewish bank.18 As a member of its managerial board, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, together with a member of the Warburg banking family from Hamburg, had taken over the chairmanship of the supervisory board of Deutsche Waren-Treuhand Gesellschaft AG in 1920.19 Against the backdrop of increasing persecution, a meeting was held on 1 May 1933 to discuss the possible resignation of the supervisory board. The suggestion was rejected by Mendelssohn–5–

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Introduction

Bartholdy on the grounds that he saw himself “as Aryan,” as Max Warburg noted with some surprise.20 But while von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy explicitly defined himself as non-Jewish, he was stigmatized by his persecutors as Jewish and consequently lost many of the positions he held on various supervisory boards before he died in May 1935. “One cannot be called Mendelssohn and not be Jewish,” sighed Eleonora von Mendelssohn after emigrating to New York.21 This attribution made about anyone named Mendelssohn—that exists to this day22—applied to many other surnames too. In 1929 the publishers of the first edition of the Jüdische Adressbuch (Berlin Jewish Directory) wrote in the preface that “the present-day anti-Jewish movement is clearly inclined … to designate anyone with a Jewish-sounding name as Jewish.”23 Similar assumptions were also made about certain first names, and by no means only biblical ones. Even names such as “Siegfried” were seen as “typically” Jewish.24 Moreover, there was a general suspicion that members of certain professions, such as banking, were necessarily Jewish.25 The appearance of a surname widely considered Jewish at this time in a company’s name could have serious repercussions. Once again, the name “Mendels(s)ohn” lends itself as an example. Of twentyfour companies listed under the name in Berlin’s commercial register in 1933, six had been stroked off by 1935, and nineteen by October 1938. By the summer of 1939, the only one that remained was Mendelssohn & Co., and even this had been in liquidation since the previous January.26 Businesses operating under a name with Jewish connotations clearly faced far greater persecution than other companies. It can therefore be assumed that market participants at the time usually had preconceptions about “Jewish businesses,” often based on hearsay and only a vague idea of what supposedly constituted a Jewish name. The latter is illustrated by an article that appeared in Das Schwarze Korps, the official newspaper of the SS, in November 1937, as a correction to a report about “the flourishing Jewish trade in Hitler postage stamps.” It referred to having mentioned the “Levys, Salomons and Guttmanns who had once again spotted a business opportunity,” and went on, “As it happens, there is indeed a postage stamp wholesaler we were not familiar with called Paul Guttmann in Hamburg … whose owner is a member of the party [the NSDAP, CK]. We were not of course referring to him in our remarks, which were general comments relating to Jewish traders.”27 The extent to which hearsay, attributions, and assumptions led to persecution and violence cannot be academically measured. But it is inherently obvious that persecution could often be based on subjective criteria and that, in retrospect, the term “Jewish” in the given context can be understood solely to mean “persecuted as Jewish.”28 –6–

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Introduction

In fact, for a considerable amount of time, the Nazi regime itself struggled to arrive at a standard definition of a “Jewish business.” For a while it relied on trial and error: the decision lay with authorities within the party or the local administration, and it was left to the businesses involved to defend themselves. Initially, in the absence of alternatives, state authorities apparently referred to the extensive definition laid out in the First Regulation to the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, introduced on 11 April 1933. Thereunder a person was deemed “non-Aryan” if at least one grandparent had been member of a Jewish congregation. Yet the First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law, introduced in November 1935, stated that “a Jew is anyone who is descended from two fully Jewish grandparents.”29 While interpretation of the term “Jewish” as applied to natural persons thus was subject to modification, a definition of “Jewish business” was only published with the introduction of the Third Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law in June 1938.30 Using the jargon of the Nazi perpetrators at the time, historians have continued to term the processes discussed here as “Aryanization,” claiming that there was “no alternative.”31 However, the term became politically charged in the mid-1990s and has been employed in research in so many different ways and to such inflationary effect that it has lost any possible analytical usefulness. Even at the time, it was controversial and loosely defined.32 In August 1937, Das Schwarze Korps asked polemically, “What does it mean to say that a company has been Aryanized? Is it Aryan or non-Aryan? According to common parlance, it is non-Aryan, because something gold-plated is not gold, something electrified is not electric, and anything that has been Aryanized is essentially Jewish but has been given an Aryan whitewash. The word ‘Aryanized’ is a typically Jewish invention and amounts to Aryan camouflage.”33 As a matter of fact, the term’s bureaucratic usage began relatively late. In the mid-1930s the term often used was “Gleichschaltung” (forcible bringing into line), which placed the process in the context of the Nazis seizure of vast state power. In 1938/39 the IHK applied the term “Aryanization” only to the sale of Jewish businesses to non-Jews, while describing the overall process of not only the sale but also the liquidation of Jewish businesses as “Entjudung,” or de-Jewification. Thus, the use of the term “Aryanization” suggests that all Jewish businesses were taken over by non-Jews. But as will be shown in chapter 7 this was by no means the case. Hence, “Aryanization” and “de-Jewification” are used only as primary source terms in this book. Instead, I employ the terminology established in a research project on the history of the Commerzbank, presented in 2004. I refer to the “destruction of the economic existence of Jews” to cover the entire process, with reference to Raul Hilberg’s pioneering –7–

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Introduction

analysis of the process of “the Destruction of the European Jews.” Interestingly, Alfred Wiener—the founder of the Wiener Library—described the process in almost identical terms in October 1936. Moreover, the “Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands,” or “Sopade” (Germany Reports of the German Social Democratic Party in Exile), shortly thereafter also used the phrase the “destruction of Jewish professional and commercial life.”34 The destruction of the economic existence of Jews than can be divided into several overlapping processes: the expropriation and confiscation of assets of Jews, the expulsion of Jewish workers from offices, businesses, and practices, and the destruction of Jewish commercial activity. The third category consisted of either the liquidation or the sale of businesses to non-Jews, which is understood here only as a transfer of possession. The reason for this is a semantic distinction reflected in case law, albeit in refined terms. According to the German Civil Code, a possessor is the person who has actual control of a thing. An owner, on the other hand, is exclusively the person to whom the thing belongs in law. Describing the process as a transfer of possession underscores the fact that the person acquiring the thing has done so against the will of the owner. The seller who has been forced to sell remains the legal owner. After all, this retention of title played a key role in restitution claims.35 “Boycott” is another term hijacked by the Nazis. In its original meaning, a boycott is a political, non violent means, by way of ostracizing or refusing to buy from persons boycotted, of forcing them to change their behavior. But since the Nazis, their accomplices, and fellow-travelers were neither non violent, nor seeking to bring about a change in the behavior of those they were boycotting but rather deliberately to destroy Jewish commercial activity, the term should only be used with caution, as a primary source term. Even the Reich-wide “boycott” of 1 April 1933 was not a boycott in the true sense, but a racist blockade—or embargo.36 It is a basic premise of this book that those whose businesses were threatened defended themselves and developed strategies to mitigate the effects of those threats and even, temporarily, to stave them off. In this case “strategy” is taken to mean deliberate efforts based on analysis of the prevailing conditions. When conditions change, strategies are modified. If the changes are too drastic, it can lead to the abandonment of the strategy. This can of course happen if the path chosen proves unsuccessful. Using the term “strategy” in this case does not therefore imply that any deliberately chosen tactic was successful or held prospects of success. I have attempted to use commercial terminology as little as possible in order to make this book more readable. However, it is essential to specify the legal forms of businesses precisely. A sole trader or one-person busi–8–

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ness, therefore, was and is a business run by a sole proprietor with unlimited liability. A general partnership (offene Handelsgesellschaft, oHG) consists of at least two partners with unlimited liability, while a limited partnership (Kommanditgesellschaft, KG) consists of both general partners with unlimited liability and partners liable up to the amount of their contribution. Nineteenth-century Germany also saw the development of the public limited corporation (Aktiengesellschaft, AG) and limited liability company (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, GmbH), as well as the rare partnership limited by shares (Kommanditgesellschaft auf Aktien, KGaA), which is a hybrid. While partners, or shareholders, in GmbHs and AGs are liable only up to the extent of their contribution, KGaAs have both simple shareholders and partners with unlimited liability.

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State of Research Although research on the destruction of Jewish commercial activity in the German Reich has progressed in leaps and bounds in recent years, there has never been a definitive study specifically focused on Berlin, despite the exceptional status of the city. Previously, research has been restricted to major Berlin businesses37 and well-known families,38 whose members have, from time to time, published their own memoirs.39 Small- and mediumsized Jewish businesses, with just a few exceptions, have long been ignored,40 although individual cases are scattered throughout various studies on the history of Jews in Berlin’s different districts.41 Not even the publication in 2007 of the collection “Arisierung” in Berlin managed to close this gap. Despite its title, it was conceived not as an exhaustive study but as a collection of case studies.42 However, given Berlin’s paramount economic significance, businesses in the city were referred to in comprehensive surveys of the destruction of Jewish commercial activity—especially in the pioneering works of Avraham Barkai and Helmut Genschel,43 as well as in recent studies on specific company histories.44 In particular, Dieter Ziegler closely examined the expropriation of certain medium-sized Jewish businesses in Berlin in the light of the role played by the Dresdner Bank.45 Subsequent to Ingo Köhler’s research, published as The Aryanization of Private Banks in the Third Reich,46 Henning Medert produced an in-depth analysis of Jewish presence in the Berlin stock exchange, also in the context of the research project this book is based on.47 As a preliminary report to our research project we presented the exhibition “Final Sale. The End of Jewish Owned Businesses in Nazi Berlin.”48 The persecution of Jews in Berlin, especially post-1938, has been researched in meticulous detail, thanks to work by Wolf Gruner, Beate Meyer, and Hermann Simon.49 Moreover, Martin Friedenberger completed –9–

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Introduction

a pioneering analysis of the expropriation of Jewish assets by financial authorities.50 Yet, as Berlin was all too often used as a mere cipher and not as a research topic, it wasn’t until 2013 that a comprehensive study of the history of Berlin during the Nazi period was published.51 A few exceptions aside, such as the cases of the art trade and real estate companies,52 the economic development of Berlin during this time frame has not yet been analyzed in depth.53 Although this study is, of course, a contribution to an economic history of Berlin, a lack of detail led to difficulties in making any statements on the specifics of the entirety of Jewish businesses compared to non-Jewish businesses.

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What is the Study Based On? A field of research this extensive inevitably relies on many sources. Of the information available, file records of medium-sized, not to mention small, Jewish businesses and personal testimony from Jewish businesspersons are the absolute exception. The Jewish Museum in Berlin has some bundles of files, but they are not complete, just small donations and legacies. The same applies to the archive of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York. Interviews with eyewitnesses, such as those stored in the Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive, have only limited evidential value. The people interviewed in the 1990s were generally the children of businesspersons with little knowledge of their parents’ firms.54 Unfortunately, few records have survived of Jewish private banks that would have shed light not only on the banking business but also on other Jewish businesses. A modest collection concerning Mendelssohn & Co. in the Berlin State Library55 and files on M. M. Warburg & Co.’s Berlin business kept by the Hamburg-based private bank in the Warburg Archive Foundation in Hamburg are exceptions. On the one hand there are structural reasons for the lack of records relating to Jewish businesses. The records of small- and medium-sized businesses are and were generally rarely retained longer then needed for tax reasons. On the other hand, given the circumstances that put an end to businesses run by Jewish entrepreneurs in Germany, the loss of company records appears inevitable. In Berlin it was common practice to refer liquidators who were legally obliged to store company books for ten years to trust companies. In January 1939 the IHK had to admit that this procedure was not feasible. However, plans to create a central archive for the records of liquidated Jewish businesses were never implemented. It must therefore be assumed that these records were destroyed.56 In fact, little of note survived even regarding businesses that passed into the hands of – 10 –

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Introduction

non-Jews. In most cases existing files were handed over to the new owners but, since files could have been used as incriminating evidence against them, they were rarely inclined to keep them. Even when new owners did take over existing files, they often ended up being destroyed in bombings along with the premises they were kept in. While only remnants of the files of Jewish businesses have survived, the archives of Berlin’s Jewish congregation are similarly “fragmentary.”57 Important insights into the processes in question from the perspective of the victims can, however, also be gained from the documents of the Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) at the Russian Federation Military Archive (RGVA), which is also partially available on film at the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, as well as the collection of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany) in the German Federal Archive. In addition, I also examined the collection of the economic expert, Cora Berliner, of the Reich Association, at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, the eyewitness accounts recorded by the Wiener Library, London, in its database “Testimonies to the Holocaust,”58 and essays submitted in a competition organized by the Harvard University.59 Clearly, the fragmentary information available needed to be supplemented by alternative sources. The starting point was the history of persecution. The destruction of Jewish commercial activity was organized in a collaborative bureaucratic process that is bound to leave traces in files. However, there is also a lack of contemporary overviews of the “Altreich,” of the sort that have been handed down as regards Austria.60 Moreover, key documents were destroyed in Berlin, including the records of the Nazi Party’s Gau economic advisers, of trade licensing offices,61 and of almost all tax offices.62 This was the result of instructions issued by the Reich Economics Ministry on 16 February 1945, which stated that files on “de-Jewification” should not be allowed to fall into “enemy hands” and should therefore be destroyed “in case disposal of the files is impossible on account of unexpected invasion by the enemy.”63 Against that backdrop, the Berlin police headquarters announced on 9 March 1945 that the files should be stored together on official premises in the district of Schöneberg.64 Shortly after, the mayor ordered the destruction of “numerous files concerning the Aryanization of Jewish businesses so as to avoid their falling into Russian hands.”65 As well as the loss of the bulk of the administrative files in question, the files of the IHK in Berlin are also missing. Its main headquarters at Dorotheenstraße 8 survived the war relatively unscathed, but only a few remnants of its files could be traced in German archives. It seems that the majority of the files disappeared after 1945 and – 11 –

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Introduction

that at least some were transported in 1945–1946 to the military archive in Tbilisi, Georgia. Due to the lack of other sources, the files of the commercial register were of crucial importance. These date back to mediaeval guild registers.66 The boom in commerce and enterprises ushered in by the industrial revolution made it necessary to standardize the register. Commercial registers were established on the basis of the General German Commercial Code, which entered into force in May 1861, in the states of the German Confederation, which would collapse just a few years later. In Prussia the registers were kept by District Courts.67 While the function of the commercial register as a public record of local businesspeople in the various districts remains unchanged to this day, its structure has altered fundamentally over the course of time. Initially, legal agents were not listed with the companies that had granted them their powers, but on a separate page of the register.68 It was only after the introduction of the HGB that the District Courts began in 1900 to link legal agents to their companies. For example, while the general banking partnership Mendelssohn & Co. and its members were originally listed in the company index under tab number 5, the company’s legal agents, Hermann Döring and Arthur Fischel, were listed separately in the index under the numbers 7303 and 7579.69 In 1900, the private bank and its legal agents were filed under the new number 1710 in section A (sole traders and partnerships).70 As it became apparent that the register was no longer up to date, the Reich Ministry of Justice ordered in September 1937 that it could be transcribed onto new pages if that increased clarity.71 On the strength of that authority, the District Court in Berlin began examining and reentering all companies in the autumn of 1937. This involved the IHK writing to companies to inform them of the content of the register and to request them to check whether “the entry on the new register sheet corresponds to the previous entry and to the company’s current legal position.”72 If the company failed to respond and the owner, shareholders, or management could not be traced, the IHK concluded that the company no longer existed and applied for its removal from the register. There was a standard procedure for this. The deletion of a company from the register would be publicized, giving owners, shareholders, and creditors three months to object. If no objection was lodged, the company was definitively removed from the commercial register once the deadline passed. In 1937 and 1938 such announcements took up considerable space in the state gazette, the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger und Preußischer Staatsanzeiger. Those businesses that were not deleted were ascribed new sheet numbers. These did not, however, constitute a new number series—the authorities continued to use the old numbering system. As of mid-August 1937, – 12 –

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when new companies in section A were given sheet numbers starting at 85570 and companies in section B were given numbers from 50170, the subsequent numbers were allocated to existing companies that had been reentered. Companies were in principle examined on the basis of the old numbering, starting from the companies with low numbers and progressing to those with high numbers. Mendelssohn & Co., for example, was allocated the number A 86750. When there was any change in the shareholder structure that had to be reported, the company was given a new number while the authorities dealt with the case, resulting in significant discrepancies between the date on which companies were founded and their number in the commercial register. In order to satisfy a legal requirement that records had to be retained for a period of up to thirty years, the authorities filed the individual records of companies removed from the register according to the year this occurred. However, entire years went missing as a result of various circumstances, such as relocation of offices. By 1940, the files on companies removed from the register between 1922 and 1926 were missing from the commercial register’s records.73 Later, the files on those removed between 1933 and 1935 were also lost. After 1945, the register court maintained that this was due to the war,74 but it is possible that the files were simply left behind and forgotten when the court moved.75 After World War II, the remaining files were kept in the District Court in Charlottenburg. Upon request, they were sent to Courts in East Berlin, where many then remained. Others were simply lost in transit through official channels.76 In the mid-1990s, the commercial register files that had meanwhile been stored in the attic of the District Court in Charlottenburg were scheduled to be disposed of, apart from files for the years 1936–1945, which were of vital importance for compensation claims. Files on companies removed in the years 1950–1952 had already been destroyed when it was decided, in the wake of various protests, to hand over all the files to the Berlin State Archive, the Landesarchiv Berlin. When this had taken place it was apparent again that certain files had been disposed of without any fixed criteria being applied—which makes scholarly assessment of this material very difficult. After this book had been written, the files stored in the District Court on companies removed from the register between 1936 and 1945 were also handed over to the Landesarchiv, where they were given new index numbers. Since 2004, the files of the Restitution Offices of Berlin have also been kept in the Berlin State Archive and are online index currently being prepared. Consisting of roughly 800,000 individual files, samples of the material revealed that only a relatively small number of the files pertained to businesses, so the files were used primarily to shed light on the fates of – 13 –

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individuals.77 The files of the main tax administration in the State Archive were of enormous significance, comprising as they did of extensive lists of Jewish businesses as well as files from the offices of the chief of police and the mayor. The files of the public prosecutor’s office contained important information concerning the fates of individuals as well as the plundering that took place during the November pogrom. The state ministries of Prussia, with the exception of the finance ministry, ceased to exist in 1934/35. However, since the trade and economics ministry in particular had been involved in the destruction of Jewish commercial activity until that time its files were also examined in the Geheime Staatsarchiv, the Secret State Archives of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. As well as ministry files, the files of the Prussian higher intermediate local authorities, kept in the Brandenburgische Landeshauptarchiv, the Brandenburg State Archive in Potsdam, were also of great importance. These include the inventory of the governor of the province and the Oberfinanzpräsident (chief finance president). The latter includes an extensive collection of reports compiled by the “foreign-exchange inspector” as part of the review of Berlin businesses. The Potsdam archives also house the files of the Assets Exploitation Office, which reported to the chief of finance. These files, compiled in the course of the deportations, are surely among the most disturbing sources of information on the destruction of Jewish economic existence. But since deportation was the final stage of this process, they shed little light on the deportees’ former commercial activity. Moreover, the Brandenburg State Archive houses the remaining inventory of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce and Industry as well, which was examined insofar as the files have been registered. Of the files kept in the Federal Archive in Berlin, the Bundesarchiv, above all those of the Reich Economics Ministry, the Reich Chancellery, the Enemy Property Administration, the Berliner Handelsgesellschaft, the Deutsche Bank, and the Reichskreditgesellschaft were examined. The files of the Nazi Party’s Reich Treasurer in addition afforded a fragmentary account of the takeover of Jewish businesses approved by Berlin’s Nazi Party economic adviser in the year 1938. The files of the German Foreign Ministry’s Political Archive in Berlin also revealed important information on the fate of many Jews with foreign citizenship in Berlin. The Historical Archive of the Commerzbank, an index of Jewish-owned businesses potentially “for sale,” compiled in the summer of 1938 by the Dresdner Bank, was also consulted. The compensation files of recent cases are still kept in the Entschädigungsamt (Berlin State Office for Citizens and Administrative Matters) and supply valuable additional information. Clearly, such administrative stocks of records are not an archive and it was therefore impossible to view all 200,000 of its files—not least because the process – 14 –

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of restitution remains ongoing and many files are out of bounds for reasons of data protection.78 In individual cases it was possible in addition to view the files of recent restitution cases in the Bundesamt für zentrale Dienst (Federal Office for Central Services and Unsettled Property Issues) in Berlin. After staff at the District Court in Charlottenburg suggested that further files might be found in one of the court’s warehouses housed in the basement of a former prison, I was also able to locate files on bankruptcies that corresponded to the commercial register files. But since these files were not indexed or in any condition that allows for systematic perusal, I was only able to examine a few samples. The same warehouse, however, also housed the Old Registration Records of Cooperatives, in which valuable register files for Berlin’s three Jewish cooperative banks could be tracked down. In the meantime bankruptcy and cooperative register files have been transferred to the Berlin State Archive, too. I evaluated not only textual but also visual material. Although photographs are used all too often simply as illustration, they are also a firstclass significant source of information, helping us to grasp context and supplying valuable perspectives. One image taken by photographer Abraham Pisarek, published in 1981 by Eike Geisel in the illustrated anthology Im Scheunenviertel, shows a stall owned by the father of the historian Avraham Barkai. Although passersby partially block the view, the photograph reveals that the stall, positioned in the entrance of Grenadierstraße 32, consisted of little more than a small kitchen table, the space available sufficing merely for a few books and some rolled palm leaves sold for the feast of tabernacles.79 Specifically, I studied the photograph collections in the picture archive of the Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage, the Centrum Judaicum, the Berlin State Archive, and the databases of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem. Since economics are an integral part of public life—however this is defined—the history of businesses can always be traced to some extent by reference to reports published at the time. In 1966 Helmut Genschel demonstrated how much can be gained from a systematic examination of the contemporary press.80 Shortly thereafter, David Schoenbaum published a social history of the Third Reich in which he suggested that the struggles of medium-sized businesses were a matter of public debate.81 Along with various economic trade publications—in particular, the Mitteilungsblatt der Industrie und Handelskammer zu Berlin and Die Deutsche Volkswirtschaft—I examined the newspapers Der Angriff, the Berliner Tageblatt, the Völkische Beobachter, Das Schwarze Korps, and, repulsed, also Der Stürmer. I also examined the Berliner Lokalanzeiger and the Frankfurter Zeitung for coverage of specific events such as the “boycott” and the November po– 15 –

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grom. The Jüdische Rundschau and the Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin also proved useful. Since, however, censorship increasingly limited the actual news content of newspaper reporting, I also studied the Pariser Tageblatt (Pariser Tageszeitung after 1936), the Washington Post, and the New York Times. It soon became apparent that the Times—which has never been used for such purposes before—was the best-informed newspaper, publishing many detailed reports and insightful commentaries, all of which help shed light on the persecution of Jews in Berlin.82

How Was the Data Collected?

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Database of Jewish Businesses in Berlin The parlous state of the files made it necessary to find a way to collate the scattered information and render it statistically manageable. The result was the Database of Jewish Businesses in Berlin, conceived as a framework for describing Jewish businesses as fully as possible. Its design is based on the premise that all Jewish businesses underwent considerable changes against the background of persecution after 1933. Sooner or later they changed their names, their legal form, their owners, shareholders, and managers, or went into liquidation. These changes can be relatively easily identified, since they were published in the Central Commercial Register Supplement (Zentral Handelsregisterbeilage, ZHRB) of the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger und Preußischer Staatsanzeiger inter alia. The importance of the Reichsanzeiger as a “first-class source” was already stressed when the “International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945” was drawn up.83 However, its importance for economic history has not yet been recognized,84 despite the fact that the Berlin Chamber of Industry and Commerce used it as a key source of information. A printed index of all the companies entered in the Berlin commercial register existed prior to this date and had been published since 1864 on an annual basis by the Registry Court officials. The sixty-seventh and final edition in the series was published amid the turmoil of 1931.85 Supplements continued to be published until December 1932 that, in conjunction with the printed directory, give a reasonably accurate picture of the status of the listed companies. Taking the printed index as a starting point, my research team and I continued to process all vital information from the Reichsanzeiger until 31 December 1938. After that we stopped filing new companies into the database, since no new Jewish companies could be added to the Berlin commercial register after the Decree on the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic Life, which came into effect on 1 January 1939. – 16 –

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For 1941 and 1942 only information on companies deleted was taken from the Reichsanzeiger. Since, in Berlin, some forty companies were entered per day on over three hundred days of the year, the major incorporated companies as well as municipal, state, Christian, and charitable undertakings were not taken into account in order to limit the amount of data. Nor were undertakings that solely administered a single house, on the ground that they were, strictly speaking, not commercial enterprises.

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Identification Compiling a record of all the changes to the Berlin commercial register inevitably also brought into focus companies defined according to the aforementioned criteria as Jewish. However, it was often impossible to tell from the central commercial register’s supplement alone which particular companies were specifically subject to persecution. Further sources were needed in order to identify those companies, such as the commercial register’s files, which proved highly useful. Accelerated persecution and the introduction of a requirement that Jewish business names included the forenames of their owners was a painful signal. From the autumn of 1938 onward, the files regularly explicitly mentioned the fact that a business or business person was regarded as Jewish. It would have nonetheless been a mistake to make register officials’ notes or the use of a compulsory forename—e.g., Israel or Sara—the sole criteria for identifying Jewish businesses. For example, if Jewish refugees in exile applied to have a company removed from the commercial register they did not, of course, have to use the compulsory forename. It was thus necessary, in the absence of conclusive proof, to find a workable compromise in order to avoid leaving out companies that were, in all probability, regarded as Jewish. I therefore also defined a company as Jewish if the commercial register file included a note on emigration and/or a compensation claim. Since, in particular, possible emigration was not always noted in the files of companies removed from the register prior to the autumn of 1938, these files were only consulted in individual cases, especially as the number of companies removed from the register in the years 1937 and 1938 was particularly high owing to the general revision of the register referred to above. Besides the commercial register’s files, information from other collections of files was systematically entered in the database whenever they contained clear evidence that specific companies were regarded as Jewish. That was the case, for instance, with the lists referred to above compiled by the Gau economic advisers, the commercial tax offices, Dresdner Bank, the collections of the foreign exchange inspection reports of the chief finance president, and the index of members of Jewish cooperative banks. – 17 –

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Introduction

The advantage of the latter was the opportunity they afforded to go beyond the definition otherwise used and to assume that these members identified with the religious community, which was increasingly showing signs of being bound together by a shared destiny. The same applies to the printed lists of members of Jewish associations and societies, primarily the membership lists of the Association of Self-Employed Craftsmen of the Jewish Faith, which were published annually from 1935 both as an independent publication and in the Berlin Jewish Community’s newspaper,86 while 1936 saw the publication of the Index of the Reich Association of Medium-Sized Jewish Businesses.87 Equally informative was the Directory of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith, which also listed the organization’s members’ professions and gave detailed information about the companies of businesspersons.88 The handbook of the Cartel of Associations of German Students of the Jewish Faith similarly listed members who were businesspersons with their position within the company.89 My research team and I also studied advertisements in Jewish newspapers, which became increasingly numerous after 1933.90 However, a standard advertisement was not enough to identify a company with any certainty as Jewish, because non-Jewish companies also took out ads in Jewish newspapers up until 1938.91 Thus businesses were only identified in the database if they explicitly indicated their Jewishness, for example, by referring to membership of a Jewish association or a Jewish congregation. In compiling the database we examined not only contemporary material but also a search list of Jewish successor organizations, created in 1954, through which information was provided on companies in respect of which restitution claims had been lodged.92 We also processed Nazi newspapers—Der Angriff and especially Der Stürmer—which shed light on which businesses the persecutors specifically targeted. Once Der Stürmer opened a Berlin office in the summer of 1935, it proceeded to compile lists of Jewish businesses and regularly disparaged them.93 In ambiguous cases, the Jewish Directory for Greater Berlin proved to be a great help. In the 1931 version it lists some 65,000 persons,94 although only the heads of households and many persons of the same name, so that it is impossible to extrapolate definitively who was a member of the Jewish community or who later suffered persecution as a Jew.95 A definitive identification was therefore only possible in cases when the private address of a businessperson listed in the Jewish Directory corresponded to the address of the business, give or take a maximum of two street numbers. Usually, however, businesspeople in the main commercial hubs of Stadtmitte and Kurfürstendamm no longer tended to live above their businesses. The result of these various factors is a certain imbalance. Nevertheless, the distortion is much less serious than it would be if every – 18 –

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Introduction

company was automatically deemed to be Jewish if just one of its potential partners or managers was listed in the Jewish Directory. Apart from that directory, the Berlin Memorial Book of Jewish Victims of National Socialism was also a useful—albeit emotionally disturbing—aid in identifying individuals and establishing their fate, as it lists the last residential addresses of deportees.96 Since research has rendered the information it contains in part out of date, I referred to the online version of the “Memorial Book of the Federal Archives for the Victims of the Persecution of Jews in Germany (1933–1945)” as well.97

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Scope of Data Collection The number of businesses examined was immense. On the basis of the central commercial register supplements alone, 82,100 entries on approximately 51,800 companies were made in the database. Some companies were listed more than once. These entries were supplemented with information from the printed index of companies listed in the commercial register, referred to in the database a total of 7521 times. Information from some 4100 commercial register files and some 3000 files of other provenance was also included in the database. The database identifies about 1788 of the roughly 4500 businesses referred to in contemporary Jewish publications and membership lists, and another 612 that were named in Nazi publications. The search list of Jewish successor organizations yielded a total of 2691 matches. Studies on topics such as Jewish life in Berlin’s districts and Uwe Westphal’s study of dressmaking in Berlin led to the identification of 1422 Jewish businesses, while Henning Medert’s research on Jewish participants in the Berlin Stock Exchange led to 826 hits. All in all, the database includes a total of 8019 Jewish businesses, 3604 of which were identified on the strength of more than one source. In some cases identification was verified by up to nine separate sources.98 The scale of identification was checked by reference to samples from commercial register files. After all essential lists and indexes had been entered into the database, files from five randomly chosen, as yet unexamined, shelves in the register on the top floor of the court in Charlottenburg from section 90 (Commercial register A, letters A–M) for year of removal 1939 were entered. It transpired that of the 207 companies in the sample, 147 were Jewish according to our criteria. Of these, 86 (i.e., 59 percent) had already been verified by other sources. At the same time, assessment of the commercial register files enabled a further 61 businesses to be identified in the sample alone. Since the inclusion of the commercial register files substantially boosted the scale of the data, it can be assumed that over 60 percent of all Jewish businesses entered in the register were covered. – 19 –

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This is confirmed by the following: the database includes 157 companies operating under the name Cohn that were liquidated or reregistered under a new proprietor. It can be assumed that, in general, these businesses had been the subject of persecution. The database identifies 105 (i.e., almost 68 percent) of those 157 businesses. With this in mind, my cautious estimate is that the database includes two-thirds of the businesses listed in the commercial register and persecuted as Jewish after 1933. One of the reasons why many businesses could not, however, be identified is that the historical documents used as reference were partly inaccurate and incomplete. This is very well illustrated by a list drawn up at Police District No 17 in Invalidenstraße on 11 November 1938, which was handed over to the Reich Association of Jews. Police officers recorded how many shop windows were destroyed during the pogrom. Since the police officers were familiar with the businesses, they did not bother to record their full names. The company J. Pellot & Co. GmbH, for example, was listed simply as Pellot & Co. Many small errors crept into the list. W. Meyer, a purveyor of gentlemen’s requisites, appeared in the list as Mayer Herrensartikel, while the leather goods shop M. Rector appears as Recktor. These errors only become apparent when the list is compared to the official Berlin Directory, which itself was not free of errors and did not necessarily list all the residents of a given street. The police lists include three stores plundered in Brunnenstraße (Brenner Ladies Clothing, Hartmann Shoes, and Samosch Lingerie), which did not appear in the Berlin Directory.99 The same applies to the index of businesses listed in the Berlin commercial register, which was over one thousand pages long. In this case, its authors themselves conceded that “it might contain inaccuracies because companies fail to inform the IHK and the register court when they move into new premises.”100

Notes 1. Declaration by Max Kulies, 3 January 1941, Charlottenburg District Court (AGC), Commercial register (HR) A 90, 38139, 1941. 2. Letter from Kulies to the court, 4 December 1937, ibid., see chapter 4. 3. Frank Bajohr, “‘Arisierung’ als gesellschaftlicher Prozeß: Verhalten, Strategien und Handlungsspielräume jüdischer Eigentümer und ‘arischer’ Erwerber,” in Irmtrud Wojak and Peter Hayes, eds., “Arisierung” im Nationalsozialismus. Volksgemeinschaft, Raub und Gedächtnis (Frankfurt and New York, 2000), 15–30. See Benno Nietzel, Christoph Kreutzmüller, and Ingo Loose, “Persecution and Strategies of Survival: Jewish Entrepreneurs in Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and Breslau 1933– 1938/42,” Yad Vashem Studies (2011), 31–70, here 31–34; Avraham Barkai, Erlebtes und Erdachtes. Erinnerungen eines unabhängigen Historikers (Göttingen, 2011), 136;

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Ludolf Herbst, “Banker in einem prekären Geschäft: Die Beteiligung der Commerzbank an der Vernichtung der jüdischen Gewerbetätigkeit,” in Herbst and Thomas Weihe, eds., Die Commerzbank und die Juden (Munich, 2004), 74–137, here 93–106; Marion Kaplan, Geschichte des jüdischen Alltags in Deutschland: Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis 1945 (Munich, 2003), 21; Christopher Kopper, “Wirtschaftliche Selbstbehauptung im sozialen Ghetto. Jüdische Wirtschaftsbürger im ‘Dritten Reich,’” in Dieter Ziegler, ed., Großbürgertum und Unternehmer: Die deutsche Wirtschaftselite im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2000), 204–214, here 205. 4. Ludolf Herbst, “Steuerung der Wirtschaft im Nationalsozialismus? Systemtheoretische Aspekte,” in Dieter Gosewinkel, ed., Wirtschaftskontrolle und Recht in der national-sozialistischen Diktatur (Frankfurt, 2005), 3–13, here 9. 5. See Frank Bajohr, “Die wirtschaftliche Existenzvernichtung und Enteignung der Juden: Forschungsbilanz und offene Fragen,” Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 13 (2006), 348–365, here 357f. 6. In 2009 Benno Nietzel produced a concise report: “Die Vernichtung der wirtschaftlichen Existenz der deutschen Juden 1933–1945. Ein Literatur- und Forschungsbericht,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009), 561–613. Apart from Frank Bajohr’s “Arisierung” in Hamburg: Die Verdrängung der jüdischen Unternehmer 1933– 1945 (Hamburg, 1997), the following were particularly useful: Franz Fichtl et al., “Bambergs Wirtschaft judenfrei”: Die Verdrängung der jüdischen Geschäftsleute in den Jahren 1933 bis 1939 (Bamberg, 1998); Alex Bruns-Wüstefeld, Lohnende Geschäfte: Die “Entjudung” der Wirtschaft am Beispiel Göttingens (Hanover, 1997). The following have been published after Nietzel’s report: Christiane Fritsche and Johannes Paulmann, eds., Arisierung und Wiedergutmachung in deutschen Städten (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2014); Christiane Fritsche, Ausgeplündert zurückerstattet und entschädigt. “Arisierung” und Wiedergutmachung in Mannheim (Ubstadt, 2012); Maren Janetzko, Die “Arisierung” mittelständischer jüdischer Unternehmen in Bayern 1933–1939, Ein regionaler Vergleich (Ansbach, 2012); Bastian Blachut, “Arisierung” als Geschäftsprinzip? Monopolisierung des deutschen Entzinnungsmarktes zwischen 1933 und 1939 durch die Th. Goldschmidt AG in Essen (Essen, 2012); Benno Nietzel, Handeln und Überleben: Jüdische Unternehmer aus Frankfurt am Main von den 1920er bis in die 1960er Jahre (Göttingen, 2012); S. Jonathan Wiesen, Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich (New York, 2011). However, despite its title, there is little concerning the destruction of Jewish business activity in Ulrich Sander, ed., Von Arisierung bis Zwangsarbeit: Verbrechen der Wirtschaft an Rhein und Ruhr 1933–1945 (Cologne, 2012). 7. Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust 1933–1945 (Cambridge, 2010 [Cambridge, 2008]). 8. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 1, The Years of Persecution (New York, 1997). 9. A letter sent by Kulies to the court, 25 February 1939, AGC, HR A 90, 38139, 1941. 10. Hannah Ahlheim, “Deutsche, kauft nicht bei Juden”: Antisemitismus und politischer Boykott in Deutschland 1924 bis 1935 (Göttingen, 2011); idem, “Establishing Antisemitic Stereotypes, Social and Economic Segregation of Jews by means of Political Boycott,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 55 (2010), 149–173, here 151f.; Mi-

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chael Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exklusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919–1939 (New York, 2011). 11. A first approach is presented in: “An den Bruchlinien der Volkswirtschaft. Jüdische Gewerbebetriebe in Berlin 1918 bis 1933,” in Christina von Braun (ed.), Was war deutsches Judentum? (Boston/Berlin 2015), 237–247. 12. Eva Balz and Christoph Kreutzmüller, “Jüdische Unternehmen vor dem Obersten Rückerstattungsgericht in Berlin 1953–1957,” Forum Historiae Iuris, April 2013, http://fhi.rg.mpg.de/articles/1304balz-kreutzmueller.html. The Active Museum, Fascism and Resistance in Berlin is currently preparing an exhibition on the restitution in the divided city. Eva Balz who’s study on the early restitution in Berlin will appear in 2016. 13. Reichshandbuch der deutschen Gesellschaft: Das Handbuch der Persönlichkeiten in Wort und Bild, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1930). 14. Erich Grasshoff and Kurt Röder, Firma und Handelsregister: Aus der Auskunftstätigkeit der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin (Berlin, n.d. [1937]), 10f. 15. In his study on Jews in the German economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Werner E. Mosse used a definition based on ethnic categories. Given the practices of racist persecution in the Nazi period this is, however, no longer possible. See Werner E. Mosse, Jews in the German Economy: The GermanJewish Economic Élite 1820–1935 (Oxford, 1987), 1f. Paul Windolf, “The GermanJewish Economic Elite (1900 to 1930),” Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 56 (2011), 2:135–162, here 143f., shows how problematic such an approach is today. 16. Thomas Lackmann, Das Glück der Mendelssohns: Geschichte einer deutschen Familie (Berlin, 2007). 17. Philipp Stauff, ed., Sigilla Veri. Lexikon der Juden, -Genossen und -Gegner aller Zeiten und Zonen, insbesondere Deutschlands, der Lehren, Gebräuche, Kunstgriffe und Statistiken der Juden sowie ihrer Gaunersprache, Trugnamen, Geheimbünde usw (Erfurt, 1931), vol. 4:451. 18. Ibid., 451f. 19. Memorandum on Brinckmann, Wirtz & Co., 24 March 1947, Stiftung Warburg-Archiv, Hamburg (SWA), C. 10602. 20. Memorandum by Max Warburg, 1 May 1933, ibid. 21. Quoted in Thomas Blubacher, Gibt es etwas Schöneres als Sehnsucht? Die Geschwister Eleonora und Francesco von Mendelssohn (Berlin, 2008), 18. 22. See, for instance, Christopher Kopper, Zwischen Marktwirtschaft und Dirigismus: Bankenpolitik im “Dritten Reich” (Bonn, 1995), 82. 23. Editor’s preface to Jüdisches Adreßbuch für Groß Berlin (Berlin, 1929), no pagination. 24. Theodor Fritsch, Handbuch der Judenfrage (Leipzig, 1932 [Leipzig, 1907]), 31. See Marianne Awerbuch, Erinnerungen aus einem streitbaren Leben: Von Berlin nach Palästina. Von Israel nach Berlin (Berlin, 2007), 170; Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing up in Nazi Berlin (New Haven, CT, and London, 1998), 27. Cf. Claire Zalc, “Trading on Origins: Signs and Windows of Foreign Shopkeepers in Interwar Paris,” History Workshop Journal 70 (2010), 133–151. 25. See Christoph Kreutzmüller, Zum Umgang der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft mit Geld und Gut: Immobilientransfers und jüdische Stiftungen 1933–1945 (Berlin, 2005), 44.

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26. My own conclusions from the Database of Jewish Businesses in Berlin (DjGB). 27. “Guttmann, Hamburg, arisch“, in Das Schwarze Korps, 4. 11. 1937. 28. See Nietzel, Handeln, 16f. 29. For a contemporary discussion on who should be persecuted as a Jew: Beate Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge,” Rassenpolitik und Verfolgungserahrung 1933–1945 (Ham­­burg, 1999). 30. Dritte Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz, 14 June 1938, Reichsgesetzblatt. I, 1938, 246f. 31. Dieter Ziegler, “‘Aryanization’ and the Role of the German Great Banks: 1933–1938,” in Gerald D. Feldman and Wolfgang Seibel, eds., Networks of Nazi Persecution, Bureaucracy, Business and the Organization of the Holocaust (New York and Oxford, 2005), 44–68, here 47. 32. Christoph Kreutzmüller, “Die Vernichtung der jüdischen Gewerbetätigkeit in Berlin. Begriffe und Blickwinkel,” in Fritsche and Paulmann, eds., Arisierung, 45–64. 33. “Arisieren, ein neuer Sport,” Das Schwarze Korps, 5. 8. 1937. 34. Jewish Central Information Office, ed., Entrechtung, Ächtung und Vernichtung der Juden in Deutschland seit der Regierung Hitler (Amsterdam, 1936), 38. Deutschland-Bericht vom Dezember 1936, Klaus Behnken, ed., Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade) 1934–1940, reprint, 7 vols. (Frankfurt, 1980), here vol. 3, 1936, 1655. See Bericht vom April 1940, in Sopade-Berichte, vol. 7, 1940, 258. 35. See Ludolf Herbst, et al., “Vorwort,” in Herbst and Weihe, eds., Commerzbank, 9–19, here 10–13. 36. Christoph Kreutzmüller, “The ban of Jewish owned businesses in Nazi Germany—a boycott?” in David Feldman, ed., Boycott Past and Present, Forthcoming: (London, 2017). 37. Ulrike Schulz, Simson. Vom unwahrscheinlichen Überleben eines Unternehmens 1856–1993 (Göttingen, 2013); Nils Busch-Petersen, Adolf Jandorf: Vom Volkswarenhaus zum KaDeWe (Berlin, 2008); idem, Oscar Tietz: Von Birnbaum/Provinz Posen zum Warenhauskönig von Berlin (Berlin, 2004); Kilian Steiner, Ortsempfänger, Volksfernseher und Optaphon: Die Entwicklung der deutschen Radio- und Fernsehindustrie und das Unternehmen Loewe 1923–1962 (Essen, 2005); Simone Ladwig-Winters, Wertheim: Ein Warenhausunternehmen und seine Eigentümer: Ein Beispiel der Entwicklung der Berliner Warenhäuser bis zur »Arisierung« (Münster, 1997); Petra Woidt, Pankow und die Königin von Saba: Eine Firmen- und Familiengeschichte (Berlin, 1997); Elfi Pracht, M. Kempinski & Co. (Berlin, 1994); Wilhelm Treue, “Das Bankhaus Mendelssohn als Beispiel einer Privatbank im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” Mendelssohn- Studien 1 (1972), 29–80. 38. Comprehensive: Martin Münzel, Die jüdischen Mitglieder der deutschen Wirtschaftselite 1927–1955: Verdrängung, Emigration, Rückkehr (Paderborn et al., 2006); Martin Fiedler, “Die »Arisierung« der Wirtschaftselite: Ausmaß und Verlauf der Verdrängung der jüdischen Vorstands- und Aufsichtsratsmitglieder in deutschen Aktiengesellschaften,” in Irmtrud Wojak and Peter Hayes, eds., »Arisierung« im Nationalsozialismus: Volksgemeinschaft, Raub und Gedächtnis (Frankfurt and New

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Introduction

York, 2000), 59–83; Mosse, Jews. Individual families or persons: Olaf Matthes, James Simon: Die Kunst des sinnvollen Gebens (Berlin, 2011); Julius Schoeps, Das Erbe der Mendelssohn: Biographie einer Familie (Frankfurt, 2009); Regina Scheer, Wir sind die Liebermanns: Die Geschichte einer Familie (Berlin, 2006); Lackmann, Mendelssohns; Marina Sandig, Die Liebermann: Ein biographisches Zeit- und Kulturbild der preußisch-jüdischen Familie und Verwandtschaft von Max Liebermann (Neustadt and Aisch, 2005); Erica Fischer and Simone Ladwig-Winters, Die Wertheims: Geschichte einer Familie (Hamburg, 2004); Sven Kuhrau and Kurt Winkler, eds., Juden, Bürger, Berliner: Das Gedächtnis der Familie Beer-Meyerbeer-Richter (Berlin, 2004); Michael Dorrmann, Eduard Arnhold (1849–1925): Eine biographische Studie zu Unternehmerund Mäzenatentum im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Berlin, 2002); Olaf Matthes, James Simon: Mäzen im Wilhelminischen Zeitalter (Berlin, 2000); Elisabeth Kraus, Die Familie Mosse. Deutsch-jüdisches Bürgertum im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1999); Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the building of the German Empire (London, 1977); Naomi Shepherd, Wilfrid Israel (Berlin, 1985). 39. Fritz Valentin Grünfeld, Heimgesucht—Heimgefunden: Betrachtung und Bericht des letzten Inhabers des Leinenhauses Grünfeld (Berlin, 1979); Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, ed., Das Leinenhaus Grünfeld: Erinnerungen und Dokumente von Fritz V. Grünfeld (Berlin, 1967); Hans Fürstenberg, Erinnerungen: Mein Weg als Bankier und Carl Fürstenbergs Altersjahre (Wiesbaden, 1965); Oscar Meyer, Von Bismarck zu Hitler (Offenbach, 1948 [New York, 1944]). 40. Gesa Kessemeier, Ein Feentempel der Mode oder eine vergessene Familie. Die Familie Freudenberg und das Modehaus “Hermann Gerson” (Berlin, 2013); Celina Kress, Adolf Sommerfeld—Andrew Sommerfield: Bauen für Berlin 1910–1970 (Berlin, 2011); Karolin Steinke, Simon Adler: Eierhändler in Berlin (Berlin, 2011); Christoph Kreutzmüller and Bjoern Weigel, Nissim Zacouto: Oriental Carpet Wholesaler and Miraculous Survivor (Berlin, 2011); Hans H. Lembke, Die schwarzen Schafe bei den Gradenwitz und Kuczynski: Zwei Berliner Familien im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2008); Götz Aly and Michael Sontheimer, Fromms: Wie der jüdische Kondomfabrikant Julius F. unter die deutschen Räuber fiel (Frankfurt, 2007); Christoph Kreutzmüller and Thomas Weihe, Eugen Panofsky (1855–1922): Berliner Bankier, Stadtrat und Stadtältester (Berlin, 2007); Ferdinand von Weyhe, A. E. Wassermann: Eine rechtshistorische Fallstudie zur »Arisierung« zweier Privatbanken (Frankfurt et al., 2007); Michael Dorrmann and Hellmut F. Braun, »Dem Deutschen Volke«: Die Geschichte der Berliner Bronzegießerei Loewy (Berlin, 2003); Henning Kahmann, Die Bankiers von Jaquiers & Securius 1933–1945: Eine rechtshistorische Fallstudie zur »Arisierung« eines Berliner Bankhauses (Frankfurt et al., 2002); Nea Weissberg-Bob and Thomas Irmer, Heinrich Richard Brinn (1874–1944): Fabrikant, Kunstsammler, Frontkämpfer (Berlin, 2002); Beate Meyer, “»Arisiert« und ausgeplündert: Die jüdische Fabrikantenfamilie Garbáty,” in Meyer and Hermann Simon, eds., Juden in Berlin 1938–1945: Begleitband zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung in der Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin—Centrum Judaicum (Berlin, 2000), 77–88; Uwe Westphal, Berliner Konfektion und Mode. 1836–1939: Die Zerstörung einer Tradition (Berlin, 1992 [Berlin, 1986]). 41. Sonja Miltenberger, Jüdisches Leben am Kurfürstendamm (Berlin, 2011); Regina Girod, Reiner Lidschun, and Otto Pfeffer, Nachbarn: Juden in Friedrichshain (Berlin, 2000); Horst Helas, Juden in Berlin-Mitte: Biografien, Orte, Begegnungen (Ber-

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lin, 2000); Gerd Lüdersdorf, Es war ihr Zuhause: Juden in Köpenick (Berlin, 1999); Kulturamt Prenzlauer Berg and Prenzlauer Berg Museum, eds., Leben mit der Erinnerung: Jüdische Geschichte in Prenzlauer Berg (Berlin, 1997); Thea Koberstein and Norbert Stein, Juden in Lichtenberg mit den früheren Ortsteilen in Friedrichshain, Hellersdorf und Marzahn (Berlin, 1995); Kunstamt Schöneberg, Schöneberg Museum, and Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz, eds., Orte des Erinnerns: vol. 2: Jüdisches Alltagsleben im Bayrischen Viertel: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin, 1995); Kulturamt Weißensee and Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, eds., »Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland«: Juden in Weißensee (Berlin, 1994); Bund der Antifaschisten, ed., Jüdisches Leben in Pankow: Eine zeit- geschichtliche Dokumentation (Berlin, 1993); Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt, ed., Juden in Kreuzberg: Fundstücke, Fragmente, Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1991); Alois Kaulen and Joachim Pohl, Juden in Spandau vom Mittelalter bis 1945 (Berlin, 1988); Dorothea Kolland, ed., »Zehn Brüder waren wir gewesen … «: Spuren jüdischen Lebens in Neukölln (Berlin, 1988); Burkhard Asmuss and Andreas Nachama, “Zur Geschichte der Juden in Berlin und das Jüdische Gemeindezentrum Charlottenburg,” in Wolfgang Ribbe, ed., Von der Residenz zur City: 275 Jahre Charlottenburg (Berlin, 1980), 165–228. 42. Christof Biggeleben, Beate Schreiber, and Kilian Steiner, “Vorwort,” idem, eds., »Arisierung« in Berlin (Berlin, 2007), 7–12, here 11f. 43. Avraham Barkai, Vom Boykott zur »Entjudung«: Der wirtschaftliche Existenzkampf der Juden im Dritten Reich 1933–1945 (Frankfurt, 1988); Helmut Genschel, Die Verdrängung der Juden aus der Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich (Göttingen, 1966). Cf. Johannes Ludwig, Boykott, Enteignung, Mord: Die »Entjudung« der deutschen Wirtschaft (Munich and Zurich, 1992). 44. Norbert Frei et al., Flick. Der Konzern, die Familie, die Macht (Munich, 2009); Johannes Bähr et al., Der Flick-Konzern im Dritten Reich (Munich, 2008); Kim C. Priemel, Flick: Eine Konzerngeschichte vom Kaiserreich bis zur Bundesrepublik (Göttingen, 2007); Peter Hayes, From Cooperation to complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2004); Gerald D. Feldman, Die Allianz und die deutsche Versicherungswirtschaft 1933–1945 (Munich, 2001); Harold James, Die Deutsche Bank und die »Arisierung« (Munich, 2001). 45. Dieter Ziegler, Die Dresdner Bank und die deutschen Juden (Munich, 2006). 46. Ingo Köhler, Die »Arisierung« der Privatbanken im Dritten Reich: Verdrängung, Ausschaltung und die Frage der Wiedergutmachung (Munich, 2005). 47. Medert, Verdrängung; Bjoern Weigel, “Vom deutschen zum »arischen« Theater: Die Vernichtung jüdischer Gewerbetätigkeit an Berliner Theatern,” forthcoming: Berlin, 2017. 48. Christoph Kreutzmüller and Kaspar Nürnberg, eds., Final Sale: The End of Jewish Owned Businesses in Nazi Berlin (Boston 2014 [New York and Berlin, 2010]). 49. Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, Chana Schuetz (eds.) Jews in Nazi Berlin. From Kristallnacht to Liberation, Chicago and London 2009; Wolf Gruner, “Die Verfolgung der Juden und die Reaktionen der Berliner,” in Michael Wildt and Christoph Kreutzmüller, eds., Berlin 1933–1945 (Munich, 2013), 311–324; idem, “Die Berliner und die Judenverfolgung. Eine mikrohistorische Studie individueller Handlungen und sozialer Beziehungen,” Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus 27 (2011), 57–87; idem, Judenverfolgung in Berlin 1933–1945: Eine Chronologie

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der Behördenmaßnahmen in der Reichshauptstadt (Berlin, 2009 [Berlin, 1996]); idem, Öffentliche Wohlfahrt und Judenverfolgung: Wechselwirkung lokaler und zentraler Politik im NS-Staat (Munich, 2002); idem, “Die NS-Judenverfolgung und die Kommunen. Zur wechselseitigen Dynamisierung von zentraler und lokaler Politik 1933–1941“ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ) 48 (2000), 75–126; idem, “»Lesen brauchen sie nicht zu können … «: Die Denkschrift über die Behandlung der Juden in der Reichshauptstadt auf allen Gebieten des öffentlichen Lebens vom Mai 1938,” in Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 4 (1995), 305–341; idem, “Die Reichshauptstadt und die Verfolgung der Berliner Juden 1933–1945,” in Reinhard Rürup, ed., Jüdische Geschichte in Berlin: Vol. 2: Essays und Studien (Berlin, 1995), 229–266; Meyer and Simon, eds., Juden. See also Susanne Willems, Der entsiedelte Jude: Albert Speers Wohnungsmarktpolitik für den Berliner Stadtneubau (Berlin, 2000); Zentrum für audio-visuelle Medien and Landesbildstelle Berlin, eds., Die Grunewald-Rampe: Die Deportation der Berliner Juden, assembled by Annegret Ehmann und Horst Neumann (Berlin, 1993). 50. Martin Friedenberger, Fiskalische Ausplünderung: Die Berliner Steuer- und Finanzverwaltung und die jüdische Bevölkerung 1933–1945 (Berlin, 2008). Cf. Christiane Kuller. Bürokratie und Verbrechen. Antisemitische Finanzpolitik und Verwaltungspraxis im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (München, 2013). 51. Wildt and Kreutzmüller, Berlin. Cf. Moritz van Dülmen, Wolfgang Kühnelt, and Bjoern Weigel (eds.), Zerstörte Vielfalt/Diversity Destroyed, Berlin 1933–1938– 1945, (Berlin, 2013); Moritz Foellmer, Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge, 2013); Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, ed., Berlin 1933–1945: Zwischen Propaganda und Terror (Berlin, 2010); Christian Engeli and Wolfgang Ribbe, “Berlin in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus,” in Wolfgang Ribbe, ed., Geschichte Berlins, vol. 2, (Munich, 2002 [Munich, 1987]), 927–1024; Bezirksamt Wilmersdorf, ed., Kommunalverwaltung unterm Hakenkreuz: Berlin-Wilmersdorf 1933–1945 (Berlin, 1992). See also Sven Felix Kellerhoff, Hitlers Berlin: Geschichte einer Hassliebe (Berlin, 2005); Gerhard Neuber, “Faschismus in Berlin: Entwicklung und Wirken der NSDAP und ihrer Organisationen in der Reichshauptstadt,” Berlin, 1976. On resistance: Hans-Rainer Sandvoß, Die »andere« Hauptstadt: Widerstand aus der Arbeiterbewegung in Berlin von 1933–1945 (Berlin, 2007); as well as the fourteen-volume set of documents on resistance in the various districts of Berlin between 1933 and 1945, published between 1983 and 2003 by the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand. The authors of the individual volumes are Hans-Rainer Sandvoß and Heinrich-Wilhelm Wörmann. 52. Christine Fischer-Defoy and Kaspar Nürnberg, eds., Gute Geschäfte. Kunsthandel in Berlin 1933–1945 (Berlin, 2011); Christoph Bernhardt, “Vom Terrainhandel zur Weimarer Städtebaukoalition: Unternehmen und Unternehmer im Berliner Eigenheimbau von 1900 bis 1939,” in Heinz Reif, ed., Berliner Villenleben: Die Inszenierung bürgerlicher Wohnwelten am grünen Rand der Stadt um 1900 (Berlin, 2008), 71–92. 53. See Christoph Kreutzmüller, “Die Wirtschaft Berlins,” in Wildt and Kreutzmüller, eds., Berlin, 83–96; Christoph Kreutzmüller and Rüdiger Hachtmann, “Arbeiter und Arbeiterorganisation in Berlin 1930–1945,” in Wildt and Kreutzmüller, eds., Berlin, 111–126.

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Introduction

54. See index of video interviews conducted by the University of Southern California, Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Various calls for contemporary witnesses, for instance via the Berliner Zeitzeugenbörse e. V., were unsuccessful. Only one former Jewish businessman could therefore be interviewed. 55. Hans-Günter Klein, “Das »Bankarchiv« der Mendelssohns,” in Mitteilungen der Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz 16 (1983), 94–105; idem, Das Mendelssohn Archiv der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin: Bestandsübersicht (Berlin, 2003), 89f. 56. Protokolle der Vorstandssitzung der IHK, 3. 1. 1939, Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv (BLHA), Rep. 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 171/56/7, 1. 57. Stefi Jersch-Wenzel and Reinhard Rürup, eds., Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in den Archiven der neuen Bundesländer, 6 vols. (Munich, 1996–2001), here 6.1: 18. Cf. Elijahu Taratul, “Jüdisches Schriftgut im Moskauer Sonderarchiv,” in Uwe Hartmann, ed., Kulturgüter im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Verlagerung, Auffindung, Rückführung (Magdeburg, 2007), 173–196, here 175. 58. See Ben Barkow, Raphael Gross, and Michael Lenarz, eds., Novemberpogrom 1938: Die Augenzeugenberichte der Wiener Library, London (Frankfurt, 2008). Further accounts can be viewed under: http://www.tlemea.com.proxy.nationallizenzen.de/ testaments/en/t3hbasic.asp. 59. Margarete Limberg and Hubert Rübsaat, eds., Sie durften nicht mehr Deutsche sein: Jüdischer Alltag in Selbstzeugnissen 1933–1938 (Frankfurt and New York, 1990); Uta Gerhardt and Thomas Karlauf, eds., Nie mehr zurück in dieses Land: Augenzeugen berichten über die Novemberpogrome 1938 (Berlin, 2009). 60. See Bericht von Walter Rafelsberger über die Entjudung der Ostmark, per 1. 4. 1939, Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Wien (ÖStA), 04/02, 102, 2160/00, Supplements. 61. Heike Schroll and Regina Rousavy, Das Landesarchiv Berlin und seine Bestände, Teil I: Übersicht der Bestände aus der Zeit bis 1945 (Berlin, 2003), 192. 62. This applies equally to the Central Tax Office and to the Charlottenburg, Luisenstadt, Mitte, Oberspree, Schöneberg, Spandau, Wilmersdorf Nord, Wilmersdorf Süd Tax Offices: LAB, A Rep. 093-01-093–12. An exception was the MoabitWest Tax Office, which inter alia was of significance throughout the Reich as regards the persecution of Jews, the files of which have been partially preserved (LAB, A Rep. 093-03). 63. Reich Ministry for Economics circular, 16. 2. 1945, Bundesarchiv Berlin (BArch) R 3101, 9042. 64. Reich Ministry for Economics memorandum, 9. 3. 1945, BArch R 3101, 34409. 65. Anonymous testimony of a coworker (Frau F.) of the District Mayor of Horst-Wessel-Stadt (Friedrichshain) dated February 1945, in Volker Berghahn, “Meinungsforschung im »Dritten Reich«: Die Mundpropaganda-Aktion der Wehrmacht im letzten Kriegshalbjahr,” in Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 1 (1967), 83– 120, here 110. I am grateful to Werner G. Fischer, Berlin, for kindly drawing my attention to this. 66. Konrad Cosack, Lehrbuch des Handelsrechts (Stuttgart, 1910), 33f. 67. Hermann Staub, Kommentar zum Allgemeinen Deutschen Handelsgesetzbuch (Berlin, 1894), 19–24; Otto Sobernheim, Handelskammern und Handelsregister in der Rechtsprechung seit dem Jahre 1900 (Berlin, 1910).

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Introduction

68. Verzeichniß der in das Handels-Register des Königlichen Stadtgerichts zu Berlin eingetragenen Einzelfirmen, Gesellschaften, Genossenschaften und Prokuren, 1. Jg. (1864). 69. Verzeichniss der in das Handels-Register des Königlichen Amtsgerichts I zu Berlin eingetragenen Einzelfirmen, Gesellschaften und Prokuren, 33. Jg. (1897). 70. Handels-Register des Königlichen Amtsgerichts Berlin-Mitte. Verzeichnis der die Amtsgerichtsbezirke Berlin-Mitte, Schöneberg, Berlin-Tempelhof, Berlin-Wedding, Charlottenburg, Groß-Lichterfelde, Lichtenberg, Pankow, Rixdorf und Weißensee domizilierenden Einzelfirmen und Gesellschaften aller Art sowie deren Vertreter, 45. Jg. (1909). 71. Order of the Reich Minister of Justice, 23 September 1937, Deutsche Justiz (1937), 1519. 72. Cf. letter from the District Court to Fraenkl & Co., 2 April 1938, AGC, HR A 93974, 1939 (Fraenkl & Co.). 73. Letter from the Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK) to the District Court dated 16 May 1940, AGC, HR A 90, 62386, 1941 (Fritz Bock). 74. Draft letter dated 29 August 1963, marked Hille, in response to a letter from the Cologne Regierungspräsident (Chairman of the Regional Council) dated 14. 8. 1963, AGC, HR A 90, 74440, 1937 (Wilhelm Cohnheim). 75. The Registergericht (Registry Court) moved in 1933 from Neue Friedrichstraße (now Littenstraße) to the building on Tegeler Weg and from there, in 1935, to Gerichtsstraße in Wedding. The gaps in the stock of files held thus correspond to the time when the Registergericht was sited on Tegeler Weg. Despite various endeavours, the whereabouts of the files in question could not be traced. 76. Memo on the file of the Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, 23 September 1998, LAB, A Rep. 342-02, 13993. 77. The size of the stock of files can be explained by the fact that the office’s work also involved in cases of compensation for the victims of deportation outside Germany where their property had been brought to Germany. In 2014 a database of records of the restitution office was put online: http://wga-datenbank.de/en/ search.html 78. Cf. Christoph Kreutzmüller and Monika Sommerer, (eds.) Finding Aids. Traces of Nazi Victims in Berlin Archives, (Berlin, 2014). 79. Barkai, Erlebtes, 13. 80. Genschel, Verdrängung. 81. David Schoenbaum, Die braune Revolution: Eine Sozialgeschichte des Dritten Reichs (Cologne, 1968), 339. 82. Christoph Kreutzmüller, “Augen im Sturm? Britische und amerikanische Zeitungsberichte über die Judenverfolgung in Berlin 1918–1938“ Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 62/1 (2014), 25–48. Stephanie Seul, “A mad spirit of revived and furious anti-Semitism. Wahrnehmung und Deutung des deutschen Antisemitismus in der New York Times und in der Londoner Times, 1918–1923,” in Michael Nagel and Moshe Zimmermann (Hg.), Judenfeindschaft und Antisemitismus in der deutschen Presse über fünf Jahrhunderte. Erscheinungsformen, Rezeption, Debatte und Gegenwehr (Bremen, 2013), 499–525. 83. Richard Albrecht, “Exil-Forschung: Biographisch: Das biographische Handbuch der deutsch-sprachigen Emigration nach 1933,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift Literatur 26 (1985), 120–130.

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Introduction

84. See Martin Schumacher, Weimar-Index Deutscher Reichsanzeiger und preußischer Staatsanzeiger, Register 1918–1933 (Düsseldorf, 1988). 85. Berliner Handels-Register. Verzeichnis der in den Amtsgerichtsbezirken BerlinMitte, Charlottenburg, Köpenick, Lichtenberg, Lichterfelde, Neukölln, Pankow, Schöneberg, Spandau, Tempelhof, Wedding und Weißensee wohnenden eingetragenen Einzelfirmen, Gesellschaften und Genossenschaften nach dem Stande vom 31. Dezember 1930, 67. Jg. (1931). 86. Membership Register of the Verein selbständiger Handwerker jüdischen Glaubens e. V. (Berlin, n.d. [1925]). 87. Membership Register of the Verein selbständiger Handwerker jüdischen Glaubens und Reichsverband des jüdischen Mittelstands (Berlin, n.d. [1936]). 88. Independent Order of B’nai B’rith, Directory 1928/29 (Kassel, n.d. [1928]). 89. Handbook of the Kartell-Convent der Verbindungen deutscher Studenten jüdischen Glaubens (Alliance-Assembly of the Association of German Students of Jewish Faith) (Berlin, 1937). 90. “Im Spiegel des Anzeigenteils,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin (GBJGB) 28. Jg., Nr. 5, 22. 5. 1938. 91. Da hilft nur … , Das Schwarze Korps 19/1938, 12 May 1938. 92. Jewish Restitution Successor Organisation, Jewish Trust Corporation for Germany, and Branche Française de la Jewish Trust Organisation for Germany, Berlin, eds., Suchliste betreffend Berliner Firmen (Berlin, n.d. [1954]). 93. See Christoph Kreutzmüller and Elisabeth Weber, “Unheilvolle Allianzen: Die Rolle des Stürmer bei der Vernichtung jüdischer Gewerbetätigkeit in Berlin,” in NURINST. Beiträge zur deutschen und jüdischen Geschichte (Nürnberg, 2008), 81–98. 94. Reprint of the Jüdisches Adreßbuch für Groß-Berlin (Jewish Directory for Greater Berlin), (Berlin, 1994 [Berlin, 1930]). 95. Hermann Simon, preface to the reprint of the Jüdisches Adreßbuch für Groß-Berlin (Berlin, 1994). 96. Freie Universität Berlin and Senator für kulturelle Angelegenheiten, eds., Gedenkbuch Berlins der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, 1995). 97. Das Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs für die Opfer der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung in Deutschland (1933–1945), www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch. 98. See, for instance, the entry for Adolf Brünn Nachf, DjGB. 99. Deployment, Police District No 17, 11 January 1938, BArch R 8150, 48. 100. Preface, Berliner Handels-Register 67 (1931).

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Part I

Context

 “As the capital of the Reich, Berlin is the center of political, cultural and social life in Germany. It’s the seat of the ministries and numerous other centers of powers and major institutions. What happens in various areas in Berlin is important not just to the Reich capital itself. In all of Germany, and often even abroad, it is taken as a model.”1

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J

ewish businesses were an integral part of economic life in Berlin and need to be analyzed as such. Hence, an in-depth investigation of the fate of Jewish businesspeople has to explore their socioeconomic environment and the way that changed after 1933. At the macrolevel, the basic facts of how the National Socialist regime established itself and consolidated its power are well known. But many developments on the meso- and microlevels—i.e., in the city of Berlin—remain to be illuminated. That will be the focus of chapter 1. As well as the city administration, I will take a closer look at the organization of the NSDAP in the Gau Berlin. Of all the official bodies taking part in the destruction of Jewish commercial activity, the Nazi Party was the only one that engaged in both violent and bureaucratic persecution. As we will see, this lent the whole process a brutal dynamic. Special attention will also be paid to the institutions responsible for enforcing trade laws, which became increasingly significant and—for Jewish entrepreneurs—threatening over time. Two administrative developments are of particular interest in this period: the creation of the office of Gau economic advisor and the ex– 31 –

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pansion of the IHK. Initially, the IHK was an amorphous body at the interface between the state and the private sector. From 1934–1935, however, it gradually became an extended arm of the state. It was typical of the Nazi economic system that government agencies could arise behind the private-sector façade of a company. One example is the “branch” of the Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co. bank in Amsterdam, which in reality was an office of the Reich Commissioner for the Occupied Dutch Territories, charged with the expropriation of Jewish assets.2 Without addressing the question of what to term this system, we can clearly recognize that it combined elements of rigid bureaucratic control with the personal authority of individual commissioners or representatives. This, however, was not a unique quality of the Nazi economy but a characteristic of the entire National Socialist regime. In chapter 2, I will attempt to trace the major lines of economic development in Berlin. As there is not much research in this area, our picture will by necessity remain sketchy and will draw heavily on the monthly reports of the IHK.3 The third chapter will be devoted to the profile and tectonics of Jewish-owned commercial enterprises in Berlin, and include a presentation and interpretation of the Database of Jewish Businesses in Berlin.

Notes

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1. Rudolf Suthoff-Groß and Ernst Luther, Verfassung und Verwaltung der Reichshauptstadt Berlin auf der Grundlage des Gesetzes über die Verfassung und Verwaltung der Reichshauptstadt Berlin vom 1. Dezember 1936 (Berlin, 1938), 40. 2. Christoph Kreutzmüller, Händler und Handlungsgehilfen: Der Finanzplatz Amsterdam und die deutschen Großbanken (Stuttgart, 2005), 149–155. 3. Cf. Kreutzmüller, Wirtschaft, 83–96.

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Chapter 1

Berlin

 City Administration

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A Belated Capital The German revolution of 1918, ending what was then called the Great War, allowed for a major restructuring of the metropolitan Berlin area. The 1920 Law on the Formation of a New City Municipality of Berlin combined eight cities, fifty-nine rural municipalities, and twenty-seven estates into a single metropolis, doubling Berlin’s population and making its square area ten times larger than before.1 Lawmakers didn’t rename the city Greater Berlin, but with 3.88 million inhabitants, the new municipality became the world’s third most populous city after New York and London.2 In order to finance the infrastructural improvements made necessary by Berlin’s belated consolidation, the city took on running debts of almost 500 million reichsmarks. When the world economic crisis turned into a depression, Berlin was barely able to shoulder the interest payments on those debts and was forced to introduce a harsh austerity program.3 Thus, in early 1931 the city was compelled to sell off its public electrical utility, the Berliner Elektrizitätswerke AG (BEWAG).4 Along with the financial shortfalls, the political consequences of antiSemitically tinged corruption can hardly be overestimated. Indeed they permanently undermined the office of mayor. The long-time mayor of Berlin, Gustav Böß, was forced to resign, and after a lengthy intermezzo, Heinrich Sahm—a politician with close ties to the right-wing German National People’s Party (Deutsch Nationale Volkspartei, DNVP)—was voted

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into office in April 1931.5 That may seem surprising at first glance, but the DNVP was traditionally strong in Berlin. In 1929 city elections they polled 17.6 percent and became the third largest party in the city assembly behind the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the centrist German Democratic Party (DDP). Lacking any other alternatives, the SPD and DDP were forced to work together with the DNVP, although the party had been charting an increasingly anti-Semitic course under the leadership of media mogul Alfred Hugenberg.6 A change in the city constitution meant that the new mayor had more power than any of his predecessors, but his influence was less noticeable as a local politician than as a strong supporter for Hindenburg in the Reich president election campaign in 1932.7 After the Landtag (state parliamentary) elections on 26 April 1932, the NSDAP emerged as the strongest party in Prussia.8 The result was “bloody battles in the Landtag” and the resignation of the long-time Prussian state premier, Otto Braun.9 Nonetheless, Braun, a Social Democrat, remained in office as a caretaker as none of his would-be successors could achieve a parliamentary majority. Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen, who had only been in office for seven weeks, exploited the situation to increase his own power base. On 20 July 1932 he declared the Prussian state government null and void and appointed himself Reich commissioner for Prussia.10 As part of this coup d’état a number of leading officials were removed from their posts. One of them was Berlin’s police president, Albert Grzesinski, who was replaced with the former police president of Essen, Kurt Melcher.11 As a consequence so many police officers were fired that the liberal Berliner Tageblatt wrote of a “cleansing.”12 Policies concerning foreigners became stricter, and the number of deportations, particularly of Eastern European Jews, increased.13 All in all, though, Papen derived little benefit from controlling the massive state apparatus of Prussia and was unable to prevent Hermann Göring from being appointed Reich commissioner for the Prussian Interior Ministry on 30 January 1933. As part of the implementation of the “Reichsstatthaltergesetz,” forcing the individual German states in line with the Reich, Papen resigned as Reich commissioner for Prussia on 7 April. That allowed Hitler complete freedom to install Göring in positions of authority, and he was then named Prussian state premier and Prussian interior minister. However, Göring had already used his considerable influence to extend the power of the Nazi regime in his previous post as interim Prussian interior minister,14 by for instance replacing the police presidents of all major Prussian cities with Nazi loyalists.15 On 14 February 1933 Göring named a retired rear admiral, Magnus von Levetzow, to head Berlin’s police force.16 This was a surprise move and a defeat for Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels, who had put forward the head of the local SA, – 34 –

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Berlin

Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, for the post.17 Yet, Göring apparently wanted to lay down a different sort of marker. As a former naval commander and intimate of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Levetzow was an exploitable symbol of the German nationalist camp. In any case, he was not appointed for his competence, and he proved unable to restore law and order in the city. In his biography of Levetzow, Gerhard Granier attributes this to the former admiral’s lack of experience in law enforcement.18 That is probably true. There was no way Berlin could have a normal police force when Göring put the foxes in charge of the henhouse and deputized the SA, the SS, and the paramilitary Stahlhelm movement as auxiliary police officers.19 Nonetheless, in a May 1933 interview with the Berliner Börsen-Courier, Levetzow defended “the measures that the state has taken since its national rebirth to defend itself against its political enemies.” He also called for “career criminals” to be pursued using the same means.20 Levetzow must have been aware of the conditions in the concentration camps. After all, his own presidium served temporarily as the authority that sent people to the Sonnenburg concentration camp, where among others the journalist (and future Nobel Peace Prize Laureate) Carl von Ossietzky was interned and maltreated.21 The sources available are insufficient to shed more light on Levetzow’s role, but before long Goebbels’s opinion of him was crystal clear: “Levetzow has to go. An ox, and a dumb one,” noted the propaganda minister and Berlin Gauleiter in early April 1933.22 Levetzow was sent into early retirement on 13 August 1935, after what seems to have been a conspiracy against him.23 In the summer 1935, as we will see in chapter 3, there was considerable anti-Jewish agitation planned by Gauleiter Goebbels and his entourage, promoted by the Gau newspaper and carried out by the SA. When Levetzow intervened to suppress the violence, he was dismissed. Goebbels’s original candidate Helldorf replaced him, although at the time he was answering charges made against him in the Nazi Party’s Superior Court.24 However, the actual power and influence of the office was diminishing. In May 1933, some of the main responsibilities of the police presidium were transferred to the newly appointed state commissioner, whom we will discuss shortly.25 The most dramatic loss of influence came with the centralization of police authority under the supervision of the SS. This was the basis for the formation of the secret police, the Gestapo, which was originally controlled in Prussia by Rudolf Diels,26 but which was put under the control of Heinrich Himmler in April 1934.27 In 1936, police authority became completely centralized, and Himmler was made chief of police for the entire Reich. While in 1933 the police president of Berlin was directly subordinate to the Prussian Interior Ministry and possessed some – 35 –

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national responsibilities, he had become a low-level subordinate to the German police chief in 1936. This demotion was probably why Helldorf constantly quarreled with Kurt Daluege and Himmler and began making frequent trips abroad, even establishing contact with anti-Nazi resistance groups.28 This, however, didn’t prevent him from playing an active role in the destruction of Jewish commercial activity in Berlin. A remarkable strategy ensured that the police would work on behalf of the new regime, and the executive played a major role. On 22 February 1933, an auxiliary force of 50,000 SA, SS, and Stahlhelm men was placed “alongside” the regular police force in Prussia. We do not know how many of the auxiliaries were actually deployed in addition to Berlin’s 14,700 officers, but there is no doubt that the presence of what amounted to a Nazi Party army disrupted the normal working of cities’ police stations. The auxiliary police force was dissolved in August 1933, but by that time other surveillance agencies—the Gestapo—were already in place. Moreover, police personnel were thinned out. By 1934, the regular force had been reduced by more than a third to 9300. Even in 1938, the city employed only 11,000 police officers.29 Still, remarkable differences in police precincts in various Berlin districts remained. On the one hand the Precinct 132 in Schöneberg put up a display box for an anti-Semitic weekly as early as July 1935,30 and the station in Grolmannstraße was known and feared for its officers’ strict interpretation of anti-Jewish laws.31 On the other hand, as late as 1938, some policemen still tried to protect Jewish businesspeople. In June 1938, for instance, a police patrol in district 110 in Köpenick removed posters calling for the blockade of Jewish stores and covered an anti-Jewish slogan scrawled on the street with sand.32 By that point the head of the Berlin police had long been involved in the persecution. Since the police president was responsible for passport matters, he could decide who would get travel documents and permission to leave Germany. As of 1934, applications were rejected if there was even the slightest suspicion that the applicant might use the opportunity to evade taxes. Applicants not only had to prove the contrary; authorities were supposed to monitor whether people were “dumping” (i.e., selling off at bargain prices) stocks of wares or private furnishings.33 Moreover, the authorities used the 14 July 1933 Law on the Revocation of Naturalizations and the Deprivation of German Citizenship to systematically denaturalize Eastern Europe Jews who had become Germans after 1918.34 Once Helldorf had been installed, police officers rarely intervened to prevent the persecution of those who were supposedly under their protection. Increasingly, they took Jews from their homes, accompanying them from a world in which a modicum of law and order still obtained into the realm of the SS, where they had no rights whatsoever. The fact that the officers treated them “correctly,” as – 36 –

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Berlin

many Jews later recalled, did nothing to change the upshot of their actions.35 Ultimately it was in the interest of the Nazi system that the police kept up an “orderly” appearance as they forced the Jews out of the city. That gave the remaining residents the chance to look the other way. In March 1933, Göring also directly intervened in Berlin’s central administration, replacing all municipal authorities with Nazi loyalists— Mayor Sahm, who enjoyed Hindenburg’s personal protection, was the exception.36 In the late evening of 13 March 1933, Göring named Julius Lippert “specially deployed state commissioner” for Berlin.37 Lippert was a veteran street brawler who had earned his political spurs as the editor-in-chief of the Gau newspaper Der Angriff and as the leader of the Nazi fraction in the city parliament.38 His new remit was to ensure that “the entire city administration of the capital Berlin, in all its branches, is carried out in complete harmony with the principles and spirit of the national uprising.”39 Lippert carried out this task with brutal efficiency. Not accidentally, more people were fired from the Berlin city administration than in most other cities.40 Parallel to the changes in the city’s central administration, National Socialists were also enforced at the district level where people actually or allegedly opposing the Nazis were mistreated, marginalized or driven from office.41 The 29 June 1934 Law on the Constitution of the Capital Berlin eradicated the final remnants of local, democratic city administration.42 Lippert took over this authority, creating even more conflicts with the mayor. In December 1935, after accusations that he had shopped at a Jewish store, Sahm finally stepped down.43 He was replaced by Lippert himself. A short time later, the embellishment of the office of state secretary was completed with the Law on the Constitution and Administration of the Reich Capital Berlin. That legislation created the office of city president for Lippert, which united the powers of the state commissioner and the mayor.44 As was also the case with Hamburg, Berlin became a de facto province of the Reich, meaning that it was under the direct control of central, Reich authorities. At the same time, the Gauleiter was given such great power that he could opt to direct the city’s administration.45

Nazi Party Organization and Development Gaus functioned as regional, intermediary centers of authority within the NSDAP. Appointed by Hitler, the Gauleiter were one of his main means of exercising power, and the office was often a career stepping-stone. A prime example is Goebbels, who was made head of the local Nazi Party organization of Berlin in 1926, and went on to become Nazi propaganda – 37 –

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director in 1930 and Reich propaganda minister in 1933. Within his Gau, Goebbels worked together intensely with a circle of intimates that established itself in 1926–1927 and whose influence persisted well into the 1930s.46 Because Berlin was the Reich capital, but not the home of the NSDAP, another high-ranking Nazi, Hermann Göring, was also stationed in the city as of 1927. In 1930, Göring became Hitler’s official representative in Berlin.47 A highly decorated war veteran, Göring’s job was to maintain contact with the German nationalist circles beyond Goebbels’s reach, but the Gauleiter objected to the presence of another alpha male on his territory. A jealous Goebbels noted in his diary in April 1933: “Göring Pruss. State Premier. He finally got what he wanted. The social climber.”48 But as of 1930, Goebbels rarely devoted undivided attention to his Gau. In a period of near constant elections, his new job as head of party propaganda took much of his time. Moreover, as he himself admitted, he had little talent for everyday organizational business.49 After being named minister of popular education and propaganda on 13 March 1933, Goebbels officially said goodbye to his subordinates in his Gau and handed over power to his newly appointed deputy, Arthur Görlitzer.50 Görlitzer51 was a trained administrator, whose entry in the 1934 National Socialist Führerlexikon (Lexicon of Leaders) draws attention to his belief that “the solution of the Jewish problem is the decisive existential question of the German people.”52 Within party circles he was considered one of the few competent deputies, and he maintained close contacts with the party grass roots and the SA.53 We know little about how Görlitzer carried out his duties. He kept Goebbels regularly informed about developments, but the latter’s curt diary entries don’t reveal much about their discussions. “Gau Görlitzer: a couple of whiny questions. Otherwise everything in order,” reads one passage.54 Or: “Görlitzer reported about the Gau. A lot of worries but all in all it’s fine.”55 Only when he felt he had to personally intervene, did Goebbels go into detail in his diary. That was the case in summer 1935 when Goebbels had Berlin’s police president fired. In the years that followed, he was even less involved with his Gau, although he was increasingly concerned with municipal issues. Quite probably Goebbels wanted to exercise the new powers he had been given in the 1936 Berlin law. Yet early in the summer of 1938, when Goebbels wanted to brutally push forward with the persecution of Jews in Berlin, he went back to the Gau apparatus.56 Many segments of the party were involved in the so-called Night of Broken Glass, which was actually a pogrom that lasted several days. After that things quieted down as far as the Gau as an institution was concerned. Its last major appearance came in February 1943, when it provided the backdrop for the infamous speech in which Goebbels declared “total war.”57 – 38 –

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Berlin

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The SA and the SS In the early days, the SA was the backbone of the NSDAP and the primary means by which the party tried to assert its claim to power on the streets.58 Consequently, the head of the SA in Berlin and Brandenburg was an important position. In 1926, Kurt Daluege took over that post. Like almost all leading SA men, Daluege could look back to a career in the paramilitary Freikorps.59 But after Daluege went over to the SS in 1929, the leadership of the SA changed hands frequently. The SA felt that it had seized political power for the party on the streets, and now they wanted a share in it— something Goebbels opposed.60 By April 1931, with the so-called Stennes Putsch, the fight had escalated to the point where Goebbels had to call the Berlin police for help.61 Only with the appointment of Helldorf to the post in July 1931 was a measure of continuity reestablished. Helldorf headed the organization for almost two years, only resigning when he was nominated as police president in Potsdam in March 1933. He was succeeded at the SA by Karl Ernst, who in the so-called Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934 was stripped of his office and shot in the SS barracks in Lichterfelde-West—today the location of the German Federal Archive. After a short intermezzo, Dietrich von Jagow62 was appointed as head of the SA in Berlin and Brandenburg, a role he continued to play until well into the war.63 The SA’s growing strength of numbers mirrored and helped crystallize the unprecedented rise of the NSDAP. In 1930 there were some 2200 SA men in Berlin.64 Their ranks swelled after the consolidation of the SA leadership. Membership tripled between November 1931 and April 1932, reaching 27,000 men. At that point there were far more SA men than police officers in Berlin.65 A ban on the SA had little effect, especially as it was quickly repealed after Papen’s coup d’état.66 Thus, by August 1933 the Berlin and Brandenburg SA numbered 80,000. With other fighting organizations being merged into the SA, ranks swelled so quickly that a temporary moratorium on new members was introduced.67 Nonetheless there were 220,000 SA men by June 1934. After that, SA membership markedly declined, even though in November 1935, there were still some 93,000 SA men in Berlin.68 In the early 1930s the SA hotbeds were Spandau and Steglitz, but by the end of 1932 storm troops had also been established in the working-class districts of Neukölln, Wedding, and Friedrichshain.69 The social centers of these companies were the so-called Sturmlokale (SA taverns), which began to spring up around 1928.70 Sven Reichardt has pointed out the special significance of such taverns, which numbered more than a hundred by 1931. They functioned as social meeting points and as barracks while beer – 39 –

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drinking acquired a political dimension. The taverns were where SA men reinforced their sense of solidarity and imbibed some Dutch courage, before brawling in the streets.71 The SA also had a major role in the battle for public space. In retrospect, a travel guide covering the “numerous memorial sites of the movement in Berlin” wrote: “The struggle of the NSDAP may have been very difficult throughout Germany. But it was at heaviest and bloodiest in the Reich capital, where the Party was left mourning almost fifty murder victims.”72 The authors of the travel guide were sounding the same tones as Goebbels in his widely distributed book The Battle for Berlin, in which killed Nazi comrades were instrumentalized as a demonstration of one’s own heroism.73 All these authors swapped cause for effect and stylized aggressors into victims. By early 1933, the SA was so adrenalized by years of street brawling that they could hardly be contained. For that reason SA kidnapping, intimidation, and murder of political opponents and personal enemies in Berlin was especially brutal—which in the context of the Reich as a whole, Peter Longerich has rightly analyzed as “terroristic by-products” of the Nazi rise to power.74 Further evidence of that is the gruesome number of detention and torture facilities in the city. According to one recent study, there were 170 of them.75 The preliminary nadir of the SA’s homicidal reign of terror came with the Köpenick “blood week” in late June 1933. After three SA men were killed in a raid, a SA storm group arrested at least 130 people in the district of Köpenick and subjected them to torture in SA taverns and the jail of the district court. At least 23 were murdered, and their bodies were thrown into a nearby river.76 Such excesses almost certainly caused the SA to be removed from the ranks of the auxiliary police in August 1933, and in turn led to a rise in SA attacks on regular police officers.77 Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, their brutality, the SA remained a useful instrument for Berlin’s Gauleiter and his deputy, even after their leadership had been disposed of. The appointment of Helldorf, well-known as a SA man, to the post of police president may be read as a kind of signal. And Helldorf brought many of his old SA comrades into the police force.78 Furthermore, in November 1938, Helldorf was promoted to SA Obergruppenführer and liaison officer between the SA and the German police.79 Moreover, in the summer of 1935 and summer and fall of 1938, the SA took a leading role in the destruction of Jewish commercial activity.80 As a subordinate group of the SA, the SS, which had less than a hundred members in 1931, also profited from the upturn in its fortunes.81 In February 1933, an indeterminate number of SS men were deputized as auxiliary police officers. Their first conspicuous activity was a raid on the Scheunenviertel neighborhood near Alexanderplatz in April 1933 where – 40 –

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Berlin

many Jews from Eastern Europe were arrested. Having murdered the captains of the SA in June 1934 the SS flourished, gaining new power and responsibilities. It was put in charge of concentration camps and, with Heinrich Himmler’s appointment as chief of the German police in June 1936, the SS began to infiltrate and control German law enforcement. The most obvious evidence of this was the establishment of the so-called Höherer SS-und Polizeiführer (HSSPF; Higher SS and Police Leader). The man appointed HSSPF of Berlin-Brandenburg was August Heißmeyer, a close intimate of Himmler who had rapidly risen within the administrative ranks of the SS.82

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Nazi Factory Cells and the German Labor Front (DAF) The German Labor Front or DAF was created from the ruins of the broken trade unions. In May 1933 it subsumed the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (NSBO), as it previously had the Fighting Association of the Commercial Middle Classes and its successor organization the NS-Hago.83 The DAF was explicitly not supposed to represent the interests of workers. What precisely the DAF was supposed to do apart from educating the workers remained nebulous and subject to the whims of party functionaries. Yet since those functionaries were usually long-time party members with a healthy sense of their own importance, the DAF became, in the words of Rüdiger Hachtmann, both a “greenhouse for political favors and mutual back-scratching” and a power center constantly trying to expand its influence.84 Epitomizing this was the head of the DAF, Robert Ley, who had already attracted attention as the Gauleiter of Cologne-Aachen in the 1920s for his hateful tirades against Jewish retail businesses and Jewish finance.85 Despite his alcoholism, Ley was a gifted, albeit unscrupulous, organizer who succeeded in making the DAF the largest grouping within the Nazi Party. In 1933 the organization had 5.2 million nominal members. By October 1934 that number was 12.6 million, and at its high point in 1940 the DAF had 22.1 million members.86 By the mid-1930s the DAF was remarkably well organized in the capital, with 31.6 percent of the population as members—higher than anywhere else apart from Saxony (35 percent), Düsseldorf (32.5), and Hamburg (31.7).87 One reason for this success was that one of the DAF’s predecessors—the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization—was a Berlin invention.88 In 1933 the Nazi factory cells were all incorporated into the DAF, and a lot of evidence suggests that the DAF worked closely together with the Berlin Gau and in summer 1935 even took over Der Angriff. The background to this remarkable transaction remains obscure, but in any case the newspaper gave the DAF a local voice it would repeat– 41 –

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edly use to impugn Jewish enterprises. In 1935 the DAF also concluded a strategic alliance with Der Stürmer, allowing the former to disseminate the intimate knowledge its members had about the clients and suppliers of Jewish businesses via the highly popular anti-Semitic weekly. To this end, an affiliate of Der Stürmer was established in Berlin in the summer of 1935.89 The DAF could also make use of the so-called Suppliers Source Index (Bezugsquellenarchiv), an institution the DAF had established in May 1933. Based on the data that the DAF’s boycott committee had collected by late March 1933, it purported to catalogue all commercial enterprises within the Reich and published mimeographed lists of “German and Jewish businesses.” Thus, the DAF not only claimed to be the sole authority on what constituted a Jewish business, but also encouraged and gave structure to the process of destruction of Jewish commercial activity.90

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Notes 1. “Gesetz über die Bildung einer neuen Stadtgemeinde Berlin, 27. April 1920,” in Hans J. Reichhardt, Die Entstehung der Verfassung von Berlin: Eine Dokumentation, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1990), vol. 1., doc. 1: 58–90. 2. Ingo Materna and Wolfgang Ribbe (with contributions by Rosemarie Baudisch et al.), Geschichte in Daten (Berlin and Wiesbaden, 2003), 159–161. See Wolfgang Rupf, “Der Wirtschaftsstandort Berlin,” in Werner Süß and Ralf Rytlewski, eds., Berlin. Die Hauptstadt. Vergangenheit und Zukunft einer europäischen Metropole (Berlin, 1999), 389–414, here 390. 3. Reichhardt, Gesetze, 49. 4. Thomas Irmer, “‘Es wird der Zeitpunkt kommen, wo das alles zurückgezahlt werden muss’. Die AEG und der Antisemitismus,” in Biggeleben, Schreiber, and Steiner, eds., “Arisierung”, 121–149, here 133f. 5. Christian Engeli, Gustav Böß, in Wolfgang Ribbe, ed., Stadtoberhäupter. Biographien Berliner Bürgermeister im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1992), 185–201, here 197f; Henning Köhler, “Berlin in der Weimarer Republik (1918–1932),” in Wolfgang Ribbe, ed., Geschichte Berlins, vol. 2 (Munich, 1987), 797–926, here 868–876; Christian Engeli, Gustav Böß. Oberbürgermeister von Berlin 1921–1930, (Stuttgart et al., 1971). 6. Hoss, Stadtverordnetenversammlung, 40–47. Thomas Mergel, “Das Scheitern des deutschen Tory-Konservatismus. Die Umformung der DNVP zu einer rechtsradikalen Partei 1928–1932,” Historische Zeitschrift 276 (2003), 323–368. 7. Engeli and Ribbe, Berlin, 937. 8. In the Prussian election a total of 22,069,849 votes were cast. Of those, 8,008,219 went to the NSDAP, 2,819,602 to the KPD, 3,374,413 to the Center Party, and 4,674,943 to the SPD. The NSDAP thus had 162 deputies in the Prussian Landtag, the KPD 57, the Center Party 67, and the SPD 93. “Vorläufiges Gesamtergebnis der Wahlen zum Preußischen Landtag am 24. April 1932,” Deutscher Reichs- und

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Preußischer Staatsanzeiger, Nr. 97 1932 (26 April 1932). By way of comparison, in Berlin there was a total of 1,197,430 votes cast, with some 360,000 going to the SPD, 46,600 to the Center Party, 352,400 to the KPD, and 288,200 to the NSDAP. See ibid. 9. “Die blutige Schlacht im Landtag”, Berliner Tageblatt, 26 May 1932. 10. Christopher Clark, The Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Fall of Prussia (London, 2006), 649–653. 11. “Weitere Personalveränderungen in Preußen,” Berliner Tageblatt, 24 July 1932. 12. “Die ‘Säuberung,’” Berliner Tageblatt, 22 July 1932. See also Kempner, Ankläger, 63; Graf, Polizei, 177; Neuber, Faschismus, 95f. 13. Dieter Gosewinkel, “‘Unerwünschte Elemente’: Einwanderung und Einbürgerung der Juden in Deutschland,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 27 (1998), 71–106, here 101–104. 14. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die deutsche Diktatur: Entstehung, Struktur, Folgen des Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt, Berlin (Vienna, 1983 [Cologne 1969]), S. 305. Cf. Ludolf Herbst, Das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945: Die Entfesselung der Gewalt. Rassismus und Krieg (Frankfurt, 1996), 63. 15. “Die neuen Regierungs- und Polizeipräsidenten,” Völkischer Beobachter, 17 February 1933. 16. “Polizeipräsident von Levetzow übernahm heute sein Amt,” Der Angriff, 17 February1933; “Neue Männer in Preußen,” Berliner Tageblatt, 17 February 1933; “Die neuen Regierungs- und Polizeipräsidenten,” Völkischer Beobachter, 17 February 1933. See Longerich, Goebbels, 213; Gerhard Granier, Magnus von Levetzow. Seeoffizier, Monarchist und Wegbereiter Hitlers. Lebensweg und ausgewählte Dokumente (Boppard, 1982), 189–192. 17. Entry 15 February 1932, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 2/II, 262. 18. Granier, Levetzow, 189. 19. Kellerhoff, Hitlers Berlin, 92–101; Engeli and Ribbe, Berlin, 931. 20. “Der Umbau der Kriminalpolizei. Ein Interview mit dem Berliner Polizeipräsidenten von Levetzow,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, 16 May 1933. 21. Stefan Hördler, “SS-Kaderschmiede Lichtenburg: Zur Bedeutung des KZ Lichtenburg in der Vorkriegszeit,” in Hördler and Sigrid Jacobeit, eds., Lichtenburg: Ein deutsches Konzentrationslager (Berlin, 2009), 75–129, here 78. See also Kaspar Nürnberg, “Außenstelle des Berliner Polizeipräsidiums. Das ‘staatliche Konzentrationslager’ Sonnenburg bei Küstrin,” in Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Diestel, eds., Gewalt und Herrschaft: Frühe Konzentrationslager 1933–1939 (Berlin, 2002), 83– 100, here 84. The Sonnenburg concentration camp was closed in 1934, and its inmates were transferred to Lichtenburg. Cf. Hans Coppi and Kamil Majchrzak. Das Konzentrationslager und Zuchthaus Sonnenburg (Berlin, 2015). 22. Entry 3 April 1933, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 2/III, 161. Despite some doubts as to his political reliability, Goebbels praised Levetzow in February 1931 as a “fellow beyond reproach.” See entry 23 February 1931, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 2/I, 351. Levetzow’s estate contained no information about the period in question. See Granier, Levetzow, 190, footnote 603; Gerhard Granier, Bestand N 239. Nachlaß Magnus von Levetzow (Koblenz, 1982), 1. 23. Entry 9 May 1935, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 3/I, 229.

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24. Letter from Helldorf to Himmler, n.d. (20 August 1935), BArch (BDC), SA, A, 0019. 25. Ribbe, Leitung, 25. 26. Graf, Polizei, 108–188. See also Klaus Wallbaum, Der Überläufer. Rudolf Diels (1900–1957). Der erste Gestapo-Chef des Hitler-Regimes (Frankfurt et al., 2010). 27. Rürup, Topographie, 55–61; Bukert, Matußek, and Wippermann, Machtergreifung, 68; Hans-Joachim Neufeldt, “Entstehung und Organisation des Hauptamtes Ordnungspolizei,” in Hans-Joachim Neufeldt, Jürgen Huck, and Georg Tessin, Zur Geschichte der Ordnungspolizei 1936–1945 (Koblenz, 1957), 5–118, here 7f. 28. On Helldorf’s trips to Spain: entry 20 February 1937, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 3/II, 384; to Austria: entry 11 June 1939, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 6, 373; to France: entry 14 June 1940, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 8, 172. On his contact to resistance organizations, see Susanne Meinl, Nationalsozialisten gegen Hitler: Die nationalrevolutionäre Opposition um Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz (Berlin, 2000), 272–284. See also Harrison, Kämpfer, 405–410. 29. Statistisches Amt Berlin, ed., Berlin in Zahlen 1945 (Berlin, 1947), 323. 30. CV note, 26 July 1935, CAHJP, HM 2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161). 31. Report by an unknown author about incidents in November 1938 (B. 1), WL, 046-EA-0450. Reprinted in Ben Barkow, Raphael Gross, and Michael Lenarz, eds., Novemberpogrom 1938: Die Augenzeugenberichte der Wiener Library London (Frankfurt, 2008), 101–118. 32. Report by 110th police precinct, 1 June 1938, LAB, Pr Br Rep 030, 21629. See also Heinz Knobloch, Der beherzte Reviervorsteher: Ungewöhnliche Zivilcourage am Hackeschen Markt (Berlin, 1990). 33. “Verfügung über Nutzbarmachung des polizeilichen Paß- und Meldewesens für Steuereinziehungszwecke, 2.3.1934,” Dienstblatt Berlin 1934, vol. IX/20, 19f. 34. See “Gesetz über den Widerruf von Einbürgerungen und die Aberkennung der deutschen Staatsangehörigkeit,” in Joseph Walk, Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat (Karlsruhe, 1981), 36, 42. 35. See Bernhard Landau, “The Hell of Sachsenhausen. My Experiences after 10 November 1938,” Wiener Library (WL), 058-EA-1279. 36. Christiane Hosse, “Die Berliner Stadtverordnetenversammlung im neuen Rathaus 1870–1933,” in Aktives Museum, ed., Vor die Tür gesetzt: Im Nationalsozialismus verfolgte Berliner Stadtverordnete (Berlin, 2006), 35–52, here 49f. Christian Engeli, “Nationalsozialistischen Kommunalpolitiker in Berlin,” in Wolfgang Ribbe, ed., Berlin Forschungen II (Berlin, 1987), 111–139, here 138f. 37. Dr. Julius Lippert (1895–1956) was the editor-in-chief of Der Angriff from 1930 to 1933 and the state commissioner and later city president (governor) of Berlin from 1933 to 1940. In 1941 he was an officer in the Wehrmacht, and in 1944 he was made regional commander in Arlon, Belgium. He was later sentenced to seven years imprisonment for crimes he committed there. See Christoph Kreutzmüller and Michael Wildt, “Ein ‘radikaler Bürger.’ Julius Lippert, Chefredakteur des ‘Angriff ’ und Staatskommissar zur besonderen Verwendung in Berlin,” Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus 27 (2011), 19–38. 38. Kreutzmüller and Wildt, “Bürger,” 19–25.

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39. Letter from the Prussian Interior Ministry to Berlin Mayor, 13 June 1933, LAB, A Rep. 01-02, 2427. 40. Kreutzmüller and Wildt, “Bürger,” 31f. See also Sabine Mecking and Andreas Wirsching, “Stadtverwaltung als Systemstabilisierung? Tätigkeitsfelder und Handlungsspielräume kommunaler Herrschaft im Nationalsozialismus,” in Mecking and Wirsching, eds., Stadtverwaltung im Nationalsozialismus: Systemstabilisierende Dimensionen kommunaler Herrschaft (Paderborn et al., 2005), 1–22, here 9f; Oleschinski, “Lippert,” 269; Engeli and Ribbe, Berlin, 937f. 41. Monika Wiemers, “Personalpolitik und allgemeine Verwaltung,” in Wiemers et al., eds., Kommunalverwaltung unterm Hakenkreuz: Berlin Wilmersdorf 1933– 1945 (Berlin, 1992), 34–119, here 95f; Engeli, Kommunalpolitiker, 115, Neuber, Faschismus, 215. 42. Wiemers, Personalpolitik, 44f. 43. “Burgomaster of Berlin,” Manchester Guardian, 26 November 1935; “Burgomaster of Berlin Reinstated,” The Times, 5 December 1935. 44. Newsletter Reich and Prussian Interior Minister, 2 January 1936, BArch, R 43 II, 572. See also entry 27 June 1936, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 3/II, 118. 45. Christoph Kreutzmüller, “Verfassung und Verwaltung der Hauptstadt,” in Wildt and Kreutzmüller, Berlin, 51–68. Cf. Mecking and Wirsching, “Stadtverwaltung,” 7f. 46. Armin Nolzen, “Die NSDAP und ihr Personal,” in Wildt and Kreutzmüller, Berlin, 69–82. Martin Broszat, “Die Anfänge der Berliner NSDAP 1926/27,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 8 (1960), 85–118, here 85f. See Engeli and Ribbe, Berlin, 978; Engeli, Kommunalpolitiker, 118f.; Goebbels, Kampf, 49f. 47. Neuber, Faschismus, 82. 48. Entry 12 April 1933, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 2/III, 167. 49. Entry 9 September 1930, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 2/I, 234f. See Peter Longerich, Geschichte der SA (Munich, 2003), 103f., 111f. 50. “Dr. Goebbels nimmt Abschied von seinen Mitarbeitern,” “Bekanntgabe,” Der Angriff, 14 March 1933. See Longerich, Goebbels, 217. Nolzen, NSDAP, 72–74. 51. Arthur Görlitzer (1893–1945) was a government financial administrator. From 1933 to 1943 he was the deputy gauleiter of Berlin. In 1943 he became the general commissioner of Schytomyr, Ukraine. He committed suicide in 1945. See Führerlexikon, part I, 149; Joachim Lilla, Die Stellvertretenden Gauleiter und die Vertretung der Gauleiter der NSDAP im “Dritten Reich” (Koblenz, 2003), 37; Lilla (with contributions by Martin Döring and Andreas Schulz), Statisten in Uniform, Die Mitglieder des Reichstages 1933–1945. Ein biographisches Handbuch. Unter Einbeziehung der völkischen und nationalsozialistischen Reichstagsabgeordneten ab Mai 1924 (Düsseldorf, 2004), 182. 52. Führerlexikon, S. 149. 53. “Pg. Görlitzer im Sportpalast,” Der Angriff, 27 July 1933; “Inspektion II im Sportpalast,” Der Angriff, 29 July 1933; Lilla, Stellvertretende Gauleiter, 37. 54. Entry 15 November 1934, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 3/I, 315. 55. Entry 1 November 1935, ibid., 323. 56. Christoph Kreutzmüller, Hermann Simon, and Elisabeth Weber, Ein Pogrom im Juni. Fotos antisemitischer Schmierereien in Berlin, 1938 (Berlin, 2013), 18–23.

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57. Iring Fetscher, Joseph Goebbels im Berliner Sportpalast 1943: “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?” (Hamburg, 1998). See Thomas Schaarschmidt, “Die Mobilisierung der Berliner Großstadtbevölkerung im Krieg,” in Wildt and Kreutzmüller, Berlin, 343–356. 58. See Sven Reichardt, “Vergemeinschaftung durch Gewalt: Das Beispiel des SA-‚ Mördersturm 33’ in Berlin Charlottenburg zwischen 1928 und 1933,” in Entgrenzte Gewalt. Täterinnen und Täter m Nationalsozialismus. Beiträge zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Gewalt in Norddeutschland 7 (2002), 20–36, here 23; Daniel Siemens, “Prügelpropaganda: Die SA und der nationalsozialistische Mythos vom Kampf um Berlin,” in Wildt and Kreutzmüller, Berlin, 33–51. See also Hüttenberger, Gauleiter, 40f. 59. Sauer, “Rabauken,” 114. See Caron Cadle, “Kurt Daluege: Der Prototyp des loyalen Nationalsozialisten,” in Ronald Smelser, Enrico Syring, and Rainer Zitelmann, eds., Die Braune Elite II: 21 weitere biographische Skizzen (Darmstadt, 1993), 66–79. 60. Entries 24 June and 8 August 1930, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 2/I, 182, 214. See Sauer, “Rabauken,” 120–130. 61. By contrast Peter Longerich stresses that Goebbels restrained the SA to prevent the party from being banned. See Longerich, Goebbels, 155–157; Michael Wildt, Die Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichsicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002), 95. 62. As a corvette captain Dietrich von Jagow (1892–1945) took part in the 1920 Kapp Putsch. Until 1933 he was an SA leader in the state of Württemberg. From 1934 onward he was an SA leader in Berlin, where he also became a city councilor in 1935. As of 1939 he fought in the German Navy and committed suicide in 1945. See Lilla, Statisten, 483. 63. Schuster, 47. See Sauer, “Rabauken,” 120–131. 64. Neuber, Faschismus, 58. 65. Around twenty thousand people worked for the police in Berlin in the 1920s. See Graf, Polizei, 10f., 23. 66. Sauer, “Rabauken,” 135f. 67. Jolis von Engelbrechten, “Wie die SA-Gruppe Berlin-Brandenburg wurde,” in Arthur Görlitzer, ed., Gau Groß-Berlin (Berlin, n.d. [1934]), 103–105. 68. Schuster, SA, 49–53. See also Longerich, Geschichte, 85. 69. Bernd Kessinger, Die Nationalsozialisten in Berlin-Neukölln 1925–1933 (Berlin, 2013). 70. Oliver Reschke and Michael Wildt, “Aufstieg der NSDAP in Berlin,” in Wildt and Kreutzmüller, Berlin, 19–33, here 25–30. 71. Sven Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde: Gewalt und Gemeinschaft im italienischen Squadrismus und in der deutschen SA (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2002), 450. 72. Jolis von Engelbrechten and Hans Volz, Wir wandern durch das nationalsozialistische Berlin: Ein Führer durch die Gedenkstätten des Kampfes um die Reichshauptstadt (Munich, 1937), 7. See also Roegels, Marsch, 26–35. 73. See Joseph Goebbels, Der Kampf um Berlin (Munich, 1932), and Siemens, “Prügelpropaganda.”

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74. Longerich, SA, 172. The brutality of the camps becomes horribly evident in the early reports of inmates. See Irene A. Diekmann and Klaus Wettig, eds., Konzentrationslager Oranienburg. Augenzeugenberichte aus dem Jahr 1933: Gerhart Seger Reichstagsabgeordneter der SPD, Max Abraham Prediger aus Rathenow (Potsdam, 2003); Karl Billinger, All Quiet in Germany (London, 1935), 25–68. See also Kurt Jakob Ball-Kaduri, Das Leben der Juden in Deutschland 1933 (Frankfurt, 1963), 58–80. See Hördler, SA Terror, 17–19. 75. Irene Mayer-von Götz, Terror im Zentrum der Macht: Die frühen Konzentrationslager in Berlin 1933/34–1936 (Berlin, 2008), 56f. See also Laurenz Demps, “Konzentrationslager in Berlin 1933 bis 1945,” Jahrbuch des Märkischen Museums 3 (1977), 16f. 76. Hördler, SA Terror. 77. Report 143rd Police Precint, 23 October 1933, LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21616; report 143rd Police Precint, 11 May 1934, LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21617. 78 Letter Kurt Daluege to Helldorf, 15 March 1937, in BArch (ex BDC), SA/A/0019. 79. “Vom Obersten SA-Führer befördert,” Der Angriff, 10 November 1938. 80. See chapter 4. 81. Engelbrechten, Berlin, 24f. 82. Personnel file August Heißmeyer, BArch (ex BDC), SSO/80 A; letter from Himmler to Heißmeyer, 14 January 1943, BArch (ex BDC), SA/A/0019. See Ruth Bettina Birn, Die Höheren SS- und Polizeiführer: Himmlers Vertreter im Reich und in den besetzten Gebieten (Düsseldorf, 1986), 335. August Heißmeyer (1897–1979) took part in the Kapp Putsch and joined the NSDAP in 1925. As of 1933 he was a Reichstag deputy, as of 1935 he became the head of the SS Main Office, and by 1939 he became an inspector of concentration camps. He was given three years imprisonment after World War II. 83. Genschel, Verdrängung, 49. 84. Rüdiger Hachtmann, “Chaos und Ineffizienz in der Deutschen Arbeitsfront: Ein Evaluierungsbericht aus dem Jahr 1936,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 53 (2005), 43–78, here 43. 85. Ronald Smelser, Robert Ley. Hitlers Mann an der Arbeitsfront. Eine Biographie (Paderborn, 1989), 55–76. 86. Hachtmann, “Chaos”, 47f. 87. Hachtmann and Kreutzmüller, Arbeiter, 111–126. 88. Broszat, Anfänge, 87; Hachtmann and Kreutzmüller, Arbeiter, 113f. 89. Kreutzmüller and Weber, Allianzen, 91–98. 90. “Liste jüdischer Firmen des Bezugsquellenreferats, 6.7.1933,” BLHA, Rep. 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 163/55, 29, Hammonia Reiniger-Werk GmbH (Hamburg-Berlin).

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Chapter 2

Economy

 Commercial Regulation

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State Authorities Since 1919 the leading authority for commercial regulation was the Reich Economics Ministry, which had succeeded the Reich Economic Office established during World War I. Between January and March 1933 the DNVP representative and media mogul Alfred Hugenberg served as the Reich economics minister. At the same time he was also the commissarial director of the Prussian Ministry of Trade and Economics, which in 1934 was subsumed by the Reich Ministry.1 After Hugenberg resigned, the chairman of Allianz insurance, Kurt Schmitt, took over the office, but he gave it up after only one year.2 He was succeeded by Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, who rose to become, for a time, the most influential economic decision maker in the Nazi regime.3 Like his predecessors, Schacht was guided by pragmatic cost-benefit considerations in his dealings with Jewish commercial enterprises. As long as the economic situation remained perilous, unemployment was high, and good relations abroad were needed, he sought to avert destruction from Jewish businesses. When the Four Year Plan was announced in 1936, and a new ministry established under Göring, Schacht’s influence waned.4 As a result Schacht resigned in fall 1937. Göring became his interim successor and recast the ministry into a department of his Four Year Plan authority before handing over the office of economics minister to the former business journalist and state secretary in the Ministry of Propaganda, Walther Funk.5 If Goebbels – 48 –

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had hoped that his former deputy Funk would follow a rigorous anti-Semitic economic line and push forward with the elimination of Jewish commercial enterprise in Berlin, he was disappointed. Funk was “too soft and malleable,” Goebbels found after a conference with Göring on 12 November 1938,6 convened to discuss the economic consequences of the pogrom.7 Local business regulation was part of the Berlin police president’s jurisdiction.8 On applications for permission to set up retail businesses, which had been restricted in May 1933, as well as the issuance of licenses for ambulant retailers, which were required as of 1934, the police presidium worked in close conjunction with the district trade licensing offices, which in turn were subordinated to Lippert as the city president.9 Although they weren’t directly concerned with commercial regulation, alongside the Reich Economics Ministry, the police president, and the city president, the state finance offices—intermediaries of the Reich Finance Ministry—played a significant rule in steering the economy. There were thirty-five tax offices in Berlin as of August 1933. On its own insistence, the Moabit-West tax office was given national authority and was put in charge of liquidating confiscated assets from people and businesses deemed enemies of the state.10 The tax offices in turn were supervised by the State Tax Office, renamed the Chief Finance Presidium in 1937. The Chief Finance Presidium included a currency unit (Devisenstelle) responsible for supervising all currency transactions.11 This had been established in August 1931, at the height of the banking and liquidity crisis, when the Reich declared a payment moratorium and the reichsmark ceased to be convertible currency. After that the exchange of marks into other currencies was only possible via a rigid allocation system with rapidly increasing exchange fees, which was carefully monitored by the Reichsbank and the Devisenstelle.12

The Berlin Chamber of Industry and Commerce The Berlin Chamber of Commerce was set up in 1902 by the Prussian Trade Ministry as a way of ending the lengthy power struggles between Berlin merchants and industrialists.13 It served as a point of interface between the state and the private sector, and as such during World War I it had already come to be involved in currency exchange control.14 In a similar vein, responsibility for monitoring the stock exchange—actually a task of state—had been transferred to the Chamber in 1903.15 As its jurisdiction was identical neither to that of Berlin’s economic area nor to the jurisdiction of Berlin’s commercial register, the Berlin and Potsdam chambers were merged in 1919. The following year this expanded entity was fused with the rival Berliner Kaufmannschaft (Berlin Merchant Association) and became, thanks to its stock market revenues, the wealthiest chamber of – 49 –

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commerce within the Reich. Especially under the leadership of Franz von Mendelssohn (1914–1931), the president of the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce and the German Section of International Chamber of Commerce, the influence of the Chamber, which was renamed the Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK) in 1924, extended well beyond the borders of its jurisdiction proper.16 During the Great Depression the IHK faced massive financial difficulties as its revenues from the stock exchange and membership fees collapsed.17 Political pressure was mounting as well. The 28 March 1933 edition of the Angriff called for the “cleansing … of the fully Jewified” chamber,18 whereupon the following day a troop from the Action Committee of the Economic Law Division of the Association of National Socialist German Attorneys forced their way in the IHK’s headquarters in Berlin’s Dorotheenstraße. There, they succeeded in bullying IHK President Karl Gelpcke—who had been in office since 1931 and who was also the chairman of the Hamburger Hypothekenbank (Hamburg Savings and Loan Bank) and the president of the Club of Berlin (one of the city’s most exclusive clubs)—into dismissing his Jewish presidium colleagues Heinrich Grünfeld, Viktor Meyer, and Michael Michalski, as well as the officials Robert Bergmann, Fritz Demuth, Werner Feilchenfeld, Erich Gisbert, Ewald Jakoby, Erich Löwenstein, Oscar Meyer, Eduard Meyerstein, and Josef Weisbart. In so doing Gelpcke essentially caved in to the threats of a handful of low-level lawyers and, as was so often the case, the National Socialists who carried out the act of intimidation stepped into the posts vacated by those they had forced out.19 Two Nazi Party members, Allianz chairman Kurt Schmitt and the owner of the Kölle & Hensel machine factory, Max Koelle, were made IHK vice-presidents.20 Almost simultaneously, the long-prepared takeover of the IHK Brandenburg further enlarged the organization’s scope. Although Jews were forced out of the leading committees more quickly and brutally in Berlin than, for instance, in Hamburg,21 and despite displays of fealty toward the new regime like the mandatory introduction of the Hitler greeting in July 1933, the IHK’s position was by no means secure.22 The new compulsory associations, the Reichsgruppen (Reich-groups), and the DAF emerged as competitiors. In the summer of 1934, for “practical purposes,” all ninety-three chambers of commerce in the Reich were put under the control of the Reich economics minister and thus “degraded to the status of an administrative unit with certain legislative capacities.”23 The Reich economics minister intervened not just in the structure but the personnel policies of the IHK, claiming for himself the right to name the organization’s president. He made his decisions in consultation with Goebbels in the latter’s capacity as Berlin Gauleiter. – 50 –

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After Gelpcke vacated the post in February 1935, Friedrich Reinhart was appointed president.24 The chairman of the supervisory board at Commerzbank, Reinhart may not have been a Nazi party member, but as Funk would later note in his obituary, he “found his way early on to the Führer”25 and was part of the Keppler Circle, a group of pro-Nazi industrialists that was renamed the “friends of the Reichsführer-SS” in 1933.26 As part of a drive toward centralization, the IHK was dissolved in April 1943 and its responsibilities transferred to the Gau Economic Chamber Berlin-Brandenburg. Reinhart was made president of that organization. After his death in the fall of 1943, the Berlin and Brandenburg chambers were once again split. Gau economic advisor Heinrich Hunke was named president of the Berlin chamber. We will return to him in the next section.27 The chamber brought out a self-published weekly entitled Mitteilungen der Industrie und Handelskammer zu Berlin (Announcements from the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Berlin), whose first editors-in-chief were Ernst Jakoby and Werner Feilchenfeld who would later play a decisive role in handling the so-called Haavara transfer.28 As part of the Nazis’ racist redistribution of posts, control was handed over to Dietrich Lorenz in April 1933, and in 1934 the periodical was renamed Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie und Handelskammer zu Berlin (Economic Newspaper of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Berlin). The change in personnel reflected a reorientation toward the regime. From then on the periodical viewed Berlin’s economic development through rose-tinted glasses and in 1939 and 1940 even reported affirmatively on the ongoing destruction of Jewish commercial activities.29 When asked by district courts, and citing the Law on Matters of Voluntary Jurisdiction, the IHK decided whether commercial enterprises would be listed in the commercial register.30 The chamber also checked whether the name chosen for a business was already taken and whether it clearly and accurately reflected the nature of the business. It decided whether companies could call themselves “factories,” “houses,” or “works,” or whether those designations suggested a scope beyond that which an enterprise actually had.31 By the mid-1930s, IHK officials declared that they drew up some 7500 evaluations annually for the registry court.32 As part of its supervisory function, the IHK worked particularly closely with the police presidium. Summing this up, the Wirtschaftsblatt declared in January 1937 that the IHK had provided the police “with countless evaluations containing information about trade and commercial matters necessary for easing or enforcing economic provisions.”33 The periodical also stressed that, in conjunction with the denaturalization of Eastern European Jews, the IHK had drawn up evaluations “of whether the naturalized person in question had taken German interests to heart or had – 51 –

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behaved, in an economic sense, in a manner harmful to the welfare of the people and the state.”34 The IHK also offered assessments of whether foreign business trips, which had to be applied for and approved, were truly necessary, and it made sure “in every case that the applicant did not do anything that would have been disadvantageous for the state and the German economy.”35 The Chamber of Industry and Commerce monitored the conduct of businesses during seasonal or final sales and worked together with the police president on decisions on whether to revoke business licenses and ways “of combating the various forms of illegal trade, in particular the black market.”36 The IHK also collaborated closely with the currency units of the central tax office. At their behest, the chamber’s officials evaluated whether applications for foreign currency were reasonable and whether the applicants were trustworthy.37 The pivotal position of the IHK Berlin, derived in part from custom, was the model for the 1937 order from the Ministry of Justice on “The Establishment and Running of a Commercial Register.”38 The ordinance, the fundamental details of which are still in force in Germany today, stipulated that throughout the entire Reich registry courts were to request regular evaluations from the chambers of commerce responsible concerning applications for registration or a change in the form of individual companies. Moreover, the ordinance expanded the chambers’ right to demand that businesses be registered.39 The IHK’s duty to offer advice was thus transformed into a requirement that the registry court ask for such advice. In addition the courts and state employees in public prosecutors’ offices and within police and community administrations, as well as all notary publics, were required to report to the registry court all cases that came to their attention for “improper, incomplete, or missing registration in the commercial register.”40 As already mentioned, in September 1937 the Reich Justice Ministry ruled that the register could be copied onto new sheets if it was no longer up to date. Berlin’s register court and the IHK immediately used this ruling to start the reviewing all the commercial enterprises on the register. All businesses were called upon to check “whether their listings on the new registration sheet conformed to both their previous ones and their current legal forms.”41 If a business failed to react or no owners or directors could be identified, the chamber assumed that a business no longer existed and applied to have the firm deleted from the register, which automatically ensued. This review was just as much a part of Germany’s general preparations for war as the destruction of Jewish commercial activity, and sometimes the two processes overlapped. The Jewish retailer Nathan Edelstein, for instance, used the announcement of the new registration sheet he received in November 1938 to report that his company had been liquidated.42 – 52 –

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Well before that, the IHK had been confronted with queries from the city administration, civic offices, the military, and various groups within the NSDAP about whether this or that business should be considered Jewish.43 In the case of retailers, the IHK’s Office for Retail Businesses had from its initial founding in June 1934 systematically determined whether owners were “Aryan in the sense of the standards used for government employees.”44 As early as June 1934 the weekly business paper Der Kurzberichterstatter: Das zeitgemäße Nachrichtenblatt für den Wirtschaftpraktiker answered the question of how one could tell whether a company “was Aryan” as follows: “With commercial enterprises that are registered as firms, this is relatively easy to determine. In such cases, almost all of the responsible chambers of commerce are able to provide the necessary information. The chambers of commerce are required to keep all documents relevant to their areas of responsibility from commercial and mercantile enterprises.”45 On 4 January 1938 a secret order from interim Reich Economics Minister Göring required all chambers to check whether any of their member companies were Jewish.46 Starting in April 1938 all possession transfers of Jewish businesses were checked by the IHK to determine whether such transactions were in the general economic interest. That led to the establishment of a separate “Aryanization department” under the direction of their experienced official, Hans Michalke.47 From 1940 on, the IHK also issued assessments about the amount of the so-called Aryanization levy, which was intended to siphon off the vast profits from takeovers of Jewish businesses.48

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Gau Economic Advisor While the IHK operated at the point of interface between the state and the private sector, the office of Gau economic advisor, which was created in late 1932, was initially solely a party-internal one.49 The Gau economic advisor’s duties were evident in the title, but as was often the case in the National Socialist system, it was up to the individual to decide how he carried out those duties. Thus, the position varied greatly from Gau to Gau.50 Avraham Barkai is correct in pointing out that the influence of the Gau economic advisors “was dependent upon the power of the individual Gauleiter in question.”51 In Berlin, Goebbels enjoyed an extremely strong position and Gau Economic Advisor Heinrich Hunke was himself a political heavyweight, having served as of 1932 as the director of the newly founded Fighting Association for the Commercial Middle Classes.52 In this capacity, he was responsible for organizing the “Brown Trade Fairs” (essentially propaganda shows for demonstrating the power of the non– 53 –

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Jewish economy) and for directing the so-called boycott in Berlin.53 In January 1935 he was made an honorary professor at the Berlin’s Technical University and became the most influential official of the German Economic Advisory Council, set up by the Propaganda Ministry.54 Harold James has characterized Hunke as the “most influential Nazi economic theorist” of the 1930s.55 In numerous articles in the periodical Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft (The German National Economy), which he himself published, the Berlin Gau economic advisor called for the destruction of Jewish commercial activity. Thus, in the wake of the 1935 Reich Citizenship Law, he argued that the regime’s decision not to move against Jewish businesses would not hold for long, and he urged the government to force Jews out of the economy “not on behalf of economic self-interest, but for the welfare of the Volk.”56 In his study Grundzüge der deutschen Volks- und Wehrwirtschaft Hunke offered legal-philosophical arguments for the eradication of Jews’ economic existence in 1938. Having argued that the Citizenship Law stipulated that entrepreneurs must be German,57 he also redefined property according to a new, racist basis: “National Socialist property law has nothing in common with the unlimited right to property of economic liberalism. … Today we no longer view property as something individuals can treat according to their every whim, but as a loan that is to be managed at all time in the interest of the ultimate lender, the Volk.”58 As Jan Schleusener has shown, Hunke was not alone in his views, but he was unable to push them through.59 The concept of property was only revised for specific purposes such as the destruction of the economic existence of Jews, Hunke considered one of his missions. In an interview published in October 1937, he stated: “In economic-political terms, I see it as my task to further restrict Jewish influence on Berlin’s industry and trade. In line with this, the Berlin Gau Economic Advisory Council has played a role in transferring many businesses to German hands. They include the Orenstein & Koppel AG, the Julius Berger construction company, the Kempinski AG, the Zuntz firm and many others.”60 Indeed, there is ample evidence that Hunke led the way among the Gau economic advisors in facilitating the destruction of Jewish commercial activity. As early as April 1933 he was involved in discriminating against Jewish delivery companies in Berlin. By 1935 at the latest, at the behest of the city’s procurement office, he decided whether a company could bear the title “German business,” which was required for the company to supply the city and its public institutions.61 In June 1938 he used his position to acquire the renown Ebro upholstery, leaning heavily on the Jewish owners to lower the price of sale.62 In September 1938 he tried to radically accelerate the destruction of Jewish commercial activity by – 54 –

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declaring that all still-existing Jewish business would be placed under compulsory administration on 1 October.63 In the wake of the pogrom of November 1938 he also developed a fast-track program for “de-Jewifying Berlin retailers.”64 We’ll return to this in chapter 3.

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Lobby Groups and Commercial Associations Much as it did with the IHK, early 1933 brought about a fundamental racist and political realignment within Berlin’s commercial associations. The IHK immediately pressured the influential Berlin Association of Merchants and Industrialists to force Jewish members out of its presidium. Most Jewish members did indeed quit the association, and in July 1938 Hunke was named its president.65 On 1 April 1933, two days after something similar happened at the IHK, the headquarters of the Reich Association of German Industry (RDI) was occupied by SA men. This troop, led by Otto Wagener, succeeded in forcing all Jewish members to quit the organization’s administration and presidium. As if that weren’t enough, Hugenberg soon installed Wagner as the RDI’s commissar—a move tantamount, in the words of Daniela Kahn, to “the end of the independent association.”66 To escape Wagener’s influence, the association president, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, announced in early May 1933 that the organization would be restructured in line with the new regime. At the end of the month the RDI dissolved and merged with the Union of German Employers’ Associations to form the Reich Estate of German Industry.67 In 1935, after the Ordinance on the Law on the Temporary Bolstering of the German Economy, this body was in turn swallowed by the Reich Group Industry and became a semi-governmental organization.68 Similar restructuring processes proceeded in the trade sector, as the examples of the Central Association of the German Bank and Banking Trades69 or the Main Community of German Retailers demonstrate.70 In the case of the Reich associations of hat manufacturers and finery wholesalers, Jews were excluded from leadership positions even when the majority of association members were Jewish.71 While only few associations barred Jewish membership in 1933, the majority disregarded their Jewish member’s interests. In late 193372 the RDI supported the efforts of the DAF to develop its suppliers’ archive, which would help organize the ousting of Jewish businesses.73 Retailers began founding institutions such as the Society for the Promotion of Aryan Leather and Requisites, which were charged with “completing the de-Jewification of our sector.”74 Another instance where Jewish association members felt discrimination was in the strictly regimented distribution of foreign currency.75 By late 1937 the – 55 –

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Reich Economics Ministry used the former lobby groups to implement an across-the-board reduction of foreign currency allotments for Jewish businesses.76

Economic Development

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Boom and Bust Berlin’s rise as one of Germany’s leading industrial locations began in the early nineteenth century and was borne initially by the textile industry. By mid-century, metalworking and machine building also became major industries. The latter made Berlin into a railway hub and encouraged the electrical sector, which would go on to become city’s leading industry by the end of the century.77 The pioneers of this second industrial revolution were Siemens and AEG.78 Parallel to the boom in the electrical industry, the chemicals sector, in particular pharmaceuticals and photography, flourished.79 The city’s trade profited from the expansion in mobility, greater access to information, the increasing political importance and greater economic influence of a population center, whose pro capita tax contributions were higher than in any other Prussian city.80 The boom as a trading location was reflected in city’s bank and stock exchange. Between 1830 and 1870 Berlin became Germany’s financial capital, and after 1871 its international significance was on the rise as well.81 As part of the economic upsurge, Berlin became a modern city, one of whose characteristics was that, as one observer put it, “in practically no other German city … are the closely linked sectors of trade and commerce so compact and centralized.”82 The city’s main artery was Friedrichstraße. To the north of the famous train station the street was lined with theaters. To the south were hotels, entertainment houses, and offices for the fledging German film industry.83 West of Friedrichstraße was the government district along Wilhelmstraße, while to the east, especially in the postal code areas C 2, W 8, and SW 68, was the commercial heart of the city. The garment district was located in the streets around Hausvogteiplatz, and the banks were concentrated in Französischer, Jäger, and Behrenstraßen. Directly adjoining the banking district and across from Berlin Cathedral was the stock exchange. The surrounding streets of the old city were full of stockbrokers and independent traders. Another big attraction was the central covered market, opened in 1886 near Alexanderplatz. It was a main terminal for almost every type of food. The nearby Königstraße, which ran from the royal palace past the Rathaus to Alexanderplatz, was the oldest shopping street in the city. It was crossed by Klosterstraße and Neue Friedrichstraße, which were home to a number of fabric shops.84 – 56 –

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The undisputed number one among the shopping streets as of the late 1890s was Leipziger Straße and its extension Gertraudenstraße. South of it was the newspaper district on both sides of Kochstraße, which was bordered by the insurance district on Lindenstraße. Still further south, Ritterstraße marked the export district.85 Postal codes were an important factor in the quality of a location. In particular for manufacturers, it was a matter of prestige to be located in W 8. Some companies even had that postal code printed on their stationery without actually being located there. The arterial roads—Chausseestraße, Brunnenstraße, Prenzlauer Allee, Greifswalder Straße, Landsberger Allee, Frankfurter Straße and Frankfurter Allee, Köpenicker Straße, Kottbusser Damm, Belle Alliance, Postdamer Straße, and Alt-Moabit—were also very attractive to businesspeople. In addition, there were surrounding towns and villages that had been merged into Greater Berlin in 1920 but that had maintained their old structures and subsidiary centers. Large companies gradually moved out to the periphery along the major transportation axes and sometimes founded their own districts. Areas like Borsigwalde, Siemensstadt, and Spindlersfeld still bear witness to this development today.86 The electrical and chemistry industries received a significant boost from research breakthroughs. For instance, in 1884 Hermann Aron—who was denied a professorship at Friedrich Wilhelm University because he was a Jew—discovered a method for measuring electricity and founded a world-famous company to mass-produce power meters.87 Entrepreneur Leopold Koppel and chemist Fritz Haber formed a close relationship. Koppel helped found the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry and in turn exploited its research, also in the service of wartime production, for his light-bulb company Deutsche Gasglühlicht.88 As a location for research, Berlin profited not just from the wealth of its entrepreneurs, which was manifested in the membership list of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Society, but from their professional knowledge as well.89 To name but one example, Georg Schlesinger took up the chair for tool machine construction and factory organization at the Technical University after impressing his peers with his rationalization of the tool and weapons manufacturer Ludwig Loewe & Co.90 During the First World War Berlin became home to the newly founded wartime economic societies, which traced their origin back to initiatives by Jewish entrepreneurs like Walter Rathenau. At the same time, it was one of the most important producers of weapons for the German forces.91 The volume of weapons manufacturing in the city is evident in the fact that some 500,000 workers took part in arms-sector strikes in early 1918.92 As a result of the Treaty of Versailles, Prussia was stripped of West Prussia and Pomerania and thus lost a part of its hinterlands, leading to “a keenly – 57 –

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felt disruption in supplies of grain and flour to Berlin.”93 Meanwhile, arms production, which had collapsed after the war, was strictly limited by the Treaty of Versailles. The weapons manufacturer Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken, for example, had to let a large portion of its workforce go.94 Other companies such as Siemens moved parts of their military production abroad to the Netherlands or the Soviet Union.95 Yet other companies responded by diversifying. Ludwig Loewe & Co. succeeded in entering the electrical sector via the investment company Gesellschaft für elektrische Unternehmungen. In 1931 the firm became the leading stockholder in the Berlin electrical utility BEWAG.96 Diversification, of course, didn’t always work. Despite coming up with revolutionary designs in the 1920s, Germany’s third-largest airplane manufacturer, Rumpler Flugzeugwerke, never succeeded in breaking into the automotive sector.97 Moreover, restructuring was out of the question for companies that had done business with German colonies or the Entente states. These companies, which often had their headquarters in Berlin, had to be written off. Britain’s Trading with the Enemy Act even stipulated that for the first five years after the Treaty of Versailles companies and entrepreneurs from the Central Powers could not do business via Britain—one of Germany’s most important trading partners before 1914.98 As if that weren’t bad enough, the burdens of war and the BelgianFrench occupation of the Ruhr Area spurred on inflation, the first indications of which were apparent in 1917, but which became ever more dramatic in 1921 and 1922. When hyperinflation was halted with a currency reform in November 1923, many industrial businesses were able to pay off their debts, while trade companies were hit much harder. Even as late as the end of 1930 the commercial register included firms whose capital was listed at the minimal amount of 500 reichsmarks.99 Banks, too, had to swallow losses during the inflationary period and temporarily moved their currency divisions and operations to Amsterdam.100 But ultimately, the crisis strengthened the hands of Berlin’s major banks since they were able to buy up a number of medium- and small-sized banking houses in subcenters such as Frankfurt or Hamburg.101 Despite all the difficulties the city encountered in postwar restructuring and despite high structural unemployment, Berlin was still considered a first-rate industrial and commercial metropolis in the late 1920s.102 According to an estimate by a study committee set up by the Reichstag in 1930 almost a fourth of all listed firms and almost a third of all limited liability companies in Germany had their headquarters in Berlin.103 The electrical industry was still the leading force. It had employed some 175,000 people—more than 40 percent of all those who worked in the sector in Germany. The electrical sector was chiefly responsible for Germany’s posi– 58 –

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tive trade balance and produced around a quarter of the exports.104 Textile processing, which over the course of decades had emancipated itself from textile production, was the city’s second largest industry. The committee summarized its development as follows: “The textile clothing trade has become a perfectly adequate replacement for the textile industry in Berlin, in part because weaving mills have converted over to producing garments and linens. Berlin is Germany’s primary producer of garments and linens as well as the largest producers of caps, hats and finery.”105 In contrast to the electrical industry, garments were often manufactured by small companies. Companies in this branch only employed an average of 2.4 people, and 48,600 (or 92 percent of a total of 52,800) home-manufacturing businesses were involved in making clothes and linen.106 Supporting the garment industry were around 12,000 textile wholesalers and retailers that employed around 66,000 people.107 Whereas the Berlin garment industry had to import fabric from various parts of Germany, the growing furniture industry made use of raw materials, the trees of Brandenburg’s forests, which grew right outside the city’s front door. In addition, a significant paper-processing sector developed. Twenty thousand people worked in this branch of industry, which exported around half of what it produced. Moreover, 68,000 people were employed in Berlin’s newspaper- and book-publishing sector.108 Berlin may have been a significant location for foodstuffs and semi-luxury foods and tobacco production—the Sarotti AG was Germany’s largest chocolate manufacturers and the Schultheiss-Patzenhofer-Brauerei AG was the nation’s biggest brewery—but, unsurprisingly, on the whole the metropolis consumed more foodstuffs than it produced.109 Edible necessities were procured from Brandenburg and Mecklenburg, and commodities like butter and eggs had to be imported from Denmark, Poland, Sweden, and the Baltic countries.110 During the 1920s a new entertainment and shopping district developed in the west of the city along Tauentzienstraße and Kurfürstendamm. It created a stir as a new hub of cosmopolitan culture.111 In June 1927 the Vossische Zeitung newspaper ran an article on the district’s development with the headline: “Downtown’s Affiliate in the West.” One passage from that report read: Kurfüstendamm shows the main commercial development. It’s as though people think this is the only street where you can run a successful business. … Kurfürstendann begins at Wittenbergplatz, so to speak, where it’s called Tauentzienstraße. Amidst the street’s rapid development, the first affiliates of some businesses from the old city center have almost become part of the district’s history. Alongside the Kaufhaus des Westens department store, there are many shoe shops such as Salamander, Stiller and – 59 –

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Leiser. Then there are the large-scale jewelry and photographic stores. … In addition there are numerous other firms whose headquarters are in the old city center.112

The economic crisis that developed into the Great Depression hit Berlin hard. The number of businesses listed in the commercial register declined from approximately 51,000 in 1928 to around 43,000 in 1932.113 In 1932 alone, 2900 more businesses were deleted from than added to the register, and a disproportionate number of deletions occurred in areas that were nonessential to people’s survival, such as luxury-goods manufacturers and car dealerships.114 Business collapsed for culture and entertainment providers. Hence, half of the city’s privately owned theaters went bust during the Depression.115 Beer production was almost halved, and the Schultheiss-Patzenhofer brewery became embroiled in a financial scandal after its merger with the Ostwerke yeast factory—because the main actors in the affair were Jewish, it nurtured anti-Semitic prejudices and allegations.116 The same was true of the collapse of the Darmstädterund Nationalbank in July 1931, a symbol of the banking crisis that was blamed on the Jewish banker Jakob Goldschmidt.117 The effects of the crisis—which even claimed Borsig, Berlin’s biggest and most venerable machine builder, as a victim118—were so dramatic that more and more empty stores appeared even on the city’s main shopping thoroughfares.119 The registry court could not keep pace with all the commercial changes, and the publisher stopped producing its handbook of commercially registered businesses, which had appeared annually despite wars and economic crises since 1864.120 By early 1932 the number of people employed had declined to 1,270,000, while 615,000 people were officially out of work, and every fifth person with a job was working reduced hours for lower wages. Together with Breslau Berlin had the highest rate of unemployment in Germany. By the end of the year the number of jobless has risen to 636,000—a third of the eligible work force.121 Moreover, a comparison of the total number of employed and jobless from 1928 (around 2,200,000) and 1932 (1,910,000) reveals that 290,000 people had withdrawn completely from the working world—or at least were no longer bothering to register as unemployed. In June 1933 a census of professions and businesses concluded that the number of commercial enterprises had increased from 150,000 to 156,000 between 1925 and 1933, but that was not a sign of an upswing. On the contrary, the IHK attributed the small rise to jobless people reacting to the crisis “by opening small independent businesses.”122 This development reinforced the tendency toward small commercial units, especially in the retail sector. By 1933 the average business employed only 2.3 people.123

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Economy

Against this backdrop, intensive discussions were held in 1932 and 1933 on the city’s economic future. The IHK sought to combat doubts about Berlin’s economic prospects by arguing that, while the depression had badly affected the city, it hadn’t altered Berlin’s status as Germany’s leading metropolis. Looking back at the data collected in the census of 1925, the IHK asserted: “The industrial concentration in Berlin is such that in terms of people employed it surpasses whole economic areas and internal German states with an industrial character. … Only North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony have more industrial concentration than Berlin, and they are whole areas while Berlin is a city.”124

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Boom and Bombs Although the first signs of economic recovery became apparent, Berlin—like the industrial Ruhr Area—did not immediately profit from Nazi job-creation programs. On the contrary, the city remained, in the words of Adam Tooze, a “hot spot” of unemployment.125 Nor did the job-creation initiatives of either the city or the heavily advertised “job-creation lottery” of the local savings bank, the Sparkasse, have much success.126 Even the so-called Göring Action, which sent unemployed Berliners out to work the land surrounding the city in the summer of 1933, was merely cosmetic.127 It took until mid-1934 for Germany’s general economic recovery—closely connected to the rearmament—to make itself felt in Berlin.128 By the autumn of 1935 the number of unemployed had declined to 197,000. Der Angriff commented in March 1936: “Thanks to the revival of Berlin’s economy—which is as inseparable now from the German people’s ability to defend themselves as it was 200 years ago under the Soldier King—hundreds of thousands of ethnic German comrades capable of working have been given jobs.”129 In July 1936, the Berlin-Karlsruher Industriewerke reverted to its former name in the commercial register: Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken (German Weapons and Munitions Factories).130 The previous year, in October 1935, the magazine Der deutsche Volkswirt (The German Economist) discussed the company’s balance sheets and determined that “Germany’s liberation from the armaments restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles … has multiplied turnover.”131 The Arado Handelgesellschaft mbH, which sold Fokker airplanes after that company relocated to Holland, was incorporated as the Arado Flugzeug GmbH. A retired air force major was named chief executive officer, and the purpose of the company was redefined to include the production of airplane and airplane parts.132 The commercial register contains ample evidence that the military aircraft industry was being built up anew—apart from the Rumpler Flug-

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zeugwerke, which had produced famous warplanes during World War I, but was considered Jewish and was therefore left out of the action.133 Between 1933 and 1939 more than a dozen commercial enterprises registered themselves explicitly as airplane or airplane parts manufacturing companies.134 There were also suppliers and subsidiaries of the Reich Aviation Ministry such as the Luftfahrtkontor GmbH (est. 1935) or the LuftfahrtErprobungsstelle (est. 1936) that concealed the fact that they were directly subordinate to the rearmament effort.135 Yet, while the Luftwaffe had to be recreated, the rearmament of the army could take advantage of existing capacity. The only new major economic player was the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, which was founded in Berlin in 1937 as a holding for a newly created armaments concern.136 Otherwise the city’s established steel and electrical companies were essentially the ones to profit.137 In addition to the rearmament effort, the concentration of Nazi Party power centers markedly changed the economic landscape of Berlin. For example, the subsidiaries of the DAF, analyzed recently by Rüdiger Hachtmann, were all located in the city.138 As of 1938 the rise of the SS as an economic entity could also be noted in the register. The Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH and the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke GmbH, a construction and a weapons company respectively, which both exploited slave laborers, were registered in Berlin, as were the publisher Nordland Verlag and the SS-owned postal advertising firm Deutsche-Briefkasten-Reklame GmbH.139 Simultaneously the number of Nazi offices and bureaucratic institutions was exploding. The newly established offices of the Four Year Plan alone had one thousand employees by 1938.140 The expansion of bureaucracy worsened the labor shortage that was already making itself felt in 1937,141 and even the IHK complained about the consequences of the overheated economy. In 1938 the Wirtschaftsblatt reported that the contracts “issued on behalf of the Four Year Plan” were exacerbating the shortage of labor. The electrical industry in particular, the IHK wrote, was “being blocked from increasing production capacities by the shortage of necessary specialists and engineers.”142 In October 1938 the IHK reported that further personnel shortages had caused the calling up of army reservists during the Sudetenland crisis.143 The lack of workers, together with strategic military considerations, had already led some industrial electronics companies to be relocated to Thuringia and northern Bavaria.144 In December 1938 the IHK noted that manufacturers of women’s coats were affected “by an increasingly serious shortage of skilled labor.”145 Shortages of labor and raw materials continued in 1939.146 In late July of that year the IHK reported that “capacity is mainly being limited by the lack of workers.”147

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Economy

Yet despite increasing employment and longer working hours, strict regulations meant that spending power grew only slowly and would not regain the predepression level of 1928 until 1938. However, the slow increase of spending power did revive the retail sector, but in contrast to other major German cities, Berlin suffered from frequent supply problems. Butter and meat were often scarce, as were eggs, which had become something of a luxury in Berlin as early as 1935.148 Even before the start of World War II many foods were in effect already being rationed and fresh fruit and vegetables in the city’s markets were often sold out before noon.149 The wholesale sector stagnated because allocation and rationing were replacing supply and demand. The “Reichsnährstand,” formed in fall 1933, was given control over the production and sale of basic foods. The Nazi farming organization developed a rationing system with fixed prices, which, particularly where bread was concerned, dramatically restricted the options of wholesalers, effectively reducing them to links in a completely regulated food production and administration chain. As of 1934, every time metals and other raw materials needed for rearmament had to be imported, the Monitoring Office for Non-Precious Metals took over, meaning that trade on the metals exchange was basically dormant. Trading in shares and bonds declined in both quantity and importance, as the stock exchange was co-opted into silently funding the rearmament effort.150 At the same time, currency regulations and protectionist policies greatly hurt German exports.151 In early 1934, for instance, the IHK reported the electrical exports, historically the main motor of Berlin’s exports, “had sunk to levels never seen before.”152 After Germany suffered a massive lack of foreign currency in 1934, Reich Economics Minister Schacht implemented a program to boost exports. What was called the “additional export procedure” took the nominal profits made by the Reichsbank and its subsidiary the Golddiskontbank (Dego) when they bought up devalued German bonds abroad and used the book profit to subsidize German exports. It also allowed exporters to use a portion of their profits to buy foreign bonds, which they could then cash in at face value. German companies calculated these profits, which ran as high as 85 percent, into the price of the goods they exported and thus could undercut foreign competitors.153 This complicated transaction instrument was necessary because Germany kept the value of the reichsmark artificially high, which meant that nonsubsidized German products would have hardly been competitive abroad. As a result of such subsidies, which were borne by foreign investors and thus had to be kept secret, German exports recovered somewhat.154 The trend accelerated in the course of 1936, although the IHK concluded a year later that only “those companies that tradition-

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ally have foreign sales … are benefiting from good export contracts.”155 In 1938 the export once again ran into difficulties—not the least because of the Nazi regime’s aggressive expansionism.156 In March 1939, after German troops occupied Prague, the IHK reported that the export market was characterized by “significant reticence.”157 The Nazi regime’s policies of annexation and warfare did, however, also bring about opportunities for economic expansion for some Berlin businesses. Almost all of the larger companies that have been subjected to research in recent years acquired businesses or started subsidiaries in the countries occupied by the Wehrmacht.158 Not enough research has been carried out on small- and medium-sized businesses, but there are clear indications that they too tried to profit from German expansionism. A host of businesses chose to locate themselves near the ghettos in Eastern Europe, exploiting forced Jewish labor. Other companies—such as the women’s collar and belt manufacturer A. Blum AG, which had taken over the Jewish firm J. Tützer & Co. beforehand, or the clothing manufacturer Charlotte Röhl—brought in semifurnished wares from the ghettos.159 As if it were a matter of course, a number of companies—the Rohstoff-Handels GmbH, the Haupttreuhand Stelle Ost, and the Deutsche Umsiedlungs-Treuhand GmbH—were also founded in Berlin to exploit occupied areas of Europe and accelerate the racist expulsion and murder policies.160 Turning from catastrophe to statistics, it is noticeable that the number of bankruptcies declined significantly,161 but so did the number of new entries in the commercial register—that was due to the one-sided emphasis on armaments in big companies—as well as the number of deletions of Jewish businesses.162 The number of registered firms went from 42,900 (1932) to 32,400 (1939) to 28,800 (1941)—a drop of around a third.163 Yet the register did not only show an absolute decline but also a fundamental realignment. This was the result of the Law on the Transformation of Incorporated Businesses of 5 July 1934, which simplified the process by which corporations and joint-stock companies could be transformed into private partnerships—usually by simply transferring the companies’ assets.164 It also raised the minimum rates for joint-stock and limited-liability companies and set the minimum capital for joint-stock companies at 500,000 reichsmarks. Since there was also a minimum charge for administration, many public companies transferred their assets to private companies.165 In 1933 there were 16,000 limited-liability companies in the Berlin commercial register. By 1938 there were only 6900. Likewise in 1938, only 1840 joint-stock companies remained where there had once been 3140. The commercial register thus clearly reflects the effects of the 1934 law. The number of private companies remained steady at the cost of the incorporated ones, while the overall number of registered businesses declined.166 – 64 –

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Economy

As of 1942 many businesses were relocated to places that were less threatened by Allied air raids.167 Beginning in 1944, and increasingly after the end of World War II, waves and waves of Berlin companies moved to the western part of Germany.168 In October 1948 the city only had around 20,000 registered commercially active businesses.169 Even if, as Johannes Bähr noted in his study of industry in divided Berlin, “the economic and industrial potential Berlin lost to firms relocating … cannot be shown … on the basis of the commercial register,” it is still remarkable that the number of Berlin businesses was halved between 1932 and 1948.170 This was due not only to the structural and administrative factors we have already discussed, but also to the destruction of Jewish commercial activity.

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Notes 1. Preußisches Staatsministerium, ed., Handbuch über den Preußischen Staat 139 (1935), 141. 2. See Feldman, Allianz, 89–138. 3. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London, 2007), 52f; Albert Fischer, Hjalmar Schacht und Deutschlands “Judenfrage” (Cologne, 1995), 77–94. 4. Tooze, Wages, 207–243; Kopper, Marktwirtschaft, 209–219; Herbst, Deutschland, 166f. For a striking contemporary analysis, see Norbert Mühlen, Der Zauberer. Leben und Anleihen des Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht (Zürich, 1938). 5. Ludolf Herbst, “Walther Funk: Vom Journalisten zum Reichswirtschaftsminister,” in Smelser, Syring, and Zitelmann, eds., Elite, 91–102; Bajohr, Arisierung, 217–221; Barkai, Boykott, 69–72; Genschel, Verdrängung, 144–150. 6. Entry 13 November 1938, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 6, 185. 7. Stenographic protocol of the discussion on the Jewish question hosted by Göring, 12. November 1938, IMT, vol. 28, 499–540, doc. 1816 PS. See also Friedländer, Germany, 280f. 8. Preußisches Staatsministerium, ed., Handbuch über den Preußischen Staat 138 (1934), 331. 9. “Beschluss über die Einführung eines Stadthausiererscheins für Berlin,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 5 November 1934. 10. “Letter of the tax office Moabit West, to the Landesfinanzamt 27.10.1933,” LAB, A Rep. 093-03, 54591. Cf. Friedenberger, Ausplünderung, 58. 11. Ibid., 129–141. 12. Kreutzmüller, Händler, 29. 13. Hertz, Industrie- und Handelskammer, 1–10; Biggeleben, Bollwerk, 308–343. 14. Letter from the IHK to the Police President, 5 January 1916, BLHA, Rep. 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 163/55, 2, Sears, Roebuck & Co. See also Hertz, Industrieund Handelskammer, 32f. 15. Hertz, Industrie- und Handelskammer, 14. 16. Ibid., 35–41.

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17. See Medert, Verdrängung, 29–31. 18. “Die Säuberung der Handelskammern,” Der Angriff, 28 March 1933. 19. Oscar Meyer, Von Bismarck zu Hitler. Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen (Offenbach, 1948), 172f. See also Hertz, Industrie- und Handelskammer, 61–65; Biggeleben, “Verdrängung,” 63–67. 20. “Industrie- und Handelskammer Berlin,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, 6 April 1933. 21. Bajohr, Arisierung, 75. 22. See “Die Zukunft der Handelskammern,” Vossische Zeitung, 23 June 1933. 23. Daniela Kahn, Die Steuerung der Wirtschaft durch Recht im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland: Das Beispiel der Reichsgruppe Industrie (Frankfurt, 2006), 217. 24. Letter from the Reich economics minister to Gelpcke, 4 February 1935; letter from the Reich economics minister to Reinhardt, 4 February 1935, BArch, R 3101, 9404. 25. “Der Abschied von unserem Präsidenten: Die Gedenkrede des Reichswirtschaftsministers,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 16 October 1943. 26. Hertz, Industrie- und Handelskammer, 77f. See also Detlef Krause, “Friedrich Reinhart,” Neue Deutsche Biographie (Berlin, 2003), 366. On the “Circle of Friends of the Reichsführer SS,” see Tobias Bütow and Franka Bindernagel, Ein KZ in der Nachbarschaft: Das Magdeburger Außenlager der Brabag und der “Freundeskreis Himmler” (Cologne, 2003), 41–67. 27. Hertz, Industrie- und Handelskammer, 93–95; Gerhard Kratzsch, “Das wirtschaftspolitische Gauamt: Der Gauwirtschaftsberater,” in Jürgen John, Horst Möller, and Thomas Schaarschmidt eds., Regionale Mittelinstanzen in zentralistischen Führerstaat (Munich, 2007), 218–233, here 230f. 28. Adam Hofri, “The Legal Structure of the Haavara Transfer-Agreement,” in Christoph Kreutzmüller, Michael Wildt, and Moshe Zimmermann (eds.), National Economies, Volks-Wirtschaft, Racism and Economy in Europe between the wars (1918– 1939/45) (Newcastle, 2015), 97–107. 29. Kurznotiz, Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 24 April 1933. 30. My own calculation based on the quarter statistics published by the Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin. 31. “Firmenwahrheit und -klarheit im Geschäftsverkehr,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 January 1936. 32. Grasshoff and Röder, Firma, 15f. 33. “Die Zusammenarbeit der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin mit den Polizeibehörden,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 21 January 1937. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Kreutzmüller and Weigel, Zacouto, 30–33; Friedenberger, Ausplünderung, 149–155.

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38. Grasshoff and Röder, Firma, 15f. See also “Gesetz zur Eintragung von Handelsniederlassungen und das Verfahren in Handelsregistersachen, 10.8.1937,” Reichsgesetzblatt I 1937, 897–899. 39. “Allgemeine Verfügung über die Einrichtung und Führung des Handelsregisters,” Reichsministerialblatt 33 (1937), 20 August 1937. See also “Erweiterung des Mitwirkungsrechts der Industrie- und Handelskammern in Handelsregister- und Firmenführungssachen,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 27 November 1937. 40. See “Verordnung zur Änderung und Ergänzung des § 125 des Gesetzes über die Angelegenheiten der freiwilligen Gerichtsbarkeit,” Reichsgesetzblatt I, 10 August 1937. 41. See notification District Court to Fraenkl & Co, 2 April 1938, AGC, HR A 90, 93974, 1939 (Fraenkl & Co). 42. Notification District Court to Nathan Edelstein, 24 November 1938; Amtsgerichts notation 17 January 1939, both AGC, HR A 90, 100500, 1939 (Nathan Edelstein). 43. Letter from the IHK to Wehrwirtschaftsstelle Berlin, 3 February 1937, BLHA, Rep. 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 163/55, 5. 44. “Anmeldung zur Eintragung in die Einzelhandelsrolle der IHK zu Berlin, als Muster abgedruckt,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 10 April 1934. 45. “Buntes Fragen Allerlei,” Der Kurzberichterstatter, 16 June 1934. 46. “Erlass Görings an die Industrie- und Handelskammern, 4.1.1938,” in Walk, Sonderrecht, 210. The text of Göring’s order was identical to the Third Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law of 14 June 1938. See Reichsgesetzblatt I, 1938, 246ff. See Nietzel, Handeln, 96f. 47. Hans Michalke (born 1879) joined the Berlin IHK when it merged with the Brandenburg IHK. In 1935, a rumor went round that his biggest supporter had been the Jewish lawyer Oscar Meyer. See anonymous letter to the economics minister, n.d. (January 1935), BArch, R 3101, 9404. 48. “Nachprüfung von Entjudungsgeschäften,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrieund Handelskammer zu Berlin, 29 June 1940. See also letter from the IHK to Pfeiffer & Schmidt, 6 October 1941, BLHA, Rep. 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 163/55, 53, Berlt & Silberstein. 49. See Gerhard Kratzsch, Der Gauwirtschaftsapparat der NSDAP. Menschenführung, ‘Arisierung’, Wehrwirtschaft im Gau Westfalen Süd: Eine Studie zur totalitären Herrschaftspraxis (Münster, 1989). 50. Nietzel, Handeln, 93f.; Kratzsch, Gauamt, 218f. 51. Avraham Barkai, “Die deutschen Unternehmer und die Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich,” in Ursula Büttner, ed., Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung (Frankfurt, 2003 [Hamburg, 1992]), 247–272, here 252. 52. Lilla, Statisten, 270f. On the history of the “Fighting Association,” see Heinrich Uhlig, Die Warenhäuser im Dritten Reich (Cologne and Opladen, 1956), 66. 53. “Braune Frühjahrsmesse,” Der Angriff, 14 March 1933; “Am Boykott-Tag im Berliner Aktions-Komitee,” Völkischer Beobachter, 2–3 April 1933.

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54. Technische Hochschule Berlin Programm für das Wintersemester 1935/36 und das Sommersemester 1936 (Berlin, 1935), 73; Technische Hochschule Berlin Personal- und Vorlesungs-Verzeichnis für das Wintersemester 1936/37 und das Sommersemester 1937, 71. Between 1936 and 1939, Questionnaire Heinrich Hunke, 23 September 1946, Institut für Zeitgeschichte Munich, OMGUS 2/232-1. See Uwe Westphal, Werbung im Dritten Reich (Berlin, 1989), 31–44. 55. James, Deutsche Bank, 30; James, “Die Deutsche Bank und die Diktatur,” in Lothar Gall et al., Die Deutsche Bank: 1870–1995 (Munich, 1995), 315–408, here 393. 56. Heinrich Hunke, “Die Lage,” Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft, 7 October 1935, 882. See also “Die Juden in der deutschen Wirtschaft,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 5 October 1935; Wiesen, Marketplace, 30–34; Genschel, Verdrängung, 124. 57. Genschel, Verdrängung, 68. 58. Heinrich Hunke, Grundzüge der deutschen Volks- und Wehrwirtschaft (Berlin, 1943 [Berlin, 1938]), 84. 59. Jan Schleusener, Eigentumspolitik im NS-Staat: Der staatliche Umgang mit Handlungs- und Verfügungsrechten über privates Eigentum 1933–1939 (Frankfurt et al., 2009), 59–102. 60. “Was tut der Gauwirtschaftsberater?” Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 October 1937. 61. Letter from the Berlin Procurement Office to Lippert, 13 July 1936, LAB, A Pr Br Rep 057, 1741; letter from attorney Erich Naue to the Board of Directors Orenstein & Koppel AG, 10 December 1935; letter from attorney Erich Naue to Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim, 16 January 1936, BArch, R 8119 F, P 2671. See also Münzel, Verdrängung, 107. 62. Eva Balz and Anne Paltian, “Ebro Upholstery,” in Kreutzmüller and Nürnberg, eds., Final sale, 24–28, here 27f. 63. James, Arisierung, 60. 64. “Die Entjudung des Berliner Einzelhandels,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrieund Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 February 1939. See also letter from the Gau economic advisor to Gau Treasurer, 22 October 1938, BArch, NS 1, 550. 65. Biggeleben, “Verdrängung,” 71–78. 66. Kahn, Steuerung, 154–157, here 156. 67. Ibid., 163f. 68. Ibid., 218–227. 69. Harold James, Verbandspolitik im Nationalsozialismus. Von der Interessenvertretung zur Wirtschaftsgruppe. Der Centralverband des Deutschen Bank- und Bankiergewerbes 1932–1945 (Munich and Zürich, 2001), 45–126. 70. Grünfeld, Grünfelds, 104f. 71. Letter from the Central Association to the Central Committee of the German Jews for Assistance and Construction, 16 November 1933, CAHJP, HM 2/8791 (RGVA 721/1/2946). 72. Memo of CV, n.d. (1934), CAHJP, HM 2/8693 (RGVA 701, 20). 73. Newsletter Association for the Advancement of the Interests of Germany’s Chemical Industry, 26 January 1934, CAHJP, HM 2/8787 (RGVA 721/1/2880). 74. Newsletter Economic Group Retail, 16 July 1938, Östereichisches Staatsarchiv (ÖStA), 04/02, 2160/00, vol. I.

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75. Kahn, Steuerung, 214f. 76. See chapter 5. 77. See Ingrid Thienel, Städtewachstum im Industrialisierungsprozeß des 19. Jahrhunderts: Das Berliner Beispiel (Berlin and New York, 1973); Lothar Baar, Die Berliner Industrie in der industriellen Revolution (Berlin, 1966). 78. Johannes Bähr, Industrie im geteilten Berlin (1945–1990). Die elektrotechnische Industrie und der Maschinenbau im Ost-West-Vergleich. Branchenentwicklung, Technologien und Handlungsstrukturen (Munich, 2001), 25. See also Ursula Mader, Emil und Walther Rathenau in der elektrochemischen Industrie (1888–1907): Eine historische Studie (Berlin, 2001); Wilfried Feldenkirchen, Siemens: Von der Werkstatt zum Weltunternehmen (Munich, 1997). 79. Ausschuss zur Untersuchung der Erzeugungs- und Absatzbedingungen der deutschen Wirtschaft, ed., Das Wirtschaftsleben der Städte, Landkreise und Landgemeinden. Verhandlungen und Berichte des Unterausschusses für allgemeine Wirtschaftsstruktur, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1930), 70; “Berlins Aufstieg zur Wirtschafts- und Industrie-Metropole des Reichs,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 14 August 1937. 80. Hartmut Berghoff, “Der Berliner Kapitalmarkt im Aufbruch (1830–1870),” in Hans Pohl, ed., Geschichte des Finanzplatzes Berlin (Frankfurt, 2002), 53–102, here 75–88. 81. Christoph Buchheim, “Deutsche Finanzmetropole von internationalem Rang (1870–1914),” in Pohl, Geschichte, 103–156, here 126–142. 82. “Berliner Wirtschaftsgeographie,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 30 April 1940. See also Untersuchungsausschuss, Wirtschaftsleben, 22; Berghoff, Kapitalmarkt, 97. 83. Ralph Hoppe, Die Friedrichstraße: Pflaster der Extreme (Berlin, 1999), 52–85. 84. Benedikt Goebel, Der Umbau Alt-Berlins zum modernen Stadtzentrum: Planungs-, Bau- und Besitzgeschichte des historischen Berliner Stadtkerns im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2003); Willy Lesser, Die Geschäftsstadt Berlin in baulicher, städtebaulicher und wirtschaftlicher Hinsicht am Vorabend des Weltkrieges (Berlin, 1915), 27f. 85. Herbert Schwenk, Lexikon der Berliner Stadtentwicklung (Berlin, 2002), 240f.; Alfred Zimm, Die Entwicklung des Industriestandortes Berlin (Berlin, 1959), 61–70; Lesser, Geschäftsstadt, 28–30. 86. Bähr, Industrie, 37; Zimm, Entwicklung, 87–104. 87. Shaul Katzir, From academic physics to invention and industry: The course of Hermann Aron’s (1845–1913) career (Berlin, 2009), http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/ en/forschung/Preprints/P370.PDF, 21–28. 88. Kreutzmüller, Geld, 27f. See also Wilhelm Treue, “Jüdisches Mäzenatentum für die Wissenschaft in Deutschland,” Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 64 (1992), 284–308. 89. Rüdiger Hachtmann, Wissenschaftsmanagement im ‘Dritten Reich’. Geschichte der Generalverwaltung der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, 2 vols. (Göttingen, 2007), 1:41– 47. See also Claudia Bergemann, ed., Mitgliederverzeichnis der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1991). 90. Eduard Knobloch, ed., The shoulders on which we stand: 125 Jahre TU Berlin (Berlin, 2004), 154f., entry Georg Schlesinger, http://opus.kobv.de/tuberlin/voll

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texte/2008/2012/html/festschrift/schlesinger.htm. Schlesinger was layed off from the university for being Jewish and arrested as a spy in 1933. He was able to escape Germany via Belgium to Britain, where he died in 1949; ibid. 91. Jürgen Kocka, “Kriegssozialismus? Unternehmer und Staat 1914–1918,” in Industrie- und Handelskammer Berlin, ed., Berlin und seine Wirtschaft (Berlin and New York, 1987), 155–176, here 168f. 92. Materna and Ribbe, Geschichte, 148. 93. Untersuchungsausschuss, Wirtschaftsleben, 99. 94. “Berlin-Karlsruher Industrie-Werke, vorm. Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken,” Der Deutsche Volkswirt 4/29, 11 October 1935. 95. Kreutzmüller, Händler, 33; Heinz Bontrup and Norbert Zdrowomyslaw, Die deutsche Rüstungsindustrie: Vom Kaiserreich bis zur Bundesrepublik (Heilbronn, 1988), 105. 96. Irmer, Zeitpunkt, 128–135. 97. Lutz Budraß, Flugzeugindustrie und Luftrüstung in Deutschland 1918–1945 (Düsseldorf, 1998), 56 and 81. See Christian Schütz, “Berlin,” in Andreas Nachama and Gereon Sievernich, eds., Jüdische Lebenswelten: Katalog zur Ausstellung (Berlin, 1991), 205. 98. Kreutzmüller, Händler, 24. 99. Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economy and Society in the German Inflation 1914–1924 (New York et al., 1993); Carl Ludwig Holtfrerich, Die deutsche Inflation 1914–1923: Ursachen und Folgen in internationaler Perspektive (Berlin and New York, 1980). 100. Kreutzmüller, Händler, 47–59. 101. Harald Wixforth, “Die Banken und der Kollaps der Mark,” in Manfred Köhler and Keith Ulrich, eds., Banken, Konjunktur und Politik: Beiträge zur Geschichte deutscher Banken im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Essen, 1995), S. 55–73, here 59 and S. 66f.; Karl Erich Born, Geld und Banken im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1976), 456–458. 102. Untersuchungsausschuss, Verflechtung, 151. 103. Ibid., 152. See also Martin Fiedler, “Die 100 größten Unternehmen in Deutschland, nach der Zahl ihrer Beschäftigen, 1907, 1938, 1973 und 1995,” Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 44 (1999), 32–66. 104. Untersuchungsausschuss, Verflechtung, 155. 105. Ibid., 157. 106. “Berlins wirtschaftliche Verflechtung,” Mitteilungen des Statistischen Amts der Stadt Berlin 1928, here 48f. 107. Untersuchungsausschuss, Verflechtung, 157. 108. Ibid., 157f. 109. Ausschuss, Wirtschaftsleben, 99–101. See also Rita Gundermann and Bernhard Wulff, Der Sarotti-Mohr: Die bewegte Geschichte einer Werbefigur (Berlin, 2004); Erich Borkenhagen, 125 Jahre Schultheiss-Brauerei (Berlin, 1967). 110. Untersuchungsausschuss, Verflechtung, 160; Untersuchungsausschuss, Wirtschaftsleben, 99–101. 111. Christoph Kreutzmüller, “Kaffee, Vergnügen und Kommerz. Geschäfte am Kurfürstendamm,” in Michael Zajonz and Sven Kuhrau, eds., Heimweh nach dem

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Kurfürstendamm: Geschichte, Gegenwart und Perspektiven des Berliner Boulevards (Petersberg, 2009), 73–83, here 75–78. 112. “City Filiale im Westen,” Vossische Zeitung, 21 June 1927. See also Kreutzmüller, “Kaffee,” 78, Sven Kuhrau, “Sehnsucht nach Stadt: Eine Baugeschichte der Parzelle Kurfürstendamm 227,” in Kuhrau and Michael Zajonz, Heimweh, 11–23, here 13–18. 113. Statistisches Amt der Stadt Berlin, ed., Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Berlin 1933, 82. 114. My own calculations based on the Zenralhandelsregisterbeilage des Reichsanzeigers. See also “Die gewerbliche Wirtschaft nach der Zählung von 1933,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 25 August 1934. 115. Weigel, “Theater.” 116. Erich Abraham, Konzernkrach. Hintergründe Entwicklungen und Folgen der Deutschen Konzernkrisen (Berlin, 1933), 81–99. See also Kreutzmüller, Händler, 81f. 117. “Die Wirtschaftskatastrophe und die Juden,” Der Angriff, 14 January 1933; “Vierzehn Jahre jüdische Wirtschaftsskandale,” Der Angriff, 18 February 1933; “Juden mit der weissen Weste,” Der Angriff, 28 May 1935. 118. Bähr, Industrie, 27. 119. “So geht es aufwärts in Berlin,” Der Angriff, 16 March 1936. 120. Berliner Handels-Register 67 (Berlin, 1931). 121. Ribbe and Materna, Geschichte, 169. 122. “Die Ergebnisse der gewerblichen Betriebszählung vom 16. Juni 1933 in Berlin, Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 27 January 1936. 123. Ibid.; see also Ausschuss, Verflechtung, 155; Kleines Berlin-Taschenbuch, 104f. 124. “Berlin stirbt ab?” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 10 April 1933 (emphasis in original). 125. Tooze, Wages, 45. See Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power 1933–1939 (London, 2005), 340f. 126. “Stadt Berlin beschafft Arbeit,” Berliner-Börsen-Courier, 13 May 1933; 115. Geschäftsbericht der Sparkasse der Stadt Berlin für das Jahr 1933 (Berlin, 1934), 8. 127. Sopade-Berichte 1 (1934), 218. 128. Toozes, Wages, 61f. 129. “So geht es aufwärts in Berlin,” Der Angriff, 16 March 1936. 130. Entry, Zentralhandelsregisterbeilage des Reichsanzeigers, 14 July 1936. 1. 131. “Berlin-Karlsruher Industrie-Werke, vorm. Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken,” Der deutsche Volkswirt, 11 October 1935. 132. Entry, Zentralhandelsregisterbeilage des Reichsanzeigers, 15 April 1933, 2. See also Burdraß, Flugzeugindustrie, 94. 133. See Schütz, “Berlin,” 205. 134. My own calculations based on the Zentralhandelsregisterbeilage des Reichsanzeigers. 135. Entry, Zentralhandelsregisterbeilage des Reichsanzeigers, 19 July 1935, 1 (Luftfahrt-Kontor GmbH); Entry, Zentralhandelsregisterbeilage des Reichsanzeigers, 29 May 1936, 1 (Luftfahrt-Erprobungsstelle GmbH). See also Bähr, Dresdner Bank, 396f. 136. August Meyer, Hitlers Holding: Die Reichswerke ‘Hermann Göring’ (Munich and Vienna, 1999), 91–99.

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137. 35. Geschäftsbericht der Siemens-Schuckertwerke AG, 1937, 41. See also Feldenkirchen, Siemens, 146. 138. Rüdiger Hachtmann, Das Wirtschaftsimperium der Deutschen Arbeitsfront 1933–1945 (Göttingen, 2012). 139. Zenralhandelsregisterbeilage, 5 May 1936, 1; Zenralhandelsregisterbeilage, 5 September 1938, 1; Zenralhandelsregisterbeilage, 18 June 1938, 2. See also Hermann Kaienburg, Der Militär- und Wirtschaftskomplex der SS im KZ-Standort SachsenhausenOranienburg. Schnittpunkt von KZ-System, Waffen-SS und Judenmord (Berlin, 2006), 97–99. 140. Herbst, Deutschland, 168. 141. “Berlins Aufstieg zur Wirtschafts- und Industrie-Metropole des Reichs,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 14 August 1937. See also “Die Wirtschaftslage im Juni 1937,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 17 July 1937. 142. “Die Wirtschaftslage im Juni 1938,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 17 June 1938. 143. “Die Wirtschaftslage im September 1938,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 27 October 1938. 144. Bähr, Industrie, 41. 145. “Die Wirtschaftslage im Dezember 1938,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 17 January 1939. See also Tooze, Wages, 260. 146. “Die Wirtschaftslage im Bezirk der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin Ende März 1939,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 29 April 1939. 147. “Die Wirtschaftslage im Bezirk der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin Ende Juli 1939,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 26 August 1939. 148. “Einzelhandelsumsätze 1934,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 March 1935; “Einzelhandelsumsätze im Januar 1937,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 April 1937; “Einzelhandelsumsätze im November 1938,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 27 January 1939; Sopade-Berichte 2 (1935), 1251–1257. See also Michael Wildt, Der Traum vom Sattwerden. Hunger und Protest. Schwarzmarkt und Selbsthilfe in Hamburg 1945–1948 (Hamburg, 1986), 12–15. 149. Sopade-Berichte 6 (1939), 636. 150. Medert, Verdrängung, 164–188. 151. Institut für Konjunkturforschung, ed., Vierteljahreshefte für Konjunkturforschung 8/1 (1933), 19f. See also Tooze, Wages, 50f. Ludolf Herbst, Der Totale Krieg und die Ordnung der Wirtschaft: Die Kriegswirtschaft im Spannungsfeld von Politik, Ideologie und Propaganda 1939–1945 (Stuttgart, 1982), 135f. 152. “Die Wirtschaftslage im März 1934,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 10 April 1934. See also “Die Wirtschaftslage im September 1934,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 5 October 1934; “Die Wirtschaftslage im April 1935,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 May 1935; “Die Wirtschaftslage im August 1935,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 September 1935.

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153. Tooze, Wages, 232f.; Kreutzmüller, Händler, 60; Kopper, Marktwirtschaft, 156; Herbst, Krieg, 145. 154. Report by Martin Baum, 22 December 1938, BLHA, Rep 36 A, 2256. 155. “Die Wirtschaftslage im Januar 1936,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 February 1936. 156. “Der Verlauf des Wirtschaftsjahres 1938 im Bezirk der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 17 March 1939. 157. “Die Wirtschaftslage Ende März 1939,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 29 April 1939. 158. See Ralf Ahrens, “Krieg und Prozess,” in Ahrens et al., Flick: Der Konzern, die Familie, die Macht (Munich, 2009), 284–325; Harald Wixforth, Die Expansion der Dresdner Bank in Europa (Munich, 2006); Kreutzmüller, Händler, 120–134. 159. Peter Klein, Die ‘Ghettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt’ 1940–1945: Eine Dienststelle im Spannungsfeld von Kommunalbürokratie und staatlicher Verfolgungspolitik (Hamburg, 2009), 273. The general partner of A. Blum KG was Anna Blum, and Goerings banker Fritz Sponholz was a limited partner. The owner of the Charlotte Röhl company was Charlotte Röhl. See DjGB. 160. Statement by Karl Maria Hettlage, n.d. (1946), in IfZ, ZS 920-1; Ingo Loose, Kredite für NS-Verbrechen: Die deutschen Kreditinstitute in Polen und die Ausraubung der polnischen und jüdischen Bevölkerung 1939–1945 (Oldenburg and Munich, 2007), 102f.; Gerhard Wolf, Ideologie und Herrschaftsrationalität: Nationalsozialistische Germanisierungspolitik in Westpolen (Hamburg, 2012). 161. Statistisches Amt, Berlin, 184. 162. “Statistik über die handelsgerichtlich eingetragenen Firmen im Bezirk der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 27 May 1938. 163. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Berlin 1933, 82; Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Berlin 1945, 176. 164. Proposal by the Finance Ministry Cabinet for the Law on the Transformation of Corporations of 22 June 1934, BArch, R 43 II, 370. A note on the file indicates that the law was “taken care of” during the cabinet meeting of 3 July 1934. 165. “Das Gesetz über die Umwandlung von Kapitalgesellschaften,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 15 November 1934. 166. The figures are from Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Berlin 1933, 82; Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Berlin 1935, 230; Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Berlin 1937, 195; Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Berlin 1939, 214. 167. Laurenz Demps, “Berlin im Bombenkrieg,” in Wildt and Kreutzmüller, Berlin, 343–356; Roger Moorhouse, Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital 1939–1945 (London, 2010). 168. Bähr, Industrie, 44, 71f. 169. Deutsches Handelsadressbuch, Reichsadressbuch für Wirtschaft und Verkehr (Berlin), 1949, III. 170. Bähr, Industrie, 75.

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Chapter 3

Jewish Commercial Activity

 Businesspeople

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Jews in Berlin “Berlin unites all the loose ends of the entire cultural life of Jews in Germany,”1 wrote the Jewish teacher and publicist Eugen Wolbe in his 1937 book History of the Jews in Berlin. The most important Jewish institutions were located in the city. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Berlin was far and away the German city with the largest Jewish community. Especially during and after World War I, their numbers rose dramatically. In 1925 a census revealed that some 173,000 Jews lived in Berlin—although many questioned whether the actual figure was not considerably higher. The background here was, firstly, speculation that many Jews had not identified themselves as such. And, secondly, there was also disagreement as to what made someone Jewish. The 1925 census merely asked citizens to check a box if they were of Jewish faith. But how people saw themselves did not necessarily square with the way others defined them—notwithstanding how nebulous and contradictory the categories employed may have been. The census carried out in June 1933 was based on the same principles as the one from 1925—much to the dissatisfaction of antiSemites, who saw it as similarly flawed. The stakes, however, were much higher. The question of who was a Jew was no longer merely a statistical issue, but rather the basis of increasingly threatening policies of persecution. It is thus important to stress that we do not know exactly how many people living in Berlin were persecuted as Jews. The only certain thing is – 74 –

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Jewish Commercial Activity

that the number is greater than the total number of Jews identified in the 1933 census.2 In the occupation and enterprise census of 1933 a total of 160,564 people (4.3 percent of the population) registered as being of Jewish faith. Here we can see that the zenith of Jewish immigration to Germany had already been reached. Aging as well as increased emigration from Germany had led to a decline in the Jewish population even before 1933.3 The decline, however, did nothing to alter the basic significance of the Reich capital. On the contrary, Jews who had moved to Berlin from smaller towns and communities bolstered the city’s status as the center of German-Jewish life. Around a third of all Jews in Germany and more than half of all Jews in Prussia lived in Berlin. After World War I waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe had made the city “one of the biggest centers of migration in Europe.”4 There were many Jews among these migrants, so that almost a quarter of Jews in Berlin did not possess a German passport. In comparison to the other cities of the German Reich, the number of Jews who were not German citizens in Berlin’s population was high. The largest subgroup was Jews from Poland. In 1925 there were 22,580 Polish Jews living in Berlin, followed by 5326 Austrian Jews and 5158 Czechoslovakian Jews. By 1933 the number of non-German Jews declined in line with the general Jewish population in the city, and the proportions shifted. The number of Polish Jews (20,725) almost remained steady, while the corresponding figures for Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jews were 2412 and 813. The second largest group of non-German Jews was those without any citizenship at all, 9054 in total.5 We can safely assume that the growth in the number of stateless Jews resulted from people being expatriated and that the situation of these people was quite precarious even before 1933.6 Jews were concentrated in six central districts: Charlottenburg (27,000 or 9.2 percent of the population), Wilmersdorf (26,600 or 13.5 percent), Mitte (24,400 or 9.2 percent), Prenzlauer Berg (ca. 18,100 or 5.8 percent), Schöneberg (ca. 16,300 or 7.4 percent), and Tiergarten (12,300 or 4.9 percent). The State Statistical Office commented: “The proportion of the Jewish population in six districts exceeds the already high Berlin average. … A comparison with the 34 largest cities in Prussia after Berlin reveals that even the one with proportionally the most Jews, Frankfurt am Main, is still surpassed in this regard … by the districts Wilmersdorf, Mitte, Charlottenburg, Schöneberg, Prenzlauer Berg and Tiergarten. Among them, Wilmersdorf already had the highest percent of Jews of all German cities in 1910, when the district was an independent city.”7 Within these districts, Jews tended to live in certain streets and neighborhoods such as Kurfürstendamm, Bayrischer Platz, and the Scheunen– 75 –

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viertel. There were remarkably few Jews in peripheral districts like Köpenick, Reinickendorf, and Spandau.8 The high concentration of Jews in certain areas of the city might suggest a high degree of sociocultural isolation, but the figures concerning mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews tell a different story. In 1929, 45 percent of all Jews in Berlin married a non-Jew—a far higher percentage than elsewhere in the Reich.9 Such figures indicate that Berlin’s Jews were deeply integrated and connected with the city’s non-Jewish population. Jewish life in Berlin was not marked traditionally by persecution and isolation. On the contrary, in most areas, people lived together peacefully. This is a point that research focusing on discrimination and anti-Semitism often misses.

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Jewish Businesspeople In his 1931 study The Economic Crisis of German Jews, sociologist Alfred Marcus neatly summed up Berlin’s significance for Jewish businesspeople: “The centralization of majorly important parts of the whole economic apparatus creates a special situation in the Reich capital and is very attractive.”10 As a group, Jewish businesspeople were very heterogeneous. On the one hand, there was a Jewish economic elite that was “much more concentrated [in Berlin] than in any other German city.”11 These families were disproportionately represented within large commercial enterprises and formed an elitist cadre that saw itself as a patriciate.12 On the other hand there were also numerous small merchants who operated on the margins of the law and whom the writer Joseph Roth—who had also made his way from Eastern Galicia to Berlin—vividly described as Luftmenschen, “people living of thin air.”13 Statistics from the 1925 census, which were published in the late 1920s by Heinrich Silbergleit, the retired Jewish director of the Berlin Statistical Office, offer a sketch of Jewish commercial activity in the city.14 They make clear that there were only a few differences between Jews in Berlin and Jews in Prussia. That, of course, is hardly surprising since the high number of Berlin Jews greatly influenced the Prussian average. Jews remained relatively fixed in the historical structures of Jewish business, which could be traced to the nineteenth century and sometimes all the way back to the Middle Ages. But two points need to be made. Firstly, a large number of Jewish Berliners were self-employed. Secondly, the proportion of Jews who did industrial work (31.7 percent) was much higher than in cities such as Breslau (24.5 percent) and Frankfurt (21.4 percent). In Frankfurt and Breslau the relation of self-employed Jews doing industrial and craftsman work versus trading was 77:23 and 76:24 respectively. That was close to the Prussian average of 75:25, whereas the ratio in Berlin was 67:33.15 – 76 –

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Jewish Commercial Activity

Berlin was also unusual in terms of Jews’ distribution within economic groups. At 8.1 percent, the percentage of Jews working in food industries was significantly lower than the Prussian average of 15.9. However, the proportion of Jews who worked in the garment sector, 53.5 percent, was much higher than the Prussian average of 44.4.16 The proportion of selfemployed Jews working in the clothing industry was also particularly high. In an article published in February 1931 in the Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden (Newspaper for Jewish Demography and Statistics), statistician Israel Koralnik concluded that “the strong representation of Jewish industrial workers and craftspeople in the garment sector is not an expression of any particular Jewish love for this area, but merely the result of the fact that entrepreneurs predominate within the Jewish populace, and the decentralized garment sector has a greater need for businesses and entrepreneurial talents.”17 Koralnik may have mistaken cause for effect. Nonetheless, it is evident that the textile and garment industry offered many Jews the opportunity to get into business as well as something to cling to in rocky economic times. The example of Jack Gryntuch is fairly typical. Gryntuch was in transit from Poland to Brazil, when an illness forced him to a stop over in Berlin in 1926. When he had recovered, his travel documents had expired and his money run out, so he started a small tailor shop to earn his living.18 There was a lot of discussion in Weimar Republic about how much Jews who had lived in Germany for a long time differed from their newly immigrated coreligionists from Eastern Europe. Koralnik explicitly pointed out that a disproportionate number (almost 56 percent) of employed “Eastern Jews” worked in the textile-and-garment and food sectors.19 The public perception of Eastern European Jews, derogatively called Ostjuden, was heavily influenced by newspaper reports about illegal and semilegal activities.20 However, leaving aside the racist stereotypes at play, this view of Eastern European Jews is misleading in two respects. Numerous families had already moved to Berlin from the east, chiefly from Silesia and Poznan, in the nineteenth century. These people had made careers in various professions and now considered themselves to be part of the Jewish establishment. Moreover there were immigrants who came to Berlin in the wake of World War I—people who opted for Germany and brought considerable resources with them. One was Chaim Kahan, who had built up a petroleum company in Baku. After the October Revolution he managed to rescue three oil tankers and resettled to Berlin. There he founded the Naphta Industrie- und Tankanlagen AG. By the mid-1920s he had become Germany’s third-largest oil importer.21 In the mid-1920s, Jewish circles were already discussing whether concentration on less-productive economic areas, which were past their ze– 77 –

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nith, was the symptom of a general crisis. In November 1925 the business editor of the Vossische Zeitung newspaper and later deputy director of the predecessor to the Wiener Library, Kurt Zielenziger, warned of the “demise of the Jewish middle class.”22 In 1931 sociologist Alfred Marcus published an analysis of the “economic crisis of German Jews.”23 At the same time, the Prussian Association of Jewish Communities established a committee to investigate the issue.24 It is difficult to determine whether Jews in Berlin were really facing a singular, continuing economic crisis.25 On the one hand Jewish and non-Jewish businesses were becoming more equal than they were elsewhere.26 On the other hand, however, the average income of Jews at the end of the 1920s was markedly higher than that of non-Jews, and Jews paid between fifteen and sixteen percent of the city’s taxes.27 Whatever the case may have been, the depression rendered such discussions obsolete.28 Even before 1933 unemployment among Jews was worsened not only by economically motivated redundancies, but by anti-Semitism as well. Apparently, many of those laid off tried to keep their heads above water by starting small-business enterprises.29 In June 1933 there were 53,628 freelance Jewish entrepreneurs, 32,880 Jewish employees with permanent contracts, and 10,018 blue-collar Jewish workers.30 Even allowing for the differences in the defining criteria between 1925 and 1933, it’s clear that the number of Jewish entrepreneurs had risen dramatically in eight years. The reason was undoubtedly that Jews were more apt to be fired than nonJews. Alexander Szanto, later the bookkeeper of the Jewish Economic Aid Organization, a Jewish self-help group within the Nazi Germany, recalled the year 1931: “The Golden Twenties were at an end. Jewish workers were increasing getting sucked into the whirlpool of unemployment and economic crisis. The emphasis was on finding new opportunities for making money.”31 Since many Jews were not German citizens and had only limited residence permits, they feared deportation if they registered themselves as unemployed.32 So they started new businesses to survive, thus becoming part of the wave of new commercial enterprises the IHK described as a side effect of the economic crisis. Paradoxically, the enormous increase in the number of new companies was by no means an expression of economic strength. On the contrary, it was evidence of economic emergency.

Commercial Enterprises Number Just as it is difficult to reconstruct exactly how many people in Berlin were persecuted as Jews, up until now the number of Jewish business was also – 78 –

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Jewish Commercial Activity

unknown. Statisticians at the time may have been interested in this figure, but their numbers always referred to the census of 1925, which, as we have just seen, were hardly representative of the years after the start of the Great Depression and the explosion in the numbers of small commercial enterprises.33 Citing the 1925 census, Beate Schreiber arrived at a rough figure of 29,000 Jewish businesses. But given that she correlates the number of Jewish employees in 1925 with the number of self-employed Jews in 1933, this figure just cannot be correct.34 The data collected by the research project upon which this book is based offers a more precise picture. When we look at the commercial register we see that in 1933, 6890 businesses were identified as Jewish. As mentioned in the introduction, samples have shown that only two-thirds of all registered businesses that could be defined as Jewish actually were, so we can assume that there were around 10,000 Jewish businesses in Berlin in the register. In June 1933 the register contained 42,000 companies, meaning that almost every fourth registered business was “Jewish.” This figure conforms to the estimates made by Marcus, who also analyzed the commercial register for his 1931 study.35 However, since the majority of commercial enterprises were not listed in the register, the figure of 10,000 does not reflect the total number of Jewish businesses, large and small, in Berlin. A study by the Berlin Statistical Office in 1933 put the total of nonagricultural commercial establishments at 275,000, suggesting that less than one-sixth of all commercial enterprises were registered.36 Yet it might be over-simplistic just to multiply the number of Jewish businesses in the commercial register by a factor of six. As Avraham Barkai showed in his standard work on the destruction of Jewish enterprise, in the retail sector Jews had “the bigger and more profitable businesses.”37 Hence, Jewish companies were more likely to be registered than German ones. Yet, even if we assume that every fifth Jewish business was officially registered, that still leaves around 50,000 Jewish companies in 1933. The accuracy of this estimate is supported by the fact that the 1933 census identified 53,628 freelance Jewish entrepreneurs, including those who were temporarily unemployed.38 Moreover, the figure corresponds to the only surviving statistic, set up by the Gau economic advisor in October 1938, on the total number of Jewish businesses.39 Our best estimate is therefore that there were around 50,000 businesses defined as Jewish in Berlin in June 1933. If Barkai is correct in his estimation of around 100,000 Jewish businesses in Germany as a whole in June 1933, then Berlin would have been home to approximately half of all German-Jewish businesses, although only 32 percent of German Jews lived there.40 Since Barkai’s estimate was based on the data from 1925, his figure probably needs to be corrected – 79 –

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upward. Nonetheless, the estimate we have illustrates the immense importance Berlin had for Jews as a commercial location—and the immense importance of Jews in the city’s commercial life.

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Trade and Industry It’s not easy to distinguish between trade and industrial production sectors since the dividing lines were blurred and especially small- and mediumsized companies produced and sold their wares. The highly regarded company Kopp & Joseph, for instance, did not just make perfumes, bathroom products, and cosmetics. It also operated as a wholesaler for those products as well as bandages and hospital supplies. In addition, it ran two retail outlets in Berlin.41 The entries in the commercial register are often disappointingly unrevealing. Categories like “knitware, wool, and knit fabrics” recur constantly and say nothing about whether the company in question was involved in production or sales.42 In collecting our data, we decided only companies that explicitly identified their purpose as production would be marked as such. A count of the entries in the commercial register in 1933 revealed 5368 Jewish companies in the areas of sales and distribution and 1399 in industry and handicraft.43 Of the trade companies almost 2000 were wholesalers or representatives. This indicates Berlin’s importance as a trading metropolis. The remaining businesses were mainly involved in retail. In 1933 every tenth retail store was considered Jewish.44 Of special symbolic significance were the large department stores like N. Israel, Hermann Tietz, and Wertheim. With the exception of Rudolf Karstadt, all big Berlin department stores were owned by their Jewish founders’ families.45 A breakdown of relations between trade and industry reveals a high Jewish representation in industrial sectors such as publishing and printing (92 percent), electrical products (50 percent), and chemicals and medicines (38 percent). These modern sectors were the ones that displayed the tendency toward equilibrium between Jews and non-Jews noted by Silbergleit most clearly.46 As a whole, an analysis of the relation between trade and industry in the database revealed significant deviations from the results of the 1925 census. The data put the ratio of trade to industry at 78:22 whereas in the 1925 census it was 67:33. This might have been the result of the Great Depression, or the difference could simply reflect the classification difficulties discussed above. As we shall see, in the textiles sector another reason for the deviation was the fact that the vast majority of small supply companies weren’t registered. Moreover, only 137 Jewish handicraft companies could be found on the rolls, whereas a study by the artisans committee of the Reich Deputation of German Jews in early sum– 80 –

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mer 1935 found at least 4440 Jewish handicraft enterprises in the register of artisans in Berlin.47

Branches An initial survey of the distribution of Jewish companies by branch can be found in table 3.1. It shows that while Jewish businesses operated in every sector of the economy, the central concentrations were in the areas of textiles and clothing, foodstuffs, and banks and insurance. Well over half of the Jewish companies in the database operated in these traditional Jewish areas of business, compared to only 46.8 in Frankfurt.48

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Table 3.1. Jewish companies according to branch (1933) Branch textiles and clothing foodstuffs and semi-luxury foods and tobacco banks and insurance leather and shoes chemicals and pharmaceuticals furniture metals and metal goods machines, motor vehicles and technical articles publishing and printing paper and paper goods pharmacies construction materials and fuel real estate jewelry and precious metals books and art household goods retail shops and department stores electrical goods restaurants construction photography and film advertising transportation used goods other/unknown Total

Number 2438 815 691 271 266 262 239 201 177 161 156 154 113 101 93 92 92 79 64 62 32 32 27 22 249 6888

Percent 37 12 11 4 4 4 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 less than 1 less than 1 less than 1 less than 1 less than 1 less than 1 less than 1 4 100

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“It is a matter of common knowledge that the Jewish element’s participation in the German textile industry is quite heavy,” Marcus wrote in 1931.49 By a large margin, textiles and clothing were the most significant crystallization points for Jewish commercial activity.50 According to the Database of Jewish Businesses in Berlin 2709 companies were identified in this area in 1933—more than a third of all identifiable Jewish businesses that year. On the whole, however, textile companies tended to be relatively small, employing on average fewer than three people and thus tending not to appear on the commercial register. Thus the actual percentage of such businesses within Jewish commercial enterprise was likely higher than the figure above. For instance we can only speculate how many of the approximately 48,600 home-run businesses in Berlin were Jewish. But if Marcus is correct that 42.9 percent of all textile and clothing companies were Jewish, the number of Jewish home-run businesses must have been quite considerable.51 The multitude of businesses was the result of the system whereby well-known clothing manufacturers merely developed patterns and ran the distribution of the finished products. The actual production took place in intermediary tailors and home-run sewing operations that were not unlike decentralized modern-day sweat shops.52 The textile branch had undergone clear structural transformation. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the industry was dominated by weaving mills like the well-known Liebermann & Comp. But after the FrancoPrussian Wars of 1870–1871 the importance of such facilities declined in the capital of the new Reich. Meanwhile Jewish merchants were increasingly turning to the production and distribution of men’s and women’s clothing.53 In his pioneering study, Uwe Westphal concluded that Jewish involvement was one reason why Berlin gradually became an international fashion metropolis in the years leading up to World War I.54 At 12 percent, foodstuffs and semi-luxury foods and tobacco are the second most important branch in the data base. Although this figure was below the ones found in other parts of Prussia, Jews were heavily involved in the wholesaling of food and feed in Berlin. Around 1933 more than half of the people at the produce exchange were Jews. In light of this, Henning Medert concludes that “Jewish wholesalers set the tone for the produce exchange as a wholesale market for specific agricultural products.”55 In general structural terms Jews thus still served as intermediaries for products traveling between the country and the city. This is apparent in the retail as well as the wholesale sector, particular with eggs. The Berlin egg trade was a Jewish domain dominated by Eastern European immigrants.56 This group had also introduced a new industrial branch to the city in the mid-1880s: the production of cigarettes, which was still done by hand. In 1894 there were around seven hundred family businesses that – 82 –

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produced cigarettes in Berlin. Both cigarette and textile production required only limited starting capital, could be done at home, and promised a secure income if one was willing to work long hours.57 Julius Fromm, the famous maker of condoms in Germany, began as a cigarette roller before establishing his first factory for prophylactics in 1914.58 As technology got more advanced and work was concentrated, the number of cigarette makers declined dramatically. Nonetheless, even as late as 1933 there were still thirteen Jewish cigarette makers listed in the commercial register. They included well-known companies such as Cigarettenfabrik Problem Szlama Rochmann, Manoli AG, Garbáty Zigarettenfabrik GmbH, and Loeser & Wolff GmbH.59 In terms of absolute numbers, banks and insurance companies were the third-largest branch of Jewish enterprise in Berlin. Bankers, of course, were a favorite target of anti-Semitic propaganda. Many Germans considered the large incorporated banks “Jewified,” as they all had at least one Jewish board member in 1933. Nonetheless, they are not part of the present discussion, since all cases were primarily expulsions with the lone exception being the Berliner Handelsgesellschaft, which was run as a KGaA.60 Leaving aside the public limited major banks, there were 328 Jewish enterprises listed as a bank or a banking business in the register.61 Thirty-four of them—for instance, Gebrüder Abrahamsohn—indicated that they also traded in grain, continuing a trend that had been an important part of the development of the private banking sector.62 Among the private banks were prestigious names like Mendelssohn & Co. and S. Bleichröder, which had greatly contributed to the rise of Berlin as a financial metropolis. Nonetheless, with the rise of the incorporated banks, their significance had diminished.63 Private banking did enjoy a minor revival in the mid-1920s, but it was based almost exclusively on foreign transactions, so that it was hit severely by the withdrawal of foreign capital in 1929 and the repayments moratorium in July 1931.64 The stock market crash and the closure of the stock exchange between June 1931 and February 1932 did the rest, shaking confidence in private banks and threatening their capital reserves. The large number of freelance Jewish fund and stock brokers, who formed the second-largest group within the category banking and insurance, were just as hard hit by the devastating economic events.65 Undoubtedly, the entire banking and insurance branch—including the Jews working in it—was in dire straits well before Hitler was appointed Reich chancellor. Whereas the preceding branches were all traditionally Jewish areas of economic activity, the category chemicals and pharmaceuticals, in which 5 percent of Jewish enterprises operated, represented a sector of high future potential. The presence of Jews in this area reflected a reorientation – 83 –

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in terms of careers within this German minority. Because Jews often faced roadblocks in academia, it seemed logical for Jewish university graduates to work in areas familiar to them from their studies. Chemical and pharmaceutical companies were closely connected to the 156 pharmacies that were considered Jewish. An example for this development is Ernst Silten, the proprietor of the Kaiser Friedrich Apotheke, who invented a medicinal inhaler which he then produced and sold via a company he founded in 1919, the Sauerstoff Centrale für medizinische Zwecke Dr. Ernst Silten.66 Some of the pharmaceuticals companies focused on the products and sale of alternative homeopathic medicines, which were all the rage at the time. For example, the Ruilos Knoblauch-Verwertungs-GmbH claimed that their garlic-based “natural home healing procedure … had the same effect as the sun.”67 Willy Tonn, CEO and shareholder of Dr. Franz Steiner & Co., offered not only internationally acclaimed “Oriental power pills” but also concoctions to boost male potency.68 Some 4 percent of all Jewish enterprises were involved in the furniture, leather and footwear, and metal and metal-products branches. The vast majority of the companies involved with metals were trading companies active on the metals market,69 whereas the spectrum of furniture businesses was large. It encompassed retailers such as the baby-carriage and bedroom-furnishings store S. Kaliski & Co., layaway stores like Abraham J. Grebler, furniture makers like Deutsche Metallbettstellen-Fabrik Max Mendelsohn, and famous furniture retailers like Heß & Rom GmbH, which were known well beyond the city’s borders.70 The spectrum of businesses covered by “machines, vehicles, and technical items” was also quite broad. It included several sewing-machine factories, which represented points of connection with the textiles industry, the international renowned backhoe and locomotive factory Orenstein & Koppel AG and the machine-tool manufacturer J. Goldmann. The latter, which was registered in 1901 and whose principals were Siegbert and Julius Levy, was considered by Dresdner Bank to be “the leading business in the field” as late as 1938.71 The 220 publishers and printers were also of relatively major significance, making Berlin the third most important publishing location in Germany after Frankfurt and Leipzig. The publishers and printers were closely affiliated with the 193 enterprises in the paper and paper-goods sector, whose products—including postcards, preprinted forms, and receipt books—were popular export items.72 For the domestic market, paper factories like B. Mendelsohn & Co. produced congratulation cards, packing materials, and Christmas decorations.73 Finally it is noteworthy that only 25 companies in the database are identified as focusing on used goods and materials. This is curious since that was a traditional Jewish – 84 –

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profession and, after the state of Saxony, Berlin was a main center of trade in used materials.74 But since companies in this area were usually quite small, most of them likely did not register themselves and thus cannot be identified in the Database of Jewish Businesses in Berlin.

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Age The way the commercial register records were structured doesn’t allow us to analyze the age of entrepreneurs. But with reference to Frankfurt, Benno Nietzel has concluded that Jewish entrepreneurs “represented a group of people primarily advanced in age,”75 and there are indications that the same was true in Berlin. We can only estimate the age of companies as well since business establishments and firms were recorded on two separate levels. We can safely assume that many companies were significantly older than their entry in the register would suggest. Often businesses existed for quite some time before they reached a size that made registration mandatory. When the modern register was established, the firms already listed on the old one were simply taken over for the years 1900 and 1901. For example, the logistics company A. Schäfer Spedition und Möbeltransport, listed in the 1900 register under A 173, was founded in 1840.76 The butter wholesaler H. Engels Nachfolger, whose designation A 7786 indicates that the company was entered in the register in 1901, had existed since 1877.77 The database is not easy to interpret because it shows only how many companies were still listed in the register in 1933, but not how many were founded in a certain year but deleted before 1933. Nonetheless, there seems to have been a respectable corpus of almost 1600 companies registered between 1900 and 1904 and that the majority started doing business before 1900 and had survived until 1933.78 By the early 1930s many of these companies were in transition, as the founding generation began reaching retirement age. One example is the linen and hat company Michalski & Striemer, registered in 1903. The company’s two founders were two Jewish lodge members, Max Michalski and Samuel Striemer. In July 1932 Max Michalski retired. He was succeeded by his son Werner and Edgar Striemer, whose father stayed on until January 1934 to show the two “newcomers” the ropes.79 It is striking that, with the exception of those registered in 1916, firms founded just before and during World War I were deleted disproportionately often from the register before 1933. After 1918 there was a noticeable increase in successful firms. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, hyperinflation encouraged the founding of businesses since getting hold of capital was not a problem. Secondly, some companies moved to Berlin from areas that Germany ceded to Poland under the Treaty of Versailles. – 85 –

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One of them was the potato seller D. Ryczywol, whose owner Robert Raphael Ryczywol relocated the company from Poznan to Berlin.80 Even more remarkable is the fact that many of the companies founded between 1924 and 1929, the years after hyperinflation, were deleted only a few years later. As Marcus noted, this reflects the increasing difficulties Jewish entrepreneurs encountered when they tried to raise sufficient capital to establish a business.81 How much anti-Semitism is reflected in this is difficult to ascertain. Pharmacies, department stores, and paper and paper-products companies tended to be registered for a long time, and the majority of companies in these areas were founded before World War I. Companies in the traditional Jewish sectors of textile and garments, foodstuffs and semi-luxury foods and tobacco, and banking and insurance tended to enjoy only average longevity. Two reasons are that companies in these areas were numerous enough to influence the average and that they encompassed a mix of long-established and newly founded enterprises. It is less surprising that the average company in the photography, film, and advertising sectors, as well as restaurants, was first registered around 1921.82

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Distribution within Berlin Like Jews themselves, Jewish businesses were not distributed equally throughout Berlin. Almost two-thirds (65.4) of all enterprises were concentrated in the three inner-city districts of Mitte, Kreuzberg, and Charlottenburg. There were 3090 companies, 38.5 percent of all identifiable Jewish businesses, in Mitte alone. Kreuzberg followed with 1162 businesses. This somewhat surprising figure reflects the fact that postal zone SW 68 included three main business streets: Lindenstraße, Seydelstraße, and Kommandantenstraße. This part of Kreuzberg alone was home to 714 Jewish enterprises, and there were a further 115 in the export-oriented environs of Ritterstraße in postal zone S 42. Charlottenburg had the third most Jewish businesses with 990. The district contained one of Berlin’s major high streets, Kurfürstendamm and, in the north, a major industrial area. A relatively high number of Jewish businesses were located in the inner-city districts of Schöneberg (695), Tiergarten (432), and Wilmersdorf (403). Prenzlauer Berg had relatively few, but that was likely down to it being a primarily residential district. As was the case in Frankfurt, Jewish businesses were concentrated at the economic heart of the city.83 There were 3068 in the three postal zones C 2, SW 68, and W 8 alone, and the tendency was even more marked in terms of individual streets. The Hausvogteiplatz square, which pretty much symbolized industrial clothing production in the city, was home to 68 Jewish companies. – 86 –

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There were only fourteen buildings on the square, one of which was completely occupied by the Reichsbank. That meant that more than 5 registered Jewish businesses were located in each of the other thirteen buildings. There were also 183 other Jewish textile companies on the nearby streets Kronen- and Mohrenstraße.84 A total of 161 Jewish companies were registered on Leipzigerstraße and Gertraudenstraße, Berlin’s main shopping streets. There were 116 companies on Friedrichstraße and 56 in Königstraße, although the latter was quite short.85 Kurfürstendamm and Tauentzienstraße contained 196 Jewish registered firms. Moreover, all the major Jewish retailers with flagship stores on Leipziger Straße—F.V.

Figure 3.1. Distribution of Jewish businesses in Berlin. Database of Jewish Businesses in Berlin (map by Bettina Kubanek). – 87 –

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Grünfeld, Arnold Müller, Michels & Co., Kersten & Tuteur—also had affiliates on Kurfürstendamm. That western shopping street started with the famous department store KaDeWe, which as of 1926 was owned by Hermann Tietz.86 Jewish retailers in particular occupied prime locations where rents were at their highest. As late as 1939 one official of the IHK complained that Jewish shops had “concentrated in the good to middling business locations so that their turnover was usually higher than that of German retailers.”87 Their position indicates the success, or at least the standing, of Jewish retailers and means that they were particularly visible.88 The concentration on or around Kurfürstendamm also suggests that such companies had recognized the trend of the times and were staking their future on the cosmopolitan shopping boulevard in the western half of the city. That was the reason the Nazis especially focused their destructive energies on that street. At the other end of the social scale, there were only 163 Jewish businesses in postal area N 54 on Rosenthaler Straße in a down-at-theheels section of the district of Mitte in the eastern half of Berlin. In the center of the district, whose borders were Dragoner- and Grenadierstraßen, only 10 Jewish businesses could be identified, although photos from the period show that there must have been many more. That suggests that most of the businesses on these narrow streets were too small to be listed in the commercial register.89 In general, Jewish businesses were concentrated in and represented an integral part of the city center, but there were differences according to branch. In the postal districts C 2, SW 68, and W 8, 1674 Jewish textile and clothing firms were registered—61 percent of all such Jewish businesses registered in the city as a whole. The situation was similar with leather goods and footwear; 36 percent of all such businesses were located in C 2. Other branches like foodstuffs and semi-luxury foods and tobacco, which were less dependent on shoppers walking by, were distributed more regularly throughout the city and corresponded more or less to the distribution of the Jewish population. The same was basically true for banks and insurance companies. Only 252 of 757 registered banks and insurance companies were located in the “banking district” of C 2 and W 8. They tended to be the more important ones. Many stockbrokers and bank commission agents had their companies in their homes. As a result, there were 76 banks and insurance companies in the district of Wilmersdorf, 62 in Schöneberg, and 134 in Charlottenburg. By contrast there were none in Spandau and Köpenick, where few Jews lived. Jewish pharmacies were also concentrated in Jewish population centers across the city, while chemical and pharmaceuticals companies tended to move away from the historic city center to the newer – 88 –

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parts in the western half. Almost a quarter of all the Jewish businesses in these sectors were registered in Wilmersdorf and Charlottenburg.90 Electrical companies also tended to settle in the west, although many were also located in the older postal districts SW 68 and SO 36.91 In general, companies involved in traditionally Jewish areas of commerce tended to stick to the city center, while businesses that we today might call start-ups often chose to set up shop in western Berlin.

Size and Legal Form We can only cautiously speculate about the size and scope of many Jewish businesses, since comprehensive lists of small- and medium-sized enterprises have not been preserved. Public companies were required to publish any changes in capital, while private companies were subject to no such regulations, and an analysis of limited-liability companies is inconclusive. Nonetheless, it is clear that there were many Jewish businesses that possessed capital in excess of the legally required 20,000 reichsmarks. The majority, however, were entered in the commercial register before World War I—or were their subsidiaries. It was rare for firms like this to be registered after the war. As the 1920s progressed, the only companies that made their way onto the register were those with 20,000 reichsmarks capital. The tendency was similar for joint-stock companies, although they weren’t required to prove a minimum level of capitalization. The jointstock companies founded in the 1920s had markedly less capital, despite inflation, than those formed before World War I.92

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Family Structurally, most Jewish companies in Berlin were family businesses, inherited from generation to generation.93 Partners and stockholders tended to come from family circles. It was also hardly unusual for family members, typically women, to work in the business. We have no statistics for Berlin alone, but in Prussia in 1925 almost 22.5 percent of employed Jewish women worked as “assisting family members,” compared with only 2.3 percent of employed Jewish men. Yet strikingly, the proportion of women registered as “self-employed,” 23.3 percent, dwarfed the corresponding figure for non-Jewish women (6.4 percent).94 In particular, many self-employed Jewish women worked in the areas of “hat and finery production” and in restaurants. Women accounted for 59 percent of all Jewish business people working in hat making and 64.7 percent of all the Jews self employed in restaurants. There were noticeably few female Jewish businesspeople working for banks, insurance companies, or the electron– 89 –

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ics industries.95 This tendency reflects the figures contained within the database. A random sample suggests that 20 percent of the business partners or owners were female. Of those a quarter were identified as “widows” in the commercial register.96 This finding is not easy to interpret because it says little about who made what decisions within companies. Were Jewish women, at least in economic terms, more emancipated than their non-Jewish counterparts? Or had they merely conquered certain economic niches? Speaking for the latter were the facts that Jewish businesspeople were concentrated in hat and finery production and that so many of them worked for family businesses. It’s possible that Jewish women were more subject to family dictates than non-Jews and thus saw no choice but to take over family businesses when their husbands died. That would confirm to the relatively high number of widows in the register.

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Notes 1. Eugen Wolbe, Geschichte der Juden in Berlin und in der Mark Brandenburg (Berlin, 1937), 305. The Kedem Jewish publisher and book distributor, owned by Lipa Bronstein, was deleted from the commercial register in July 1939. See DjGB. 2. Denkschrift über die Behandlung der Juden in der Reichshauptstadt auf allen Gebeiten des öffentlichen Lebens, Yad Vashem Jerusalem (YVJ), O.8/17, 6f.; Alexander, Bevölkerung, 119f.; “Nachwort,” in Freie Universität Berlin and Senator für kulturelle Angelegenheiten, eds., Gedenkbuch Berlins der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, 1995), 1405–1416, here 1407. See also Andreas Nachama and Hermann Simon, Juden in Berlin (Berlin, 2001); Reinhard Rürup, “Jewish History in Berlin—Berlin in Jewish History,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 45 (2000), 37–50. 3. “Über die Wirtschaftslage der deutschen Juden” in Der Makkabi, December 1930. Cf. Doron Niederland, “Leaving Germany: Emigration patterns of Jews and Non-Jews during the Weimar Period,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte XXVII (1998), 169–194. 4. Verena Dohrn, Getrud Pickhan, and Anne Christin Saß, “Einführung,” in Verena Dohrn and Gertrud Pickhahn, eds., Berlin Transit. Jüdische Migranten aus Osteuropa in den 1920er Jahren (Berlin and Göttingen 2012), 13–19, here 13. 5. Ibid., 129, 142. See also Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden, 163ff. 6. Christoph Kreutzmüller, National Economies. The Eruption of Racist Fault Lines in central European economy after World War I. in Kreutzmüller, Michael Wildt, and Moshe Zimmermann, eds., National Economies, Volks-Wirtschaft, Racism and Economy in Europe between the Wars (1918–1939/45) (Newcastle, 2015), 1–17. Cf. Alfred Wiener, Wirtschaftsboykott (Amsterdam, 1934). 7. Mitteilungen des Statistischen Amts der Stadt Berlin 18 (1934), parts 4 and 5. 8. “Die jüdische Bevölkerung in Berlin,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 6 July 1935; “Wo wohnt Berlins jüdischer Bevölkerungsanteil,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 15 July 1935. See also Engeli and Ribbe, Berlin, 952f.

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9. Alexander, Bevölkerung, 123–125. 10. Alfred Marcus, Die Wirtschaftliche Krise des deutschen Juden: Eine soziologische Untersuchung (Berlin, 1931), 114. 11. Dolores L. Augustin, “Die soziale Stellung der jüdischen Wirtschaftselite im Wilhelminischen Berlin,” in Mosse and Pohl, Unternehmer, 225–246, here 225. 12. Martin Münzel, “Die Verdrängung jüdischer Vorstands- und Aufsichtsratsmitglieder aus Berliner Großunternehmen im NS-Staat,” in Arisierung, 95–120. See also Cecil Lamar, “Jew and Junker in Imperial Berlin,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 10 (1975), 47–58; Kurt Zielenzinger, Juden in der deutschen Wirtschaft (Berlin, 1930); Rudolf Martin, Jahrbuch des Vermögens und des Einkommens der Millionäre in Preußen (Berlin, 1912); idem, Jahrbuch des Vermögens und Einkommens der Millionäre in Berlin (Berlin, 1913). 13. Joseph Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft (Cologne, 1985 [Berlin, 1927]), 47–49. See also Jakob Lestschinsky, Das wirtschaftliche Schicksal des deutschen Judentums: Aufstieg, Wandlung, Krise, Ausblick (Berlin, 1932), 39f., 89; Anne-Christin Saß, Berliner Luftmenschen. Osteuropäisch-jüdische Migranten in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen, 2012). On the semantics, see Nicolas Berg, Luftmenschen: Zur Geschichte einer Metapher (Göttingen, 2008), 9f. 14. Heinrich Silbergleit, Die Bevölkerungs- und Berufsverhältnisse der Juden in Deutschland, Part 1: Preußen (Berlin, 1930), 88–114, 161–199. 15. Kreutzmüller, Loose, and Nietzel, “Persecution,” 34–43. See also Silbergleit, Bevölkerungsverhältnisse, 92f., 101f.; Alexander, Bevölkerung, 143. 16. Koralnik, Industrie, 19f.; Lestschinsky, Schicksal, 99f. 17. Lestschinsky, Schicksal, 124f. 18. Letter by the Prussian Ministry of the Interior to Police President, 3 January 1934, PArch AA, R 100208. 19. Lestschinsky, Schicksal, 24. 20. Sass, Luftmenschen, 84. 21. See Verena Dohrn (with contributions by Tamar Or und Christoph Kreutzmüller), “Die Familie Chaim Kahan in Berlin und ihre Unternehmen im Weimarer Berlin,” in Dohrn and Pickhahn, Berlin, 100–106, here 100–102. 22. “Der Untergang des jüdischen Mittelstandes” and “Die wirtschaftliche Umwälzung,” CV Zeitung, 13 November 1925 and 4 July 1930. In February 1944 Kurz Zielenzinger was deported from Amsterdam to Bergen-Belsen, where he died as a result of the terrible conditions on 19 July 1944. See Gedenkbuch Berlins, 1392; Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv, “Zielenziger, Kurt, geb. 21.2.1890 in Potsdam.” On Zielenziger, see also Dorothea Hauser, “Economy as Fate: Abraham, Zielenziger, and the Liberal Fallacy of Weimar Jewry,” in Christoph Kreutzmüller, Michael Wildt, and Moshe Zimmermann, eds., National Economies, Volks-Wirtschaft, Racism and Economy in Europe between the Wars (1918–1939/45) (Newcastle, 2015), 47–61. 23. Marcus, Krise, 143–177. See also Kahn, Schichtung, 7; Nietzel, Handeln, 52. 24. Lestschinsky, Schicksal, 4. 25. Barkai, Boykott, 12; Mosse, Jews, 323–339. 26. Silbergleit, Bevölkerungsverhältnisse, 92. 27. Marcus, Krise, 12f.

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28. Cora Berliner, “Übersicht über die wirtschaftliche Lage der Juden von 1929 bis 1933,” Leo Baeck Insitute, New York (LBI), AR 1578 (Cora Berliner). 29. Ball-Kaduri, Leben, 179f. 30. “Denkschrift über die Behandlung der Juden in der Reichshauptstadt auf allen Gebieten des öffentlichen Lebens,” n.d. (1938), YVJ, 08/No. 17. See also Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 18f. (footnote 37). 31. Alexander Szanto, “Im Dienste der Gemeinde 1923–1939,” typescript (Manchester, 1968), 119, LBI, ME 638, S. 86. 32. Alexander, Bevölkerung, 127. See also Comité, Schwarzbuch, 284f. 33. Koralnik, Industrie; Jacob Segall, “Die Bevölkerungs- und Berufsverhältnisse der Juden in Deutschland,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 6/2 (February 1931), 25–27. 34. Beate Schreiber, “‘Arisierung’ in Berlin. Eine Einführung,” in Schreiber, Christof Biggeleben, and Kilian J. L. Steiner, eds., Arisierung, 13–53, here 18f. See also Koralnik, Industrie, 18. 35. Marcus, Krise, 115–117. 36. “Die Volks-, Berufs- und Betriebszählung in Berlin im Jahre 1933,” Mitteilungen des Statistischen Amts der Stadt Berlin Nr 18 (1933), 5:3. See also Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Berlin 1933, 82. 37. Barkai, Boykott, 16. See also “Die Entjudung des Berliner Einzelhandels,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 February 1939; Nietzel, Handeln, 41. 38. “Denkschrift über die Behandlung der Juden in der Reichshauptstadt auf allen Gebieten des öffentlichen Lebens,” no date (1938), YVJ, 08/No. 17. See also Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 18f. (footnote 37). 39. Letter Hunke to de Mars, 19 September 1938, BArch, NS 1, 550. See also chapter 7. 40. Barkai, Boykott, 14. 41. Affidavit of Curt Joseph, 12 January 1952, Entschädigungsamt Berlin (EAB), 62928 (Curt Joseph). For more on the fate of this entrepreneur, see the case study in chapter 11. 42. Berliner Handelsregister 1931, 31. Entry: Abraham Antmann. The business owned by Abraham Antmann, which had been listed since 1905, was deleted from the register in March 1938. See DjGB. 43. My own calculations based on the DjGB; 137 firms were listed as handicraft businesses, and 254 were listed under “other services” or could not be classified. 44. “Die Entjudung des Berliner Einzelhandels,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrieund Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 February 1939. 45. See Busch-Petersen and Tietz, Birnbaum; Ladwig-Winters, Wertheim; H. G. Reissner, “The Histories of ‘Kaufhaus N. Israel’ and Wilfried Israel,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 3 (1958), 227–256. 46. Silbergleit, Bevölkerungsverhältnisse, 92f. 47. Herbert Kahn (with contributions by Walter Ansbach), Die jüdischen Handwerker in Deutschland: Eine Untersuchung auf Grund statistischer Unterlagen der Reichsvertretung, (Berlin, 1936), 1f. 48. Kahn, Handwerker, 1f. 49. Marcus, Krise, 70. – 92 –

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Jewish Commercial Activity

50. Ibid., 114–142; Silbergleit, Bevölkerungsverhältnisse, 93–103. 51. Marcus, Krise, 75. See also Westphal, Konfektion, 52. 52. Ibid., 58–60. 53. Scheer, Liebermanns, 243; Mosse, Jews, 40. 54. Westphal, Konfektion, 47. 55. Medert, Verdrängung, 84–96, citation 63. See also Henning Medert, “Grain Wholesalers Alfred Höxter,” in Kreutzmüller and Nürnberg, eds., Final Sale, 32– 35, here 32f. 56. Anne Paltian, “The wholesale and retail traders Jacobowitz & Co,” in Kreutzmüller and Nürnberg, eds., Final Sale, 36–39, here 36f. See also Steinke Simon Adler; Harald B. Ramm, “Jüdische Betriebe und Gewerbetreibende: Entstehung, Entwicklung und Arisierung,” in Kolland, Brüder, 291. 57. Klara Eschelbacher, “Die ostjüdische Einwanderungsbevölkerung der Stadt Berlin,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 16/Nr. 1–6 (January–June 1920), 21f. See also, Sass, Luftmenschen, 82. 58. Götz Aly and Michael Sontheimer, Fromms: Wie der jüdische Kondomfabrikant Julius F. unter die deutschen Räuber fiel (Frankfurt, 2007), 35–44. 59. Erik Lindner, “Garbáty. Eine Zigarettenfabrik in Pankow,” in Biggeleben, Schreiber, and Steiner, eds., Arisierung, 247–286; Beate Meyer, “‘Arisiert’ und ausgeplündert. Die jüdische Fabrikantenfamilie Garbáty,” in Meyer and Simon, Jews, 64–79. 60. Rolf E. Lüke, Die Berliner Handelsgesellschaft in einem Jahrhundert Deutscher Wirtschaft, 1856–1956 (Berlin, 1956), 244–256. 61. Ingo Köhler asserts that there were 152 private Jewish banks in Berlin. See “Die ‘Arisierung’ jüdischer Privatbanken,” in Dieter Ziegler, Die Dresdner Bank und die deutschen Juden (Munich, 2006), 148–161, here 88f. 62. My own calculation based on the DjGB. The Gebrüder Abrahamsohn company, owned by Günther Abrahamsohn, was deleted from the commercial register in June 1938. 63. The active business accounts of Mendelsohn & Co were transferred to Deutsche Bank in 1938, while S. Bleichröder was bought by Dresdner Bank. See Köhler, “Arisierung,” 148–161; Köhler, Privatbanken, 226–243; James, Deutsche Bank, 70–77. 64. Keith Ulrich, Aufstieg und Fall der Privatbankiers: Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung von 1918 bis 1938 (Frankfurt, 1998), 354–359. 65. Medert, Verdrängung, 119–125. 66. Frank Leimkugel, Wege jüdischer Apotheker: Die Geschichte deutscher und österreichisch-ungarischer Pharmazeuten (Frankfurt, 1991), 47. The Sauerstoff Centrale’s business was transferred in 1938 to the non-Jewish firm Atmos Gesellschaft Fritzsching & Co. Possesion of the Kaiser Friedrich Apotheke Dr. Ernst Silten pharamacy was transferred in 1936 to a non-Jew named Hans Böwing. Cf. DjGB. 67. Reproduction of an advertisement, Stefan Hördler, “Garlic Product Specialist Ruilos GmbH,” in Kreutzmüller and Nürnberg, Final Sale, 52–55, here 52. For more information on the fate of this company, see chapter 4. 68. Newsletter D. Franz Steiner GmbH, n.d. (1938), LBI, AR 7258. In February 1939, after his business was liquidated, Willy Tonn fled to Shanghai. See DjGB and “Abforderungsschein der Brokerhof & Lipschütz GmbH,” 2 February 1939, LBI, AR 7258. – 93 –

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69. Medert, Verdrängung, 97–105. 70. The limited partnership S. Kaliski, which was located at Tauentzienstraße 7a and whose general partner was a widow named Hedwig Silberberg, was looted and destroyed during the Pogrom. The Associated Press photo of it became known around the world. See Andreas Nachama, Uwe Neumärker, and Hermann Simon, Es brennt. Antijüdischer Terror im November 1938 (Berlin, 2008), 69; Kreutzmüller and Weigel, Kristallnacht, 28f. The general partnership Abraham J. Grebler, which was located at Weinbergsweg 4 and whose owners were Bernhard Kreindler, Wolf Kreindler, and Siegfried Posner, was deleted from the commercial register in 1936. By contrast Heß & Rom GmbH was never formally liquidated. See the DjGB. 71. File note Dresdner Bank, Branch Office 63, n.d. (July 1938), HAC, DB, 299972001.BE, Liste A. The fate of this business is unknown. 72. Letter Branch Office 85 to Dresdner Bank Central Headquarters, 8 July 1938, HAC, DB, 29997-2001.BE, Liste A. 73. DjGB. B. Mendelsohn & Co, whose owners were Bianca and Martin Mendelsohn and Viktor Müller, was deleted from the commercial register in September 1937. 74. Susanne Kösterling, “Pioniere der Rohstoffbeschaffung. Lumpensammler im Nationalsozialismus. 1934–1939,” Werkstatt Geschichte 17 (1997), 45–65, here 46f. 75. Nietzel, Handeln, 43. 76. The posession of A. Schäfer Spedition & Möbeltransport, whose owners were Heinrich Lentscher and Edgar Brilles, was transfered to Erwin Domaß 1939. See the DjGB. 77. The possesion of H. Engel’s Nachfolger, owned by Bruno Fraenkel, was transfered to Fritz Gumbart in 1938. See DjGB. 78. On Frankfurt, see Nietzel, Handeln, 39. 79. DjGB, For more information on the fate of this company, see chapter 4. 80. The firm, which was located at Kurfürstendamm 76, was deleted from the commercial register in October 1938. Cf. DjGB. 81. Marcus, Krise, 117–123. 82. My own calculations based on the DjGB. 83. Nietzel, Handeln, 42. 84. DjGB. 85. My own calculations based on the DjGB. 86. Kreutzmüller, “Kaffee,” 77f; Busch-Petersen, Jandorf, 70–75. 87. “Die Entjudung des Berliner Einzelhandels,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrieund Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 February 1939. 88. Friedländer, Germany, 77–87. 89. Anne-Christin Saß, “Scheunenviertel,” in Pickhahn and Dohrn, Berlin, 44– 61, here 50–56, See also Geisel, Scheunenviertel. 90. DjGB. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Nietzel, Unternehmer, 50f.; Marcus, Krise, 128f. 94. Lestschinsky, Schicksal, 132f. See also Kahn, Schichtung, 12. 95. Lestschinsky, Schicksal, 136–138. 96. DjGB. – 94 –

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Part II

Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

 “Outside, children deface the doors and windows of Jewish businesses. … After a few days, the head of the local police precinct came and ordered us to clean up our signs. A long discussion ensued with the officer. The result: Jews clean up what others have defaced.”1

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W

hile there had been anti-Jewish sentiments and violence well before, from 1933 onward Jews in Berlin existed at the point of intersection between two persecution initiatives: the anti-Jewish policies of the central governmental agencies and the anti-Jewish measures of the local city administration.2 The latter, historian Wolf Gruner argues, often took precedence until the summer of 1938.3 In and of itself that is no surprise since recent research has highlighted that many impulses driving the persecution of Jews came from the periphery.4 Yet it is questionable whether the center-periphery dichotomy applies to the capital of both the Reich and Prussia. At least geographically speaking, where Berlin was concerned, the center and periphery were one and the same. Civil servants and Reich ministers could see the effects of their anti-Jewish acts as well as damage done by the attacks of local groups on their way to work. The destruction of their economic existence was a constitutive part of the persecution and annihilation of the Jews we often refer to as the Holocaust. The former did not differ in character from the larger process in which violence and bureaucracy came together and reinforced one an– 95 –

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other.5 Coincidently, commercial enterprises also exist on two levels, the level of a business in the sense of a retail store, an office or a workshop, and the level of a firm in the sense of a bureaucratically recorded name and legal form. Violent persecution was directed against businesses; bureaucratic persecution was aimed at the firms. For heuristic reasons, these two aspects will be analyzed separately from one another. Following the seminal works of Ernst Fraenkel, this methodology allows for a more precise view on discriminatory norms and measures as well the perpetrators and their practices. From the perspective of those persecuted these partial processes represented two different types of threat suffered. Whereas bureaucratic threats built up slowly and constantly, violence came suddenly—even though the pain left behind was often permanent. Gruner’s work convincingly shows that while there were crests of local, violent persecution in early 1933, the summer of 1935, and the summer and autumn of 1938, the periods in between were by no means placid.6 The absence of large waves of persecution cannot conceal the fact that a host of anti-Semitic measures were taken and had a noteworthy side effect: By early 1938, what in 1933 had at least merited an article in the New York Times, a note by an official, or a letter of protest from an entrepreneur no longer seemed worth mentioning—or was even prosecuted in Germany as malicious treachery.7 That’s why the data for the later years of seeming calm is far more scant than for the previous years. Even though it’s often impossible to determine whether instances of violence were motivated by anti-Semitism, lust for profit, peer pressure or sadism, inauspicious circumstances or unhappy structural constellations could produce violent attacks against Jews or their businesses at any time, while the bureaucratic threat to Jews was growing slowly but steadily. Nonetheless, the two processes mutually encouraged one another. Thus, the anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1935 provided a welcome, perhaps intentionally staged, reason to formulate the new anti-Semitic laws that were proclaimed in Nuremberg in September 1935.8 Aspects of both partial processes manifested themselves in some persecution measures, making them difficult to classify. This was especially true of “boycott” measures. On the one hand the exclusion of Jewish commercial enterprises by the city and its institutions would seem to fall into the category of bureaucratic persecution. On the other hand the blockade of 1 April 1933 was more an act of violence, as it was ultimately initiated by SA men. The campaigns of anti-Semitic periodicals also fall into the violent category since they, implicitly or—sometimes even—explicitly, called for attacks on targets they made visible. We also have to take into account that the persecution of Jews was not carried out in a vacuum, but rather in the public sphere for everyone to see. Even if they weren’t directly involved, non-Jewish Berliners had to decide – 96 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

how to behave. The same applies to non-Jewish businesses, which had to choose how to treat Jewish competitors and associates. Hence, chapter 6 will analyze those choices and discuss the question of who benefited from anti-Semitic policies. Looking yet again at the results presented in the Database of Jewish Businesses in Berlin, chapter 7 will then summarize and analyze the statistics of the destruction of Jewish commercial activity.

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Notes 1. Entry from lawyer Hermann Jalowicz’s diary, June 1938, cited in Kreutzmüller, Simon, and Weber, Pogrom, 22. 2. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 13. 3. Ibid. 4. See Wolf Gruner, “Die NS-Judenverfolgung, und die Kommunen: Zur wechselseitigen Dynamisierung von zentraler und lokaler Politik,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 48 (2000), 75–126, here 79; idem, “Der deutsche Gemeindetag und die Koordinierung antijüdischer Kommunalpolitik: Zum Marktverbot für jüdische Händler und zur ‘Verwertung’ jüdischen Eigentums,” Archiv für Kommunalwissenschaften 37/II (1998), 261–291. 5. Herbst, Banker, 79f. 6. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 73–98. See also Gruner, “Die Berliner und die Judenverfolgung: Eine mikrohistorische Studie individueller Handlungen und sozialer Beziehungen,” Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus 27 (2011), 57–87. For a focus on city administration, see Gruner, “Die Kommunen im Nationalsozialismus: Innenpolitische Akteure und ihre wirkungsmächtige Vernetzung,” in Sven Reichardt and Wolfgang Seibel, eds., Der prekäre Staat: Herrschen und Verwalten im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt, 2011), 167–211. 7. “Die Verfolgung wird immer schärfer,” Pariser Tagezeitung, 1 January 1938. 8. Michael Wildt, “Einleitung,” in Wildt, ed., Hans Reichmann. Deutscher Bürger und verfolgter Jude. Novemberpogrom und KZ Sachsenhausen 1937 bis 1939 (Munich, 1998), 1–37, here 13f.

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Chapter 4

Violent Persecution

 A Rising Crest

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Anti-Semitism and Violence before Hitler’s Appointment as Chancellor It is a well-known fact that anti-Semitic stereotypes were widely spread long before 1933. Envy and resentment rose dramatically during the financial crisis of the late nineteenth century, which was one fundamental source of modern anti-Semitism in Germany. In his 1879 essay “Our Prospects” the (in)famous conservative historian Heinrich von Treitschke summed up this outlook when he wrote of the stereotypical hyper-ambitious, trouser-selling Jew, whose offspring would dominate the German stock market and media landscape of the future. Even today, Treitschke warned, “the Jew is sitting in a thousand German villages, selling out his neighbors.”1 Theodor Fritsch’s Handbook on the Jewish Question, which ran through almost fifty editions in Germany between 1907 and 1945, offered a similarly defamatory depiction of Jewish business practices. Even the respected economist and sociologist Werner Sombart proposed in his 1911 book The Jews and Economic Life that, as an itinerant people, Jews were tailor-made for capitalism. The fact that they had never settled down, Sombart claimed, had led them to develop a special attachment to the abstract commodity of money.2 The venomous anti-Semite Fritsch felt this did not go far enough, and in 1913 he published under a pseudonym a far-fetched “study” entitled “Jews in Commerce and the Secret of Their Success.” It explicitly aimed to fill in the gaps he felt Sombart had left.3 – 99 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

Anti-Semitism especially gained momentum after World War I when Jews were blamed not only for military defeat, but also postwar inflation. Against this backdrop, in 1920 Nazi economist Gottfried Feder saw to it that the “liberation from the bondage of interest” was enshrined as Point 11 of the NSDAP’s party program. The Nazi Party also pledged to combat the economic might of trust companies and department stores, which were indiscriminately thought to be Jewish.4 Department stores were popular targets for scapegoating as were Eastern European Jewish emigrants to Berlin, who were defamed as “East Jews” or “caftan Jews”—even though many of them had been recruited to work in Germany by the German Army in the First World War. In February 1921, after students attacked passersby they believed were Jewish on the boulevard Unter den Linden, the New York Times already reported on a “first Berlin pogrom.”5 The situation got even worse at the zenith of hyperinflation, when there was the first full-blown race riot in Berlin’s modern history.6 The violence began on 5 November 1923, after it was announced that no benefits would be paid to a group of jobless people standing outside an unemployment office. Some started spreading the rumor that Jews in a nearby neighborhood were to blame. The mood turned incendiary, and hundreds of young men stormed the Scheunenviertel and starting plundering Jewish businesses and apartments. There were scenes of violence that, as the liberal Berliner Tageblatt described them, “overshadowed many an incident in Tsarist Russia.”7 Jews were humiliated and brutally beaten. A Jewish butcher later died of his injuries. Armed members of the Reich Association of Frontline Jewish Veterans were able to repel the mob, which moved on to wreak havoc in other neighborhoods. The police were late in intervening, and when they did, they primarily took Jews into custody. No one was ever convicted of any crimes in connection with the riot.8 The Times in London remarked that the fact that non-Jewish businesses in the neighborhood had time to identify themselves and escape the violence suggested that the riot was at least semi-planned.9 A leading Dutch newspaper expressed its deep concern about the “poisonous fruits of anti-Semitism” in Germany.10 In 1926, after a few years of relative peace, violence became an everyday occurrence with the appointment of Joseph Goebbels as Gauleiter of Berlin. Because of the prestige attached to the German capital and because the Communist Party (KPD) and left-wing Social Democrats were strongly anchored in the city, Nazi street fighters battled for political power with greater brutality there than elsewhere. Violence was seen not just as a means to an end, but as a legitimate form of political activity and as a way of increasing internal Nazi cohesion.11 The Berliner Tageblatt repeatedly reported on “SA terrorism” well before 1933,12 while the press office of a Berlin retailers’ association wrote that the street fights had taken the – 100 –

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Violent Persecution

form of “a latent civil war.”13 Though Jews were not the party’s primary enemies in the years of its rise, street fighting brutalized many Nazi party members, and that—together with the radical anti-Semitism of many SA men and Berlin’s Gauleiter—meant that Jews were subject to increasingly frequent attacks. This connection became readily apparent after one of the first major assaults on KPD members, which took place in the Lichterfelde Ost railway station in March 1927. When they marched to the city center after that attack, excited SA men took the opportunity to punch any passersby whom they thought looked Jewish.14 In the late 1920s the so-called Sklarek scandal made headlines. The Gebr. Sklarek GmbH had bribed several city councilors in return for a near monopoly on supplying the city with textiles as well as a line of credit from the municipal Stadtbank. Between 30 September and 17 November 1929, Der Angriff ran a series of shrill articles about the affair.15 On 13 October 1930, the first day of business for the newly constituted Reichstag, in which the Nazis had won a surprising number of seats, SA men smashed the store windows of the Wertheim department store in Leipziger Straße, the Isidor Dobrin coffee house, and other businesses they thought were Jewish. They fled the scene before they could be identified. In its report on the “unrest in Berlin’s city center,” the newspaper of the CV stressed that the violence was a “stupid youthful prank” but admitted that the smashed windows were the beginning of a harvesting of “the hate which political campaigns have been sowing for months, even years.”16 Even people who disavowed anti-Semitism were susceptible to it. This emerges clearly in the diary of an ordinary Berliner named Franz Göll, which has been thoroughly analyzed by historian Peter Fritsche. In the late 1920s Göll maintained blatantly anti-Semitic ideas despite having renounced anti-Semitism in 1921.17 On 12 September 1931, a few weeks after the high point of the banking crisis, another targeted series of violent attacks was carried out on Kurfürstendamm.18 As the members of the congregation emerged from the synagogue on Fasanenstraße and headed toward Kurfürstendamm, groups of SA men mingled with the crowds, shouting anti-Semitic slogans and beating up people they thought were Jewish.19 Because of the large numbers of Jews who lived and worked there, the cosmopolitan shopping boulevard in the west of the city carried a special symbolic significance and was an attractive target for attack.20 The more the attacks spread to new locations, the fewer oases there were. In 1929 Jews “only” had to steer clear of certain streets to avoid the danger of running into SA men. By 1931 they already needed to avoid whole districts.21 Of course, Jewish businesses were subject to attacks, too. One example was an egg store owned by one Philipp Moschkowitz, which had oper– 101 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

ated in the Spandau district since 1910. The owner had called an SA man a “Nazi pig,”22 and in November 1932 the latter decided it was time to avenge the insult. Having waited until the customers had left the store, he began bellowing anti-Semitic slogans and smashed two crates of eggs in the shop window. The courageous wife of the owner, who was manning the store that day, was able to detain the SA man in the store until police arrived and arrested him.23 But the case wasn’t pursued very vigorously. The perpetrator wasn’t interrogated until mid-December, whereupon the case was transferred to the Superior Prosecutor’s Office because it was “political in nature.”24 The senior prosecutor dismissed it on 31 December 1932, citing a law concerning exemptions from punishment.25 By that time, successful entrepreneur Jakob Michael, who had been frequently attacked as a Jewish profiteer from inflation, decided it was time to leave the German capital and began transferring his business assets via a Dutch holding to the United States.26 As well as being targets of violence, the existence of Jewish businesspeople was threatened by so-called boycotts. Members of the NSDAP were generally instructed to avoid Jewish shops and, beginning in early 1930, Nazi women’s organizations were particularly active in the marginalization of Jewish businesses.27 Starting in 1932 the Nazis held “brown markets” in Berlin, whose stands were available only to party members, and individual regional groups also published lists of approved non-Jewish businesses.28 In April 1932, after the Nazis had become the largest fraction in the Prussian state parliament, the body was transformed, in the words of the Jüdische Rundschau newspaper, into a “forum for anti-Semitic oratorical excesses.”29 On the night of 24–25 June of that year, the Nazi fraction submitted a proposition calling for the “confiscation of the entire wealth of all East Jews who immigrated since 4 August 1914.” The proposition was passed with the help of the German National Peoples Party (DNVP), but never implemented because it violated Reich law.30 This incident shows that anti-Semitism was not restricted to the Nazi Party. It also had spread within the DNVP, which was very popular in the southwestern part of Berlin. Although the Prussian government did not follow through in confiscating the property of Eastern European Jews, the latter were deported from Berlin much more frequently after Papen assumed power in Prussia in July 1932.31

Violence after Hitler’s Appointment as Reich Chancellor Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor on 30 January 1933 may not unambiguously represent a dividing line where anti-Jewish violence is concerned, but it certainly did herald a new level of escalation. In his pio– 102 –

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neering study Die Verdrängung der Juden aus der Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich, Helmut Genschel correctly points out that the “April boycott” was “only” the highpoint of “a whole series of terroristic attacks against Jews and others.”32 In Berlin and in the Reich as a whole, there were outbreaks of violence against Jews and others after the Reichstag elections of 5 March 1933. In Berlin the attacks were apparently planned by local party officials and individual SA men—although they were certainly approved or at least tolerated by the Gau leadership.33 On 6 March there were a number of racist assaults on Kurfürstendamm. Two days later SA men forced their way into the stock exchange on Burgstraße and demanded the resignation of the head of the board of directors, whom they thought was Jewish. Simultaneously, unidentified individuals chanted that passersby should “boycott” the Hermann Tietz department stores on Leipziger Straße and on Alexanderplatz. These activities attracted large crowds that police had trouble dispersing.34 On 9 March SA men went marauding down the Scheunenviertel’s central Grenadierstraße, beating Jewish pedestrians senseless and breaking the windows of Jewish businesses—the Manchester Guardian called these events the worst excesses thus far.35 The example of the café New York showed how brutal and devastating such attacks could be. The café was located at number 59 Alte Schönhauser Straße on the margins of the Scheunenviertel. The owner was a man named Judka Jankel Kopelmann. As detailed in a long letter of complaint by the Polish Embassy in March 1933, on 2 March a dozen uniformed men had eaten and drank beer in the establishment, insulted Kopelmann, and then left without paying. Three days later SA men threatened to throw a bomb into the café if it didn’t shut its doors. On the two days following, armed SA men searched customers, and on 9 March further SA threats forced the café to close. On 15 March three SA men burst into the New York, abducted several guests at gunpoint and took them to a local SA tavern where they were frisked, robbed, and beaten to “the point of senselessness.” By that time Kopelmann saw no choice but to permanently close his café.36 Violence was often random and haphazard, and on occasion personal scores were settled. But it soon emerged that entrepreneurs who were particularly successful or who worked in politically sensitive areas were among the first with good reason to fear for their safety. Those who had expressed or published democratic opinions were particularly at risk. On the night of the Reichstag fire, for instance, Edith Jacobsohn—the widow of the founder of the weekly news magazine Die Weltbühne—was forced to flee the city.37 The Ullstein publishing house also came into the crosshairs in February 1933. In March the SA arrested Heinz Ullstein, the son of the company’s founder, and Hans Schäffer, another main company boss, was – 103 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

threatened with “protective custody.”38 The examples of Hermann Schapiro, Adolf Sommerfeld, and the Rotter brothers illustrate how broad the spectrum of potential SA victims had become. Schapiro had to flee Berlin because he was the chairman of the Nero Film AG, which had made Fritz Lang’s “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,” a film banned by Goebbels in March 1933.39 That same month, property developer Sommerfeld was the target of a murder plot because he was an advocate of modern architecture. Sommerfeld wasn’t hurt, but he too had to flee and could only watch helplessly as the commissioner, a loyal Nazi, appointed to run his company succeeded in seizing the entire title to the firm.40 In the case of Alfred and Fritz Rotter, the founders of a private theater loathed by the Nazis, even emigration from Germany was no guarantee of safety. The Nazis tried to kidnap them in Lichtenstein. Alfred and his wife Gertrud were killed, while Fritz Rotter was able to escape, seriously wounded.41 The Völkische Beobachter instructed the SA and SS to desist from violent activities on 12 March. Nonetheless, the next day Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick had to order the interior ministers of the individual German states within the Reich to prevent violence. “Not only the owners of businesses are adversely affected,” Frick wrote in his memorandum, “but also employees, customers and the nation’s economy.”42 Despite these orders, violence declined only slightly, and more worried discussions were held within Hitler’s cabinet.43 On 25–26 March Hitler met with Goebbels and Frick to agree on concrete measures to divert anti-Semitic violence into channels less harmful to the image of the Nazi regime and to distract public attention from mass violence. They decided on the one hand to implement a “boycott” of Jewish businesses and on the other to lay the groundwork for excluding Jews from the civil service.44 Hitler only informed the rest of his cabinet of these measures on 28 March, the day after the call for the blockade was made public. He dismissed the reservations of conservative-nationalist ministers but agreed to a compromise whereby the “boycott” was officially organized as a Nazi Party activity. He also agreed to characterize the racist exclusion of Jews from the civil service as a reaction to negative reporting about Germany in the foreign press.45 Once the call for the blockade had been made public, local Nazi groups in Berlin began compiling lists of Jewish businesses.46 These lists were then checked by a local committee, founded on 29 March under the direction of the Gau economic advisor.47 Yet the director of the “Central Committee for Defense Against Jewish Atrocities and Boycott Agitation,” Julius Streicher, did not provide a clear definition of the businesses concerned. Guidelines published on 29 March with Hitler’s approval merely stated that businesses that found themselves “in Jewish hands” were to be targeted. The guidelines explicitly stated that businesspeople who had converted from – 104 –

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Judaism to Protestantism or Catholicism and atheists of the “Jewish race” were to be considered Jews,48 and that the action should also include businesses whose owners’ spouses were Jewish.49 But the guidelines neither defined Jewishness as a racist category nor answered the question of when precisely a business should be deemed to be “in Jewish hands.” Such decisions were left to the whims of the local subcommittees and to local Nazi groups and SA storm troops.50 Although the announcement of the blockade was intended to divert SA activism into “respectable” channels, there were still instances of violence.51 These were so intense that, on 30 March, Mayor Sahm saw himself compelled to issue an official denial, claiming that “public life in Berlin was governed by exemplary order.”52 The very next day, the right-wing Lokal-Anzeiger reported that the SA had “occupied” two Jewish businesses on Münzstraße.53 On nearby Königstraße, SA men stormed the N. Israel department store and abducted the business’s directors.54 They also occupied the Berlin Central Court, driving judges they believed to be Jewish out of the building.55 On 31 March a pro-boycott poster was hung on the wall under the giant clock in Markthalle VI, a covered market on Invalidenstrasse, known to be frequented by many Jews.56 A picture of the poster, taken by an unknown photographer, was published in the weekend edition of the Völkische Beobachter on 2 April 1933. Clearly visible on the poster, alongside a swastika flag, was the pennant of the “Battle Front Black, White and Red,” the association that had been formed by the conservative nationalist DNVP and the Stahlhelm, a paramilitary league of military veterans, for the 2 March elections. The people who designed the poster apparently wanted it to express that both movements within Hitler’s coalition supported the blockade.57 That was untrue of the Battle Front’s leadership, but many of their rank and file backed the anti-Semitic initiative and became the fifth wheel on the NSDAP’s bandwagon.58

The “Boycott” According to the official version of events, in Berlin the national “boycott” of Jewish businesses proceeded “with strict discipline.”59 “Discipline” was the watchword of the day.60 The Foreign Ministry employed it.61 Goebbels used it twice in his diary entry for 1 April 193362 and repeated it in his book Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei.63 One of the photos officially released to the press, showing the SA lining up in front of a branch of the Hemdenmatz GmbH in Leipziger Straße, was intended to demonstrate, above all, how disciplined the storm troopers had been. Thus the caption it was given in the popular illustrated magazine Die Grüne Post read: “To counter the – 105 –

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atrocious agitation from abroad, the NSDAP staged a defensive boycott that went off peacefully in Berlin and throughout the Reich. Here SA men can be seen carrying signs in western Berlin.”64 Far stricter than the discipline maintained by the SA were the instructions Propaganda Minister Goebbels issued to the press. Nonetheless, Nazi techniques for controlling the public sphere weren’t as effective as they would become in later years, so that contemporary reports contain a number of revealing details. They not only recounted what journalists were supposed to see, but also shed light on things that were supposed to be kept concealed and are therefore worth analyzing. For starters, newspapers reported extensively about how the blockade spread. The Berliner Börsen-Courier wrote: “Even early in the day, there was an extraordinary amount of activity in the western commercial streets. … Almost all of the shops between Wittenbergplatz and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church on both sides of Tauentzienstraße had boycott posters, large and small. … On Hausvogteiplatz and on Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße, which are almost exclusively lined with Jewish textile businesses, little could be seen of the boycott since most shops had stayed closed.”65 The

Figure 4.1. Slightly retouched original of a press picture taken by an unknown photographer on 1 April 1933. The placards read: “Germans, defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!” Collection Wolfgang Haney, Berlin. – 106 –

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Lokal-Anzeiger reported: “Driving through the city, it’s interesting to note how Jewish businesses are distributed in various districts. In the south, from Hallisches Tor to Tempelhof, you see very few businesses being boycotted. In Neukölln, they are more numerous, and along some stretches of Frankfurter Allee, there are red posters on practically every building. In the southeast, where the used-garment trade is located, most of the shops are, of course, closed.”66 The Steglitzer Anzeiger pointed out that the blockade had shown the public “how many Jewish businesses there are in [the district of] Steglitz too.”67 The Völkische Beobachter took a similar tack in its report on Tauentzienstraße: “Now you can recognize this Eldorado of Jewish commercial spirit in the brightest of lights. One Jewish business after another.”68 Secondly, newspapers reported on the commercial sectors affected by the blockade. The Lokal-Anzeiger wrote: “Only now can we see with complete clarity which branches of business are mainly practiced by Jews: many shoe shops, most department stores, numerous garment shops and almost all the city’s pawn shops are affected by the boycott. The majority of pharmacies are also shut.”69 The Börsen-Courier added another branch of commerce to the list: “The boycott is also being felt in the taxi sector. Drivers are distributing hand-written lists with the names of all Jewish taxi companies and encouraging all taxi drivers not to use the taxis of the businesses in question.”70 Banks had been explicitly excluded from picketing, but not the stock exchange, and the Völkische Beobachter reported that Jewish brokers had been denied entry to the building.71 Thirdly, the newspapers also mentioned inconsistencies. The Vossische Zeitung, for instance, pointed out that several Jewish businesses had been spared the blockade, while non-Jewish businesses had erroneously been included.72 The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung even cited a concrete example: “There was confusion regarding the outlets of the well-known company Hester, several of which boast in their display windows an advertisement from the Völkische Beobachter and a declaration with the official NSDAP stamp that the owners of the business are Christian and Aryan. Nonetheless some outlets of this company were picketed by men carrying placards who initially withdrew but later returned. Word is that the local competition had some influence here.”73 The Berliner Tageblatt reported that in no time people had assembled in front of the big Jewish businesses in the city center and began discussing the measures connected with the blockade.74 In so doing the newspaper cautiously hinted that the general populace was by no means completely in favor of the “boycott”, while the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung made no bones of rejecting it. An article in the latter not only described the humiliating slogans that had been painted on many business, it also cited the Prussian Constitution of 1850, which guaranteed – 107 –

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all Germans, including Jews, equality before the law.75 The Jüdische Rundschau pointed out that it was hard to understand why slogans such as “Germans, defend yourselves” had been translated into English on some of the placards and concluded that the “boycott organizers” wanted “the photographs to be disseminated in Anglo-Saxon countries.”76 The fact that picketers in Berlin carried bilingual placards underscores the particular importance of the city. The Reich capital played host not only to foreign embassies but to the offices of foreign periodicals.77 The city was a focus of attention for the nascent global community.78 But the Nazi attempts to use bilingualism to influence public opinion abroad failed.79 On 12 April the New York Times ran a photo of the blockade featuring people standing outside a Hemdenmatz GmbH store and not one focusing on picketers or placards (figure 6.1.).80 And foreign newspapers were nearly unanimous in condemning the blockade.81 The event, of course, was staged for the eyes of foreigners as well as Germans. The German press did not publish any pictures of images of businesses identified by graffiti, rather than placards—which were more common in the outlying districts than in the city center.82 Instead, the Illustrierte Beobachter—published by the Nazis’ own Franz Eher Nachf. Publishing House—printed a series of photos from Berlin that depicted the supposed discipline and dedication of the SA.83 In its report on the “boycott” the Völkische Beobachter showed similar photos, including one purported to capture the picketing of the Michalski & Striemer linen shop.84 Yet the closed shutters and gates, the moist dung of dogs, and the reflection of a flashbulb all indicate that the photo was taken the night before the event. Thus, although it has been republished uncritically in a number of studies on the “Aryanization,” the photo does not capture the “boycott” itself, but only what it was supposed to look like.85 There is a second photo depicting the same scene from a slightly different angle and a third picture in the Berlin State Archive depicting the same SA men—identifiable as common storm troopers in the prestigious Horst Wessel Sturm—covering an advertising pillar with posters.86 The second picture bears its maker’s stamp and allows us to identify 44-year-old press photographer Fritz Steppuhn—who had joined the Nazi Party in 1930—as the man behind the camera (see figure 4.2., next page).87 But despite the effort spent on the blockade and Nazi assurances that it would help maintain order, violence did not cease. One of the many outbursts—although the Börsen-Courier reported on it under the headline “Boycott with Strict Discipline”88—took place in the central covered market (Markthalle I). There, a man named Erich Felix rented a stall where he sold fruit.89 The blockade would have hit him particularly hard since he dealt in perishable wares, so he attempted to keep his stand open, but he – 108 –

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Figure 4.2. Picture by Fritz Steppuhn; Berlin, 31 March 1933. From the author’s private archive.

was driven out of the hall by a Stahlhelm member and four SA men and viciously beaten in front of the building.90 Even for those tradespeople who did not suffer physical violence, the experience of the racist embargo was deeply disturbing. Listing the outrages against Jews in Germany in 1933, the Comité des Délégations – 109 –

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Juives, led by Russian Zionist Leo Motzkin, made a point of mentioning the “psychological effects” of the “boycott”: “The damage is immeasurably large when Jew hatred is concentrated within a single day and when it is legitimated in orders and speeches by the political leadership and supported by propaganda, so that even the most apolitical, withdrawn and dull-witted people are unable to overlook it.”91 The World Alliance for Combating Anti-Semitism in London reported that several entrepreneurs committed suicide. One of them was Herbert Schimek, a 40-year-old partner and war veteran who shot himself because he could not bear that his business, the venerable used-paper dealership Josef Schimek, was being marked in such a medieval way.92

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In Businesses and Around Berlin On 2 April 1933 Jewish businesspeople may have been “allowed”—in the words of the Berliner Tageblatt—to remove the placards and graffiti with “some occasionally quite extensive cleaning.”93 But as we shall see, that hardly ended the persecution. For practical purposes, at least as far as retailers were concerned, the embargo had demarcated which businesses were to be considered Jewish.94 To strengthen the impression that Jews were not true Germans, thereby reinforcing the message of the “boycott”, a raid was carried out in the Scheunenviertel on 5 April and broadcasted on the radio. The Jews who were interviewed spoke only broken German, which of course underscored the idea that they were non-German foreign entities.95 In addition, the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (NSBO), which had acquired considerable momentum in the euphoria after the Nazis’ political victories, stirred up unrest within large Jewish companies.96 By 31 March 1933 the Berlin NSBO was already demanding that functionaries from the organization be appointed as personnel commissioners in all Jewish businesses. All Jewish employees and managers should be immediately dismissed, and non-Jewish staff should receive two months’ salary paid in advance.97 The NSBO had no realistic chance of pushing through these demands, but they did demonstrate the organization’s radical commitment.98 In April 1933 Nazi factory cells began terrorizing Jewish workers and managers wherever they could.99 The cell at the Christian Wilhelm Kayser & Co. smelting works, which employed some 160 people, occupied the office of the board of management and forced board member Erich Lewy to hand over his key to a deputy—another Jewish member of the board, Siegfried Hirsch, had already fled the premises. The company’s Jewish employees were fired, and a general agent who enjoyed the confidence of the board of directors was taken into temporary “protective custody.”100 – 110 –

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A self-appointed commission assumed the running of the company. On 18 April, when Lewy was restored to his post at the behest of supervisory board chairman and later IHK President Friedrich Reinhart, the result, according to the cell, was nearly a strike. The industrial action was only averted when it was pointed out that the strike would have coincided with Hitler’s birthday.101 The cell informed Kurt Daluege, then a commissioner within the Prussian Interior Ministry, that it could not guarantee the safety of Lewy or those loyal to him. In order to “preserve orderly conditions” within the smelting works, the cell asked Daluege “to take board member Lewy into protective custody and appoint without delay a Reich commissioner.”102 On 14 May 1933, with the situation threatening to careen out of hand, the director of the NSBO in Berlin explicitly ordered his functionaries to desist from taking any independent actions.103 As this did not have the desired effect, Goebbels had to issue an identical order five days later. In so doing he followed a pattern for assigning blame that Hitler had established in March 1933,104 offering a highly implausible explanation for the events in question: A commissioner comes and declares he wants to cleanse an economic enterprise. He appoints himself director general and gives himself a fat salary. This man dons a newly acquired brown shirt and thinks that he’s safe from the police. But he’s wrong! Let me make this perfectly clear: From now on, we’ll be putting commissioners like this behind bars. We decide what needs to be done in the economy. By crassly grabbing power, a commissioner like that takes the bread from workers’ mouths. I do not believe that people like that are harmless dreamers. On the contrary, many of them are sophisticated political enemies who think that if the economy continues the way it’s going we’ll be toppled from power. This nonsense has to stop.105

Using one of Germany’s largest banks, the Dresdner Bank, as an example, Dieter Ziegler has shown how disturbingly effective the Nazi company cells were in the medium and long term and how greatly they disrupted the atmosphere of large businesses.106 Parallel to and sometimes in conjunction with the DAF, city administrators, in particular Julius Lippert, exerted additional pressure. One prime example of this was the Engelhardt Brauerei AG, whose Jewish owners Lippert had detained until he finished selling off the business at a price far below its worth.107 Moreover, traders at Berlin’s markets were frequently subject to blockades in the surrounding countryside or were literally marginalized out of business.108 The CV described the situation in June 1933 as follows: “For several months Jewish dealers have been prevented from pursuing business – 111 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

at various markets in Prussia. A few weeks ago they were hindered, under the threat of violence, from setting up their stands. Now, numerous communities have simply refused to grant Jewish merchants spots at markets. There has been no justification for this action, which has no legal basis and which contradicts the principle of people’s freedom to pursue their trades.”109

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Further Attacks Even after 1 April 1933 there were attacks and other acts of violence against Jews throughout Berlin.110 In the summer of 1933, for example, milk seller Helene Birnbaum was attacked six times—her shop windows were shattered by bullets.111 In some cases the violence proved fatal. One of the first victims among entrepreneurs was Georg Eppenstein, a nonreligious descendent of a Jewish family who had headed the herbal medicine company Ruilos Knoblauch-Verwertungs-GmbH since 1927. The business flourished under his direction, and in 1931 he moved production facilities to the outlying district of Köpenick,112 where he quickly attracted the attention of the local SA. In March 1933 two SA men tried to take Eppenstein into custody, only to be foiled by a hastily summoned police officer. Nonetheless, Eppenstein and his non-Jewish wife Martha were often harassed and insulted on the street.113 In conjunction with the so-called Köpenick Blood Week, two armed SA men brutally removed Eppenstein from his apartment on 21 June. After a number of inquiries, Martha located her husband in the local courthouse and secured his release. But she was shocked at the condition he was in, as she recalled in 1949: “I shuddered when I saw him. I hardly recognized him. His glasses were gone, his eyes and his head had been buffeted with blows, and his nose was smashed to pieces. His entire face was black. My husband could neither see nor hear. That apparently even made an impression on [SA leader] Gehrke because he said to me: ‘Well, take your husband home.’ Once we were home, I called a doctor. He just shook his head and said that my husband needed to go to the hospital at once. So that’s what happened. My husband stayed there for several days, in terrible pain. Then I took him home again.”114 Georg Eppenstein died in the night of 3 August as a result of his brutal mistreatment.115 A little over two weeks later, on 21 August, Rudolf Mosse—the nephew of the founder of Berlin’s famous publishing house—died while being transferred from Gestapo custody to the Oranienburg concentration camp. No cause of death was recorded.116 More research needs to be done on the early incarceration of Jews in the more than 170 early concentration camps in and around Berlin, but the authors of a leading study on the initial phase of Nazi rule in the city concluded some thirty years ago that at – 112 –

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least sixteen Jews were murdered there between February and September 1933.117 On 18 September 1933, in a speech in the Sportpalast auditorium, the Gau director of propaganda Werner Wächter once again called for violence against Jews and demanded that more Jews be sent to concentration camps.118 But in contrast to other cities like Munich and Breslau (Wroclaw), there was no major picketing in Berlin during the 1933 Christmas season. The reasons are a matter of speculation. One possible explanation is that Nazi fears of further negative headlines abroad served to protect Jewish entrepreneurs. However, there were numerous individual attacks, of which two will be sketched here. In January 1934 hat maker Benno Freifeld was forcefully taken from his business to a nearby SA tavern. According to the Polish embassy, Freifeld had accused one of his employees of theft. In turn, she called upon a relative, an SA man who had been previously convicted of manslaughter. He quickly arranged for the abduction of Freifeld and his brother in order to force them to rescind their accusation.119 The incident reveals a new dimension of threat for Jewish entrepreneurs. Any conflict at the workplace could potentially make Jews targets of the SA. The second incident took place on New Year’s Eve 1934. That evening the Czech grocer Samuel Haupt was accosted and mistreated by a number of young people not far from his business. Haupt managed to flee back to his store, whereupon the attackers shattered the windows, broke down the door, and ransacked the place, fleeing only when the police arrived. The grocer had recognized some of the attackers as DAF functionaries and told the officers that the same people had wrecked things in other Jewish businesses that day. He filed an official complaint, accusing his assailants of causing bodily harm and damage to property. The police had already been informed that day that one of the attackers had tried to drive away customers from a Jewish furrier by yelling at them, “Get away from there! We don’t buy from Jews!”120 But unlike Haupt, the other Jewish businesspeople had not pressed charges because they feared, as the district attorney stressed, “being subject to further attacks.”121 Haupt’s case was closed in April, when the district attorney deemed that the Jewish grocer had suffered neither physical nor economic damages.122 His business was not listed in the commercial register and doesn’t occur in any of the other sources, so it’s impossible to determine what became of him. Haupt himself was no longer listed in the 1936 Berlin address book, which was printed in late 1935, indicating that he might have left Germany soon after the court ruling.123 This incident shows how little trust Jewish entrepreneurs could have in the judicial system by late 1934 and how slim the chances were of getting any satisfaction if they decided to insist on their rights. It is also significant that the ones responsible for the violence in this case were DAF, and not SA men. – 113 –

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Second Wave From the Periphery to the Center

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Since April 1933 there had been no nationwide anti-Jewish campaigns, but a new wave of violence spread throughout the Reich in late 1934.124 Along with anti-Semitic convictions and frustrations with the pace of anti-Jewish persecution, the unsatisfactory economic situation and rising prices for food were behind the renewed violence.125 The capital, whose economic recovery lagged behind that of the Reich as a whole, quickly became a center of unrest. In January 1935 “boycott” lists and placards appeared in the Siemenstadt part of the Spandau district,126 and in early February the Pankow district was visited by “massive numbers” of adhesive posters reading “He who buys from Jews is a traitor to his people.”127 These stickers, whose design recalled that of Der Stürmer, were professionally made and mass produced.128 In February 1935, after Saarland had voted to remain part of Germany, such stickers also began appearing in the central district of Mitte.129 Ever mindful of attracting too much negative press abroad, the government started suppressing the anti-Semitic campaigns in April so that, for a few weeks, they noticeably lost momentum.130 However, on 4 June, on the occasion of a local party rally, Deputy Gauleiter Görlitzer issued a barely concealed call to step up violence against Jews.131 This was followed by serious violent outbreaks that stretched from the Prenzlauer Berg district in the north of Berlin to Neukölln in the south.132 By mid-June, there was violence everywhere in the city, and the campaign had begun to agitate for a concrete goal. The CV noted: For approximately 14 days, people have been assembling in front of icecream parlors all over the city. On the command of certain individuals, these people prevent any customers at all from entering these places of business. Customers are threatened and occasionally punched, ice cream cones are knocked from people’s hands, and shop windows are shattered. In the majority of cases, shop owners are forced by people in civilian clothing to shut their businesses, or risk having them completely destroyed. At night, shop windows and building fronts are smeared with graffiti, covered with SA pamphlets or have the word “Jew” painted on them.133

As was becoming a trend throughout the Reich, Berlin Jews were increasingly accused of having sex with non-Jews and thereby committing what was called “racial defilement.”134 An example of how destructive such accusations could be is the case of Benno Falk, the owner of garment shop in Pankow. When he pressed charges against an employee for theft, she, in turn, accused him of “racial defilement” and called upon the SA for help. On 4 June, as the CV reported, a crowd of around one hundred – 114 –

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Figure 4.3. Picture of Hans Jeschke, Berlin, 16 July 1935. Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, E 39, 1183/1. On the back of the photograph, sent to Der Stürmer, Jeschke had written that it showed the customers leaving the Balsams ice cream parlor, because of his and his fellow picketer’s verbal threats.

people assembled outside Falk’s shop, shattering the businesses windows and attacking Falk personally.135 On 25 June both the SA and the Hitler Youth prohibited their members from taking part in attacks like these,136 but Goebbels gave an incendiary anti-Semitic speech at the annual Gau party conference five days later.137 As the CV noted, anti-Semitic violence remained prevalent and was once again being directed by SA leaders. In July 1935 the CV reported that a crowd had chanted, “We’ve waited for two years, and now we’re going to solve the Jewish Question ourselves.”138 On 14 July there was a serious and apparently staged conflict at a movie theatre on Kurfürstendamm. During a showing of a Swedish film with anti-Semitic overtones called Petterson & Bendel, there was unrest in the audience.139 The next edition of Der Angriff blew up the incident into an article with the headline “Jews demonstrate in Berlin” and openly called for a violent response.140 That very evening the Polish doctor Moritz Kleinfeld, who made a living for himself in Berlin as the representative of a South German machine-building factory, was surrounded by “30 mostly young people in civilian dress.” Kleinfeld was so badly beaten that he died a short time later.141 Anti-Jewish violence had – 115 –

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finally penetrated to the very middle of the city and Berlin’s police chief Levetzow was fired when he tried to intervene. He was replaced by the far more radical Helldorf. The day he was appointed, 18 July, Helldorf ordered Jewish ice-cream parlors to close early and ordained that Jewish businesses on Kurfürstendamm be shut down for a day on 19 July.142 With the attacks now happening in the center of the city, some party members were concerned about attracting the negative attention of foreign journalists, who had theretofore only filed brief notes. Some local party functionaries tried to constrain journalists using the same means employed against Jewish businesspeople. A Danish journalist, for instance, was attacked by SA when he tried to photograph anti-Semitic violence.143 But even when the threats against foreign reporters were made by the minister of propaganda, they had little effect.144 The international press comprehensively covered the violence. American correspondent Varian Fry reported the following on 16 July for the New York Post: “All along Kurfuerstendamm the crowd raised the chant ‘Jude’ [Jew] whenever anyone sighted or thought he had sighted a Jew. The cry sent the crowd converging on this poor victim, who was asked for his identification papers. If he could not prove himself a good ‘Aryan’ he was insulted, spat on, roughly handled, and sometimes knocked down, kicked and beaten. … I saw a man who, already lying on the sidewalk, was brutally kicked and spat on. … Nowhere did the police seem to make any effort whatever to protect the victims from this brutality.”145 The New York Times also covered the unrest in detail, emphasizing that the violence had been planned and highlighting the role of Nazi periodicals—chiefly Der Stürmer, Der Angriff, and the Völkische Beobachter—in stirring up hostility. Almost in passing, the Times mentioned that a candy store on one of the side streets off Kurfürstendamm had been attacked, and the owner and an employee had been beaten senseless.146 Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer has rightly described these brutal acts as a “pogrom,”147 and they soon developed a dynamic that could no longer be controlled. A report made by the 133rd police precinct, which was responsible for parts of Kurfürstendamm, on 22 July reads: In the past few days, it has been shown that the source of the unwanted anti-Jewish demonstration … was the numerous sellers of Der Stürmer (almost exclusively Hitler Youth). These sellers act illegally. Working together with two or three helpers, they affix ban-worthy pages of Stürmer and posters, some of which depict naked Jews, to trees and walls. The papers are sold while the sellers bellow anti-Jewish slogans. As soon as the sellers have sold out of their wares, they and their helpers join others and form the core of a demonstration that marauds through the streets.148 – 116 –

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Violent Persecution

The eruption of violence and its aftereffects are vividly illustrated by the example of the Hansa-Konditorei GmbH. On 15 July 1935, while the attacks mentioned above were being staged in a Kurfürstendamm movie theatre, several “young people, not all of whom were fully adult” arrived at the confectioner on Flensburger Straße 19. Taking orders from a lowranking SA leader, they surged into the dining room, hassled patrons, and ransacked the furniture.149 The café was repeatedly attacked in the days that followed. Customers were driven away, the seating was damaged, and the walls of the building smeared with graffiti at night. The attacks continued for more than two weeks until the afternoon of 28 July, when the SA ringleader proudly boasted about the damage he’d done to a female friend on the front yard of the café. When he tried to enter the confectionery proper, the owner told him to leave the premises and had his son call the police. The officers who arrived on the scene in fact took in the ringleader to the station to determine his identity—Kurt Heinz Hobleske, as Loewy was told. But that was likely not the young man’s real identity since there’s no record of anyone with that name either in the Berlin address book or the NSDAP rolls.150 It is likewise doubtful whether any charges were ever pressed. In any case, the ringleader was immediately released so that he was able to return to the confectionery and threaten Loewy that very evening. His threats weren’t empty. At around 10:00 pm four men stormed into the establishment, bellowing “Jews out” and “Christians out” and menacing patrons to the extent that some of them, including the wife of the confectionery manager, passed out from fear. By the time the police answered the owner’s call for help, the ruffians had long disappeared.151 Looking back on the economic damage done by these campaigns, the economic expert at the CV, Cora Berliner, concluded in her October 1935 report on Jews’ economic situation that “this summer’s wave of boycotts claimed far more numerous and serious victims than any previous wave of boycotts.”152

Newspaper Campaigns While the international press coverage certainly helped to protect Jewishowned businesses in Berlin, the German press played an increasingly destructive role from summer of 1935 on. Leading the way was Der Angriff, which since its founding had called directly and indirectly for action against Jewish commercial activities. For example, in May 1935 the periodical ran a series of articles about ostensible “Jewish swindlers” under the ironic headline “Jews with Clean Hands.” That was followed in August by a series of articles about Jewish “front companies.”153 The SS-owned Das schwarze Korps, which appeared for the first time in March 1935, also repeatedly – 117 –

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egged its readers on to violence. In July 1935, amid the public unrest described above, the paper published a long report, entitled “The Jewish March on Berlin,” that claimed the city was experiencing “an invasion of Jews unparalleled in the history of the Reich capital.”154 In May 1938 the editors unabashedly called for violence against the (non-Jewish) owner of a pharmacy for placing an advertisement in the Jüdische Gemeindeblatt (Jewish Community Paper). That, asserted the authors of the editorial, was clearly out of bounds, requiring a visit to the pharmacy by the Schwarze Korps readership: “In such cases where all laws fail, the only thing that helps is a drastic re-educational measure, which is always the best thing for enemies of the state and saboteurs.”155 Roughly at the same time as the Schwarze Korps made its debut in the capital, the retired government councilor Ernst Pistor founded the antiSemitic weekly Der Judenkenner (The Expert on Jews).156 In its initial edition in February 1935 the periodical opened with an article entitled “The Trade in Human Flesh. The Trade in Girls—A Jewish Monopoly”157 and promised that further articles denouncing Jewish inhumanity would follow.158 But the paper wasn’t a success.159 The reason for its failure was likely the great popularity of Der Stürmer. Beginning in the spring of 1935 the anti-Semitic paper published by the Gauleiter of Franconia, Julius Streicher, was displayed everywhere in Berlin, even in schools.160 The party members or individuals who hung the paper up in glass cases often included reports and further anti-Jewish tirades of their own. By the summer of 1935 the paper helped to radicalize the general public, and its influence increased in August when it opened up a branch in Berlin. A short time later Der Stürmer established a special rubric, “Letter from Berlin,” for reports from the Reich capital. In close cooperation with the DAF, the editors in charge of the column used it to attack Jewish businesspeople. The articles included the addresses, named the owners of targeted businesses, and featured photos and reproductions of company signs. Later they also listed the names of companies’ managers and employees and published detailed information about the customers.161 From July 1937 on, Der Stürmer published lists of Jewish commercial enterprises, organized according to Nazi districts and sometimes even individual streets.162 The readers were encouraged to cut them out and save them, but despite the efforts of the editors, these lists were neither comprehensive nor were they ever published as a whole.163 One of the first Jewish entrepreneurs to be targeted by Der Stürmer was the 64-yearold stocking manufacturer Carl Oswald. He was forced to transfer his business to a non-Jew after the paper accused him of systematically making unwanted advances toward his non-Jewish female employees.164 Due

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to Der Stürmer’s rising influence, accusations of “racial defilement” became more common. They were often used to apply pressure to Jewish entrepreneurs—even if sex between unmarried Jews and non-Jews first became a criminal offence later in September 1935.165 In addition, the paper’s editorial staff initiated other types of smear campaigns aimed at forcing Jewish businesspeople to throw in the towel. One of the victims was Karl Kutschera, who after World War I had built up a small amusement empire on Kurfürstendamm that included a movie theatre and two restaurant-bars, Café Wien and Zigeunerkeller. He had been at the center of public unrest in 1935 when the German film agency UFA ordered the aforementioned film Petterson & Bendel to be shown in Kutschera’s cinema. Now in 1936 Kutschera’s businesses were targeted by Der Stürmer, which raged about “scandalous” hygiene and disgraceful working conditions. That put pressure on the building-inspection authority, which shut down the Zigeunerkeller. Kutschera had no choice but to lease both of his restaurants to non-Jewish DAF functionaries, who were quickly able to diffuse the inspectors’ concerns.166 Der Stürmer was a catalyst for the persecution of Jews. Between early 1935 and late 1938 the paper picked out more than eight hundred Jewish businesses in Berlin. It is impossible to determine how detrimental to a business it was merely to be identified as Jewish, but enterprises were definitely put under considerable pressure if they were not only identified, but pilloried by Der Stürmer. The co-owner of the well-respected linen maker F.V. Grünfeld, Fritz Grünfeld, recalled in his memoirs that a Stürmer report on his business in March 1938 had opened up a “witch hunt.”167 By 1938 at the latest, the members of the IHK considered such articles significant enough to include them in their files.168 Even the ultimate destruction of Jewish commercial activity did not put an end to racist slander. In early 1942 Der Angriff ran an article entitled “Jews as Contrabandists” about the discovery of three hundred pairs of silk women’s stockings in the possession of a Jewish merchant named Alfred Lenek. Although the economic damage was minimal and silk stockings were, strictly speaking, not commodities essential to the war effort, the paper used Lenek as an example of the pernicious effect of Jews on the German economy, which justified the deportations to which, by that point, tens of thousands of Berlin Jews had already been subjected. “Although the laws of the Reich have restored the Jews living in Germany to their proper place,” the paper wrote, “they still try with all the means at their disposal to sabotage the German people’s battle for existence. … The German people have a right to be protected with all available means against such elements.”169

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Third Wave Prelude?

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Over the course of 1936 and 1937 there were repeated attacks on individual Jewish businesses. In February 1936, for instance, an egg sellers’ trade journal wrote: “As has been officially investigated, the Jewish egg wholesaler and retailer Seitelbach on Brunnenstraße 151 in Berlin North has closed its doors and failed to distribute eggs to consumers despite receiving large egg shipments from Holland. Seitelbach has almost exclusively delivered these eggs to his Jewish racial comrades and has also exploited egg shortages to hike prices so that the state police have taken him into protective custody. He has been denied the right to continue his activities as a wholesaler and retailer, and his business has been closed.”170 The Stürmer archive in Nuremberg contains a picture of the Lasker & Rynarzewski fabric shop in the southern Berlin district of Neukölln from the summer of 1937. The storefront is covered by discriminatory painted slogans, looked at by curious passersby. This sort of defacement was probably carried out by individuals, acting on their own initiative, but it was by no means uncommon. By 1937, as Nazi Germany achieved almost total employment, one of the final constraints on violence disappeared. In October of that year Das Schwarze Korps ran an article with the headline “Jews are Being Helped,” which claimed that Jews were no longer essen-

Figure 4.4. Picture by an unknown photographer of the Lasker & Rynarzewski fabric shop in Berlin, 1937, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg (StAN), E 39, Nr. 2246/9.

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tial to the German economy.171 This poured oil on the anti-Semitic flames. In early 1938 tensions had increased so much that Else Cohen, a Jewish woman from Berlin, wrote to banker Max Warburg: “The signs are that further ordinances will produce a veritable run to escape Germany.”172 The general atmosphere at the time led Saul Friedländer to conclude that in early 1938 “the idea of a pogrom against Jews in Germany” was in the air.173 The anti-Semitic outbreaks accompanying the incorporation of Austria into the Reich not only made the mood within the “old Reich” even more incendiary. Measures taken in Austria were seen as best-practice examples for the rest of Nazi Germany to follow. When the city of Vienna ordered that all Jewish businesses should be visibly identified as such, Goebbels quickly adopted the idea.174 On 22 April Berlin Police Chief Helldorf, who had just returned from Austria, had a long discussion with Goebbels about issuing a similar ordinance in Berlin, and the two men immediately briefed Hitler. In his diary Goebbels recorded that Hitler had agreed to order all Jewish businesses in Berlin to be identified—but only after he had completed a trip to Italy planned for early May.175 Nonetheless, in advance of that trip, tension increased with Göring’s 26 April 1938 Ordinance Concerning the Registration of Jewish Property. Contemporaries saw this regulation as a decisive step toward the full exclusion of Jews from the German economy. In the night between 1 and 2 May members of a local Nazi group in the district of Steglitz painted identifying slogans on Jewish businesses in their neighborhood. The Security Service (SD) would later describe this activity as the beginning of the anti-Jewish action that culminated on 21 June 1938. Nonetheless, it is obvious that this defacement was a proactive initiative of committed anti-Semites hoping to inspire similar acts.176 Anti-Semitic activities increased after Hitler returned from Italy. In the night between 14 and 15 May the word “Jew” was painted on the storefront windows of Jews’ businesses around Bayrischer Platz, and similar graffiti was also scrawled on sidewalks in front of them. The Jewish Central Information Office in Amsterdam reported that patrons of Jewish businesses in the district of Tempelhof were being photographed.177 On 31 May the Gestapo raided the popular coffee houses Dobrin, Reimann, Wien, and Uhlandseck on Kurfürstendamm and, according to Der Angriff, arrested 317 Jews.178 Although the primary goal of what were called “actions against asocial individuals” was to “recruit” new forced laborers for the SS armaments industry, they served, as the SD determined in a hastily prepared report, to “bring the situation to a boil” since contemporaries interpreted them as a signal that the state was about to commence systematically targeting Jewish businesses.179 – 121 –

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In Predetermined Channels: Repellent Labels The Third Ordinance on the Reich Citizenship Law of June 14 was like a match thrown into an already explosive mixture. For the first time ever, this law publicly defined what made businesses Jewish and empowered the Reich economics minister to have them identified as such. In the run-up to the expected official measures, local party organizations all over the city began to take matters into their own hands and crudely marked shops of Jews.180 In so doing, they followed the instructions of the Gau leadership,181 which had already resorted to the vandalism so popular during the elections of the early 1930s.182 Quite likely, Goebbels wanted to demonstrate initiative and regain his place at Hitler’s side, after falling out of favor with the Führer because of an extramarital affair.183 Berlin’s police showed increased presence on the streets, but did nothing to intervene.184 On the left-hand side of a picture taken by the amateur photographer Klaus Mirbach (Figure 9.1, p. 261), the graffiti can be seen to extend up to the second floor.185 The vandals thus not only had paint and brushes, but obviously a ladder and plenty of time in which to do their work. Anti-Semitic activists were allowed to deface whole storefronts with white, yellow, and red paint so that it was impossible for passersby to see the wares on display. This is evident in a photo of the A. Brünn Jr. furniture store that the Jewish photographer Hans Spieldoch took one afternoon between 15 and 20 June 1938.186 Using a different color of paint, a further vandal or groups of vandals had painted the words “Jews out” and a gallows on the right-hand store window. A metal grill made it impossible to paint on the bottom half of the window so the vandals merely drew a crude face with the word “Jew” there. The fact that at least three different colors and handwriting styles are discernible in the photo indicates that the windows were defaced by at least that many people or groups. Various handwriting styles are also evident in a photo of the Friedrich Boas bed shop in the Prenzlauer Berg district in northern Berlin. Along with the painted labels “Jew” on the shutters of the shop door, the image also reveals the words “Jews out” childishly scrawled in chalk. It is partial covered by other graffiti, meaning that it was written there first. At least two separate people or groups contributed to defacing this building.187 Within a matter of days, vandals deliberately worked their way from the periphery to the center of Berlin, from the Neukölln district along Frankfurter Allee via Alexanderplatz and then on to Kurfürstendamm. As a result, by 20 June the SD reported that “all Jewish businesses in Berlin” had been labeled with the word “Jew.”188 Additionally, as the New York Times reported on 22 June 1938, Nazi “boycotters” had been posted

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outside many Jewish retailers on Kurfürstendamm to insult and intimidate potential customers.189 A spokesman for the exiled Social Democratic party concluded that the vandals were working according to “carefully drawn-up lists.”190 That fact was confirmed by the speaker of the HSSPF in his report of events, adding, however, that some of the lists were inaccurate and that “isolated Aryan businesses have been mislabeled as Jewish and erroneously boycotted.”191 The word “boycott” had long since been redefined to encompass acts of active exclusion and persecution. While a “boycott” was an act of passive refusal to purchase items from Jewish shops in 1930, the term implied the violent harassment, identification, and closing of businesses in 1938. The local Nazi group “Mühlendamm” photographed the results of such boycotts and submitted a picture to the editors of the Stürmer on 18 June 1938. It depicts the completely defaced windows of the Adolf Salberg gift shops opposite the Berlin Rathaus. The reverse side of the photograph contained the inscription “in the name of the German people,” and, as is visible in the image, the words “closed by the people” have been painted on the shop door. This cohered with the NSDAP’s self-image as the executor and embodiment of the will of the people. Local Nazi groups like Mühlendamm stylized even window shopping into a test of belonging within what was advertised as the people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft), which was, as Jonathan Wiesen has

Figure 4.5. Photograph by the local Nazi group “Mühlendamm,” Berlin, 1938. Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, E39, Nr. 2246/10.

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shown, also defined as a consumer community.192 Nonetheless it was by no means guaranteed that the general public would approve of being so directly confronted with acts that would normally qualify as simple vandalism. Hence, Nazi party members placed before the victimized shops tried to convince passersby that the defacements were a just answer to similar acts of harassment visited on German businesspeople in Prague.193 Other party members tried to stir up doubts and suppress evidence that the party had been responsible for the attacks. And a garment worker, who told a crowd that the vandals of a building had been wearing party insignia, was immediately arrested by an SA Oberführer, who “just happened to be present.”194 In contrast to the blockade of April 1933, which was staged for the press, photos like the ones we’ve been discussing were not supposed to leave Germany. Taking pictures of defaced storefronts may not have been officially forbidden, but a British exchange student at an elitist Nazi high school (Napola) who had taken photographs was cautioned and had his camera confiscated by the Gestapo.195 A Jewish merchant named Benjamin Cukiermann was turned in by a neighbor and arrested when he tried to take pictures of graffiti on his store.196 Even the US ambassador reported that four foreign press photographers had been arrested after documenting the vandalism.197 Such tactics of suppression appear to have been successful. Foreign reports on the labeling campaign lacked photos—although the pieces published were still very critical, as the Hamburg Global Economic Institute determined in a report commissioned by the SD.198 The New York Times, for instance, commented: “A daylight ride down Berlin’s main shopping streets today revealed a thousand or more crudely decorated Jewish-owned shops and stores that had been victims of one of the most sinister but also one of the most clumsily executed anti-Jewish demonstrations undertaken in the German metropolis since the advent of the National-Socialist regime. Last night’s bucket squads worked with precision, it must be allowed, even if their color combination and lettering lacked artistry.”199 Perceptively, the Times correspondent surmised that the majority of the populace rejected the identification campaign because it was perceived as being in poor form.200 That view was shared by the SD operative in his onthe-spot report: “In many segments of society, people think that the same positive result could have been achieved with other methods. What they mean primarily is a unified labelling of Jewish businesses which would have required shop owners to write their names and types of business in Hebraic letters. And many people question why, six years after coming to power, the government still needs to resort to the same propaganda methods employed in the Jew boycott of 1 April 1933.”201 – 124 –

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After complaints by Funk and Göring, Hitler—who, as was often the case, was in Berchtesgaden, not in Berlin—ordered a stop to the campaign.202 Goebbels had to back down, and on 21 June his deputy Görlitzer issued instructions to Nazi district leaders, the SA, and the police that all activities were to cease that afternoon. In addition, it was decided that Reinhard Heydrich, as the head of the security police, would be exclusively responsible for “decisions concerning individual measures.”203 That night, owners of Jewish businesses were given the opportunity to remove all graffiti.204 Twisting the facts, as was his wont, Goebbels recorded: “The Jewish Question in Berlin has become more complicated. Most likely upon orders by Helldorff, the party had all Jewish businesses marked as such, whereupon Funk got involved. He wanted to do everything legally. But it takes so long. … Helldorff [sic] completely reversed my orders. I had said: The police acts with the face of legality, while the party looks on. Exactly the opposite is now the case. I’ve summoned all party authorities and issued new orders. All illegal activities must cease. The Jews will have the chance to clean up their businesses. Funk had better hurry up with his measures.”205 Ever the hero in his own writing, Goebbels transformed personal defeat into a public triumph. At a 22 June speech to celebrate the summer solstice at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, he declared that while he knew that there were a lot of Jewish businesses in Berlin, he hadn’t known “that there were so many,” thereby picking up on one of the leitmotifs from journalistic reporting on the blockade of April 1933. He subsumed what had happened under a larger cause and was greeted, as the reporter from the Angriff duly noted, with “amusement.”206 The press, which had previously been forbidden from mentioning the graffiti campaign, was ordered to write, by way of commenting on the propaganda minister’s speech, that individual actions had now ceased but that Jewish businesses had been definitively marked.207 A gagging order, which by and large had been respected by Berlin newspapers, was thus partially lifted.208

On the Margins As we’ve seen, many Nazi actions began on Berlin’s periphery and moved toward the central districts of the city. The neighborhood of Tegel was particularly brutal. There the local party group leader Karl Gröninger, who was also the leader of the local SA storm troop, and the chief of the local police precinct had decided that theirs would be the first “Jew-free” district in the city.209 One of the victims of their racist rage was a man named Max Hirsch, who ran an auto-repair and bicycle shop that wasn’t listed in the commercial register. Over the course of 1938 Hirsch was repeatedly taken from his shop and brought to the police station by a jeering column – 125 –

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of officers.210 In the summer of 1938 Hermann Großmann, who had run a men’s clothing shop in Tegel since 1912, had to finally bow to anti-Semitic pressure. Grossmann’s business had been repeatedly picketed by the SA and excluded from the suppliers’ lists to needy Berliners since 1933.211 On Whit Sunday 1938 Grossmann was mistreated by SA men, who also smashed his store windows.212 The incident was brutal enough for the Social Democrats in exile to describe it as a “pogrom.”213 A few days later the Stürmer poured oil on the flames by publishing a list of “Jews in Tegel” that drew particular attention to the “horrific conditions” of Grossmann’s business.214 In August 1938, after further attacks, Grossmann transferred his business to Walter Schulz and Hedwig Marianczek, who formed a general partnership to this end.215 A short time later the Stürmer reported—under the headline “What gladdens the Berliner”—that Grossmann intended to leave Tegel “as soon as possible.”216 Max Hirsch, owner of one of the last surviving Jewish businesses, a repair shop, was incarcerated on 10 November. He was threatened with deportation to a concentration camp if he didn’t immediately sell his home and business.217 Thus pressured, Hirsch transferred possession of his business a short time later to a man named Arthur Blaschke.218

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Violence and Plunder The marking of Jewish businesses did not just make the owners feel humiliated and vulnerable. As the SD itself determined, it also went hand in hand with personal harassment, since the marking made the shops visible and, in so doing, easy to target.219 The German exile newspaper Pariser Tageszeitung described a typical incident: “In the late afternoon of June 16, a mob bellowed and raged in the area surrounding Horst-Wessel-Platz in eastern Berlin. Jewish shopkeepers were dragged out of into the street and beaten, and all Jewish businesses were forced to close.”220 The Social Democrats in exile in Paris reported that a mob had threatened Willi Kornblum, the owner of a tie shop near the Rathaus, because he had the temerity to wipe the word “Jew” and other defamatory graffiti from his store windows.221 The pogrom-like atmosphere repeatedly inspired individuals to vent their rage.222 Writing retrospectively in US exile, journalist Bella Fromm recalled seeing SA men force the owner of a stationery shop out in the street to clean up shards of broken glass from his store windows with his bare hands.223 Together with a friend, Fromm was also witness to scenes of looting: We were just about to enter a tiny jewelry shop when a gang of youngsters in Hitler Youth Uniforms smashed the shop window and stormed – 126 –

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into the shop, brandishing butchers knives, yelling: “To hell with Jewish rabble! Room for the Sudeten-Germans!” The smallest boy of the mob climbed inside the window and started his work of destruction by flinging everything he could grab into the street. Inside, the other boys broke glass shelves and counters, hurling alarm clocks, cheap silverware to their accomplices outside. A tiny shrimp of a boy crouched in a corner of the window, putting dozens of rings on his fingers and stuffing his pockets with wristwatches and bracelets. His uniform bulging with loot, he turned around, spat squarely into the shopkeeper’s face, and dashed off.224

Instances of looting were only half-heartedly investigated. When the Alfred Brünn Nachfolger department store in Frankfurter Allee had its windows smashed, the investigating police officer reported: “The perpetrator was not out to steal anything but merely to do harm to the business’s Jewish owner.”225 Not surprisingly, police investigations failed to turn up any leads in the case and were discontinued in March 1939.226 While the police at least maintained the pretense of looking for looters, Goebbels simply dismissed plunderers as “gypsies and other nefarious elements.”227 Another of Goebbels diary entries, however, is particularly revealing. On 8 June 1938 he noted that he had ordered Helldorf to “check on the fate of Jews in the concentration camp [Sachsenhausen].” “Abuses” had occurred there, which Goebbels, at least as he wrote in his diary, refused to tolerate.228 Goebbels can hardly be accused of being honestly concerned with Jews’ welfare. Nonetheless, this diary entry shows that Goebbels was aware that Jews deported to Sachsenhausen in 1938 were being mistreated beyond the levels that had been deemed acceptable since 1933. Indeed, while the mass arrests and kidnappings of June 1938 were officially directed against “asocial” individuals, they in fact represented a radicalization of anti-Semitic repression. Not only were Jews arrested en masse for the first time. The treatment accorded to them was particularly arbitrary and brutal.229 The CV’s in-house lawyer estimated that 90 of the 900 people arrested died.230 One of the fatalities was Albert Labus. Labus was born in a small Brandenburg town in 1892 and had founded a paper factory in Berlin in the 1920s. In May 1936 he had transferred his business, the Albert Labus AG, with an equity capital of 100,000 reichsmarks, to his non-Jewish general manager.231 Two years later he was arrested as a “work-shy Jew” and taken to Sachsenhausen, where he died on 29 August 1938. The ostensible cause of death was pulmonary and circulatory failure.232 Yet, violence was not restricted to the camps. In Berlin local party figures were still carrying out violent attacks against Jews. Thus, in early October 1938 some thirty Nazis went marauding through the weekly outdoor market in the district of Spandau, mistreating Jewish merchants and tipping over their stands.233 – 127 –

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Pogrom First Deportations On 27–28 October masses of Jews were deported for the first time ever from the German Reich. The reason for this was that Poland had begun to expatriate citizens living outside its national boundaries. Some 17,500 people were affected.234 It is estimated that around a third of them, or approximately 6000, came from Berlin. However, the actual number may have been higher, since, according to the 1933 census, almost half of all Polish Jews in the German Reich resided in Berlin. What is certain is that the deportations in Berlin mainly affected men and were extremely brutal.235 One of those deported was Moritz Zielinski, who had been brought to Germany to work during World War I and had long been planning to emigrate to Paraguay.236 One week before he was deported, Zielinski had his shoemaking company, which he had built up impressively from humble beginnings, erased from the commercial register. That was published on the very day of his deportation, 28 October 1928.237 But Zielinski was an exception. Most entrepreneurs didn’t have time to formally wind down their businesses. For example, Markus Kleinberger, who had run a tobacco wholesaler since 1913, had to ask his wife, who stayed behind in Berlin, to take care of formalities for him.238 To deal with the bureaucratic chaos that resulted, the German Foreign Ministry agreed with the Polish government in early 1939 “that deported Jews with Polish citizenship would be allowed to return temporarily to liquidate their German assets.”239

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Escalation On 7 November 1938 in Paris Herschel Grynszpan, who was angry at the deportation of his parents to Poland, shot and seriously wounded German Ambassadorial Secretary Ernst vom Rath. When the news of the attack came over the radio, it was clear to most Jews that terrible consequences would follow.240 Helldorf ratcheted up the already tense situation and announced that his men had disarmed Berlin’s Jews, remarking about “what a stock of weapons had been in Jews’ possession.”241 On Wednesday, 9 November, vom Rath died. That same day, the Nazis were celebrating with great pomp and pathos the fifteenth anniversary of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in Munich on 9 November 1923. Hitler and Goebbels, who were in Munich together with Görlitzer and Helldorf,242 agreed that evening to allow and indeed incite a targeted anti-Semitic action.243 Goebbels gave the signal in his customary speech in the Bürgerbräukeller, whereupon at around 10:30 pm the Gauleiter and SA leaders ran to the available tele– 128 –

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phones and issued the order for SA men in their hometowns to get on with it.244 Since almost the entire leadership of his Gau was in Munich, Goebbels called his Gau propaganda director and ordered him “to have the synagogue on Fasanenstraße taken apart.”245 Wächter had apparently put the Ortsgruppenleiter in Berlin’s districts on high alert so that they could quickly mobilize their men when he gave the signal to move. As was customary the men had imbibed some Dutch courage in storm taverns and then swarmed out and began ransacking. It is unknown whether they were given time off from their jobs as compensation for their nightly party work. No doubt they had little trouble identifying Jewish businesses since most were still clearly marked from June 1938 so that, as Fredric Zeller recalled, “even the stupidest SA man had no difficulty recognizing every Jewish business in every street, if he drove slowly enough.”246 Considering the large number of Jewish businesses that still existed, we can safely assume that the street gangs were centrally directed to specific neighborhoods. In his report on the events, Germany’s envoy to Argentina mentions lists that were handed out to the perpetrators.247 Jewish chemist Bernhard Landau, who reported on his experiences in November 1938 to the Central Jewish Information Office, was also convinced that the violence had been carefully planned.248 Landau included detailed descriptions of the ransacking. Even if these were in part second hand, they deserve citation since they conform to other testimonials249: A truck with a trailer drove down (Tauentzienstraße) carrying a number of young people. They had civilian coats and caps on, but under their coats you could see brown trousers and black boots, which immediately identified them as members of a National Socialist organization. Apparently they were part of the NSKK (National Socialist Motor Vehicle Corps), who had been charged with carrying out the destruction since they had the heavy vehicles necessary to get the job done quickly. Armed with long metal bars, they jumped down from the truck, and one of them went to the police officer directing traffic at the intersection of Tauentzienstraße and Nürnberger Straße. The former showed the latter a sheet of paper, which seemed to contain a list of Jewish businesses as well as instructions not to interfere in their destruction. After reading the document, the officer turned his back as the youths smashed the display windows etc … of a shop with their metal bars. A bit further on, the procedure was repeated at a ladies garment shop. The youths just tossed women’s coats out to the street, insofar as they were in too much of a hurry to carry them to the truck.250

In addition to businesses, synagogues and houses of prayer were also defiled, set afire and left to burn. In the Scheunenviertel particularly, gangs of SA invaded private apartments.251 Yet, Berlin apparently saw – 129 –

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relatively few of the instances of mass humiliation reported and photographed in small- to medium-sized cities.252 Instead, in the afternoon of 10 November, the ransacking and looting resumed, with Hitler Youth units also taking part.253 Among the victims were Hermann Kovács and his wife Martha, who ran a gentlemen’s requisites store on Kurfürstendamm. It had previously escaped the worst damage probably because the owners were Czech. The Czech embassy reported:

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On November 10, at around 2PM, a gang of young people forced entry into the locked and barricaded store, smashed the glass doors of all the display cases, all glass surfaces, mirrors and all other items made of glass. … The stores’ wares were taken from the cases and thrown about the premises. The youths then stomped around on the wares and the glass shards without interruption from 3PM until the evening. The lights in the store were completely destroyed, and many of the display cases were taken apart, their doors torn completely from their hinges. Almost nothing remained of the interior of the shop. White shirts made of silk and poplin … were thrown in the coal bins. A bottle of metal cleaner was dumped upon the wares, which had been tossed on the ground and trampled. Raw eggs were broken upon them, and some of them were dirtied with blood.254

Jewish architect John Greiffenhagen reported that that afternoon some two hundred people invaded a tailor’s workshop on the second floor of a building on Kurfürstendamm and were only hindered by SS men from storming the office of a non-Jewish business one floor further up.255 On Hausvogteiplatz wholesale businesses located on the upper floors were also systematically destroyed. An eyewitness described as “an Aryan woman from Berlin” reported the following to the Central Jewish Information Office: “A group of ten or eleven men, armed with long iron bars and axes, stormed into the wholesale businesses and reduced everything, and I do mean everything, there was to be shred to tiny pieces. … Clothing, furs, typewriters, lamps, coach racks even flowerpot were thrown down into the street. All the firms’ records, notes and card files followed. … Down below, boosters and watchdogs ensured that the street remained empty.”256 Alexander Szanto, one of the managers of the Wirtschaftshilfe, the Jewish Community Economic Aid Organization, described similar scenes: As I hurried along the streets on the afternoon [of November 10], I was struck by the sheer number of ravaged Jewish businesses. Without exception, their windows had been smashed, and there were glass shards all over the street. Signs, electrical advertisements and placards had been torn down or smeared with paint. Hanging down like that and scattered

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in the road, they gave the street the atmosphere of unreal devastation. But it was not until the evening that I could survey the full extent of the vandalism, when I … hurried to the west and crossed Kurfürstendamm, which had once been home to so many Jewish businesses. The pogrom, said to be a “spontaneous popular outrage,” had begun the previous evening, raged through the night and was continued the following day. Even during the evening of November 10, there were still gangs of five to ten men armed with crowbars and iron bars marauding the streets. Bellowing and laughing, they completed the work of destruction wherever they was anything left to destroy.257

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A photo shows that looting took place in broad daylight in front of crowds of onlookers and participants. The plundered shop is the Leo Schmuckler tobacco store, which had also specialized in Jewish ritual articles. The photo was presumably taken from behind plants on a balcony on the opposite side of the street—the Artilleriestraße. In the image, several looters are tearing down a sheet of white material that the shop owner apparently hung up by Schmuckler to cover his windows, which had

Figure 4.6. Photo of Leo Schmuckler’s tobacco store on 10 or 11 November 1938 by an unknown photographer. bpk/Bayerische Staatsbibliothek/Heinrich Hoffmann, No. 50049865. It is questionable whether this photograph was really taken by Heinrich Hoffmann since on 10 November he also made an extensive series of pictures of the pogrom in Munich. Thus it is possible that the photographer was one of Hoffmann’s assistants or that the photo was confiscated by the Gestapo and handed over to Hoffmann. – 131 –

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likely been smashed the night or day before. Plunderers too are pushing up the shutters meant to protect the entrance. Most of the people trying to squeeze into the store are men. We can assume they were not after the ritual articles but after the cigarettes. In the lower left-hand third of the picture, under the cigarette advertisement, we can make out the cap of an SS or police officer who to all appearances is participating in rather than preventing the looting.258 The aim of this second wave of destruction was obviously to damage Jewish businesses, including their records, so badly that it would be impossible for them to resume activity. On the evening of 10 November the unrest receded somewhat because police stepped up patrols and began arresting looters.259 Nonetheless, the situation hadn’t calmed down completely; on Friday, 11 November, Goebbels had newspapers repeat his order, issued the day before via the German News Service, that the destruction had to stop immediately.260 It took all weekend, however, for the Nazis to restore public order, a state which they repeatedly invoked in their propaganda but which they themselves had reduced to utter farce. No one knows exactly how many Jewish businesses were raised to the ground in the pogrom. In precinct 17, police reported that 29 businesses had been attacked, 80 windows had been smashed, and 12 of the businesses had been looted in their precinct alone. Since we don’t know precisely how many Jewish businesses still existed in the area (between Rosenthalter Tor and Bernauer Strasse) by that point, we cannot say how many, if any, were spared ransacking. What we do know is that all of the Jewish businesses listed in the commercial register were also contained in police lists.261 So we have to assume that at least as far as retail businesses were concerned, the destruction there was horribly complete. According to the IHK there were 3000 officially listed Jewish retailers, so this is the lowest possible figure of businesses that were vandalized in Berlin in November 1938.262 If we believe the figure of 7500 businesses cited by the head of the security police, Reinhard Heydrich, in the conference in the Reich Aviation Ministry on 11 November 1938, Berlin would account for an astonishing 40 percent of all businesses destroyed throughout the Reich, including Austria. It is more likely, however, that the number of ransacked businesses was much higher and that Heydrich, when pressed, simply made up the figure—which too often has been uncritically accepted. After all, the former Austrian trade minister Hans Fischböck, who was well-informed and had been diligently working on the Ordinance on the Removal of Jews from German Economic Life in September 1938, called Heydrich’s number into question at the meeting and mentioned that there had been 17,000 Jewish “shops” in Vienna alone at the eve of destruction.263 – 132 –

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German newspapers scarcely mentioned the race riot. The clearest report about the effects of pogrom came in the Völkische Beobachter:

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Along with the windows, the names of the Jews have also disappeared, insofar as they no longer sit atop the entrances to the buildings, whole rows of vivid-sounding names that we have been forced to see in more or less tasteful form for years on Kurfürstendamm: Mayere Probst, Moritz Rothenberg, Siegbert Levy, Sally Vasen, Martha Kovacs, Nathan and Simon Wachtel, Sacher Neumann, Roszi Weiß, Lotte Lowenstein, Sally Goldstein, Benno Chlebowsky, Alter Abramowicz, Siegfried Israel, Mircia Wieselberg, Paula Pinner, Eva Löwensohn, Werner Salomon Maas, Julie Casparius and whatever the rest were called, who lived here and behaved as though they were in Palestine.264

By contrast, the international press reported extensively about the pogrom.265 Even Japan’s largest newspaper passed on the news, with a critical undertone, of “Germany’s anti-Jewish unrest,”266 while the New York Times offered outraged descriptions of the devastation.267 On 28 November the director of the Berlin office of the Associated Press, David Lochner, wrote to his children that the anti-Semitic pogrom of 10 November and the days that followed had been “the most terrible experience” of his life.268 (Lochner was the same journalist who had conducted the famous interview in April 1933, in which German Foreign Minister von Neurath had said that there had never been a revolution without a certain level of severity.) Britain’s ambassador to Germany was likewise shocked. In his dispatch to the Foreign Office he wrote that “forces of medieval barbarism” had been unleashed.269 As the sales of many foreign newspapers were banned in Germany, the Communist Party reverted to a trick to get some information into Germany. They put a brochure with a vivid description of what had happened and excerpts of foreign press reactions on the November pogrom into a sachet of a Shampoo—aptly called Excentric—and smuggled that into Germany. Figure 4.7., next page.

Murder, Mass Arrests, and Concentration Camps An undetermined number of Jews were murdered in Berlin during the days of the November pogrom. One of them was a 67-year-old merchant named Elias Feuerstein. Together with Hermann Czwiklitzer, Feuerstein had run the liqueur distillery and wine sellers Likörfabrikation und Weinhandlung Feuerstein und Czwiklitzer. On the morning of 10 November, knowing that Jewish retailers were particularly threatened, Elias and his wife Martha temporarily moved into Czwiklitzer’s apartment—the two – 133 –

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Figure 4.7. Cover of the camouflage brochure on the November pogrom. Joseph Wulf library, House of the Wannsee Conference, Berlin. – 134 –

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were related by marriage, and Czwiklitzer and his wife didn’t live near their business. Elias Feurstein, however, couldn’t rest knowing his store was in danger so that afternoon he headed out to check on it. There he apparently fell into the hands of the plundering mob and was so badly injured by never-identified looters that he was dead by the time he was delivered to the nearby Horst Wessel Hospital.270 That same morning, while murder, destruction, and looting were going on in the streets, large groups of Jewish men were arrested. The detentions, which continued for six days, were carried out on the basis of lists of politically active, well-known, and affluent Jews. As a rule, they were arrested in their homes and brought by Gestapo or police officers to the police presidium on Alexanderplatz. The police department only had men available to do this, of course, because they were making no efforts at all to reign in the mob. In no time the presidium was completely full. Those arrested were made to wait in the interior courtyards, while their fearful relatives gathered in front of the building.271 Many of these men were then conveyed via truck to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp some ten miles north of Berlin. Between 10 November and 21 November272 the number of Jewish inmates there rose from 457 to 6471.273 That means that 6011 Jews in total were taken to and registered in Sachsenhausen, although they came from all over northeastern Germany, not just Berlin.274 As Berlin Jews were only rarely taken to the two other concentration camps that existed at the time, Buchenwald and Dachau, CV lawyer Hans Reichmann, who was himself detained, was probably fairly accurate when he estimated that 3000 Berlin Jews were abducted to concentration camps. The number was relatively small because many Jewish men succeeded in avoiding arrest,275 or were detained in various police jails in Berlin from which they were usually released as of November 16.276 However, those who did end up in Sachsenhausen were taken aghast by the humiliations, violence, and forced labor that were part of the concentration camp’s reality. At least ninety of those abducted died in the winter of 1938/39.277 Among the fatalities were businessmen like Alfred Schönberg. Schönberg was born in 1882 in the Upper Silesian town of Antoninenhütte and had moved to Dortmund after World War I.278 There he established a railroad supply business, which he relocated to Berlin in 1934. He was taken on 9 or 10 November to Sachsenhausen, where he died on 8 December 1938. The civil registry office in Oranienburg, where Sachsenhausen was located, was informed that Schönberg had died of pneumonia in his lower right lung, but the veracity of the information is doubtful.279 The day Schönberg died, the raincoat factory Ullmann & Co. applied to be deleted from the commercial register.280 When the registry court ordered that the application be signed by all the company’s partners, un– 135 –

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der the threat of punishment if it weren’t, the firm declared that this was impossible since one of them, Arthur Ullmann, had died “in protective custody” on 19 December.281 In late November some 150 to 200 Jews a day were released from Sachsenhausen so that by the end of the year there were “only” 1064 Jewish inmates there. Many of them would have to wait until May 1939 to be freed.282 Yet, in December 1938, Reich Economics Minister Funk had pointed out: “In the course of the most recent Jewish measures, numerous Jews have been taken into protective custody. Insofar as Jewish businesspeople have been detained, unwanted economic consequences might result. The damage could be especially serious for the export economy since individual personalities and knowledge of market conditions is particularly necessary in that sector. I therefore request in all cases in which the release of a Jew is in the interest of the export economy that the responsible state police authority be informed of the situation and advised to order the individual’s timely release.”283 In cases that didn’t involve exports, the release of Jews from Sachsenhausen was sometimes, if not always, made contingent upon their agreeing to liquidate their businesses or transfer possession to non-Jews. Jewish entrepreneurs like Hermann Isaack even used the forms confirming their release from the concentration camp to apply for their companies, which had been plundered in the pogrom, to be deleted from the commercial register.284 A high-ranking functionary among the inmates later recalled: “Among the Jewish inmates in Sachsenhausen there were hundreds, if not more, who had been pressured into allowing their businesses to be ‘Aryanized.’ They were forced to sign ‘Aryanization contracts.’ Many did this after the SS promised that they would be released once they signed the agreements and declared themselves willing to emigrate. Many others initially refused and attracted the particular fury of the SS. They were driven to the brink of death, utter exhaustion and suicide by all possible means.” One fellow who had been especially worked over said openly to an SS man: ‘Come on and strike me dead. Then my wife and children will inherit everything, and they live in London’.”285 Those released were often ill and exhausted and required medical attention.286 Alfred Silberstein, the son of the owner of textile retailer in southern Berlin since 1921, recalled that his father returned from six weeks in Sachsenhausen a “completely broken man.”287

Notes 1. Heinrich von Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” in Karsten Krieger, ed., Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit: Eine kommentierte Quellenedition, vol. 1 (Munich, 2003), 6–16, here 13.

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2. Christoph Kreutzmüller and Jonathan Zatlin, “Werner Sombart. Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben,” in Handbuch des Antisemitismus, vol. 6 (Berlin and New York, 2013), 332–334. Cf. Jonathan Zatlin, “The Usurious Jew: Wilhelm Roscher and the Homo Economicus Judaicus,” in Christoph Kreutzmüller, Michael Wildt, and Moshe Zimmermann, eds., National Economies, Volks-Wirtschaft, Racism and Economy in Europe between the wars (1918–1939/45) (Newcastle, 2015), 18–32. 3. Theodor Fritsch (F. Roderich Stoltheim), Die Juden im Handel und das Geheimnis ihres Erfolges: Zugleich eine Antwort und Ergänzung zu Sombarts Buch ‘Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben’ (Steglitz, 1913). 4. Francis R. Nicosia, “German Zionism and Jewish Life in Nazi Berlin,” in Nicosia and David Scrase, eds., Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (New York and Oxford, 2010), 89–116, here 93f. See also Zielenziger, Juden, 279. 5. Students organize first Berlin pogrom, New York Times, 28 February 1921. 6. David Clay Large, “‘Out with the Ostjuden’: The Scheunenviertel Riots in Berlin, November 1923,” in Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser-Smith, eds., Exclusionary Violence (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002), 123–140, here 127. 7. “Antisemitische Ausschreitungen in Berlin,” Berliner Tageblatt, 7 November 1923. See also “Die judenfeindlichen Ausschreitungen in Berlin,” Jüdische Rundschau, 9 November 1923. 8. Clay-Large, “Ostjuden,” 130–137. Cf. Christoph Kreutzmüller, “’Le Marchand de Berlin’. Les commerces juifs à Berlin (1918-1942)“, in Laurence Guillon/ Heidi Knörzer (eds.), Berlin et les Juifs. 19e-21e siècles (Paris 2014), 157–162. The idea that there was no anti-Semitic background to this incident is untenable. See Bernd Sösemann, “Exerzierfeld und Labor deutscher Geschichte: Berlin im Wandel der deutschen und europäischen Politik zwischen 1848 und 1933,” in Werner Süß and Ralf Rytlewski, eds., Berlin. Die Hauptstadt. Vergangenheit und Zukunft einer europäischen Metropole (Berlin, 1999), 100–120, here 115. 9. Berlin Riots, The Times, 9 November 1923. 10. “Jodenvervolging,” Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 10 November 1923. 11. Reichhardt, Kampfbünde, 460–462; Armin Nolzen, “The Nazi Party and its violence against Jews 1933–1939: Violence as a historiographical concept,” Yad Vashem Studies 31 (2003), 245–285, here 282f. See also Wildt, Generation, 95. 12. “Gegen S.-A.-Terror,” Berliner Tageblatt, 27 July 1932. 13. “Bulletin des Pressediensts des Einzelhandels, 26.8.1932,” in BArch, R 3101, 13859. See Reichardt, Vergemeinschaftung, 21. 14. Sauer, “Rabauken,” 115. 15. Bjoern Weigel, “Barmat, Sklarek, Rotter, or: The Fabrication of the ‘Jewish Economic Scandal,’” in Christoph Kreutzmüller, Michael Wildt, and Moshe Zimmermann, eds., National Economies, Volks-Wirtschaft, Racism and Economy in Europe Between the Wars (1918–1939/45) (Newcastle, 2015), 62–79. Ibid., “Sklarek-Skandal,” 281–284; Jonathan Zatlin, “Guilt by Association. Julius Barmat and German Democracy,” Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements 47 (2012), 82–114; Cordula Ludwig, Korruption und Nationalsozialismus in Berlin 1924–1934 (Frankfurt, 1998), 133–166. 16. “Zertrümmerte Fensterscheiben,” CV-Zeitung, 17 October 1930.

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17. Peter Fritzsche, The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century (Cambridge and London, 2011), 142f. 18. “Die Ausschreitungen im Westen,” Berliner Tageblatt, 14 September 1931. 19. Ibid. See also Johannes Fülberth, “Wird mit Brachialgewalt durchgefochten”: Bewaffnete Konflikte mit Todesfolge vor Gericht. Berlin 1929–1932/33 (Cologne, 2011), 32; Longerich, Goebbels, 170f.; Martin Schuster, “Die SA in der nationalsozialistischen ‚Machtergreifung’ in Berlin und Brandenburg 1926–1934,” dissertation (Berlin, 2005), 147, http://opus.kobv.de/tuberlin/volltexte/2005/876/pdf/schuster_ martin.pdf. 20. “Cohnfürstendamm-Auslandshetze,” Der Judenkenner, 7 August 1935, 25. 21. Reichardt, Vergemeinschaftung, 23. 22. Testimony Georg Flory, 13 December 1932, in LAB, A Rep 358-01, 1789. 23. Testimony Regina Moschkowitz, 16 November 1932, in ibid. Philipp Moschkowitz Eggseller was deleted from the register on 30 June 1939, cf. DjGB. 24. Official note Spandau Prosecutor’s Office written on a letter from the Spandau police department, 14 December 1932, in LAB, A Rep 358-01, 1789. 25. Official note Superior Prosecutor, 31 December 1932, in LAB, A Rep 358-01, 1789. 26. Affidavit Hans Cohn, 27 October 1992, in BAZD, BA-1-111993/03. 27. Entry 18 December 1930, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 2/I, 90. See also Genschel, Verdrängung, 87. 28. Ortsgruppe Ebersstraße, ed., Deutsche Geschäfte in Schöneberg (Berlin, n.d. [1931–1932]). “Braune Frühjahrsmesse,” Der Angriff, 14 March 1933. 29. “Die Saat geht auf,” Jüdische Rundschau, 28 June 1932. 30. Ibid. 31. Alexander, Bevölkerung, 129, 142. See Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden, 163ff. 32. Genschel, Verdrängung, 44. 33. Ahlheim, Deutsche, 243–247; Bajohr, Arisierung, 28f. See also World Alliance for Combating Anti-Semitism (Hg.), J’accuse (London, n.d. [1933]), 12–18. 34. “SA vor der Börse,” Berliner Tageblatt, 9 March 1933; “Aktionen gegen jüdische Geschäfte,” Jüdische Rundschau, 10 March 1933. See also anonymous photo, 8 March 1933, in BArch, Photo 102-02923A; “Notiz,” 11 May 1933, SWA, I/4, 1933; Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 54. 35. World Alliance, J’accuse, 18. 36. Aide mémoires of the Polish embassy in GPSTA PK, HA IV, NL Daluege, 37. See also communiqué Polish Consulate to German Foreign Ministry, 5 April 1933, in PArch AA, R 100208; “Report by the Polish Consul General, 8 April 1933,” in Frank Bajohr and Christoph Strupp, eds., Fremde Blicke auf das ‚Dritte Reich’: Berichte ausländischer Diplomaten über Herrschaft und Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1933–1945 (Göttingen, 2011), 366f. 37. A few hours later the prominent Weltbühne author Carl von Ossietzky was arrested. See Stefanie Oswalt, Siegfried Jacobsohn. Ein Leben für die Weltbühne. Eine Berliner Biographie (Gerlingen, 2000), 166f. The Weltbühne was deleted from the commercial register in February 1935. Cf. DjGB. 38. Münzel, Mitglieder, 397–401. 39. Letter from the City Office for Fire Fighting to IHK, 17 October 1933, in

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BLHA, Rep 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 163/55, 33. The Nero Film AG was deleted form the commercial register in April 1935. 40. Celina Kress, “Frühe ‘Arisierungen’ in der Bauindustrie. Adolf Sommerfeld und seine Firmengruppe,” in Biggeleben et al, eds., Arisierung, 151–181, here 172–178. 41. Weigel, “Theater,” 213f. 42. Memo from Frick to state interior ministers, 13 March 1933, in BArch, R 3101, 13859. 43. Ahlheim, Deutsche, 246; Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft, 117. 44. Herbst, Deutschland, 75f. See also Bajohr, Arisierung, 44–54. 45. Friedländer, Germany, 21f. See also “Jewish Retaliation is planned by Nazis,” Washington Post, 28 March 1933. 46. Joseph Goebbels, Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei (Berlin, 1934), 290. 47. “Am Boykott-Tag im Berliner Aktions-Komitee,” Völkischer Beobachter, 2–3 April 1933. See also Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 58f. 48. “Die Boykott-Anordnungen zur Greuelabwehr,” Der Angriff, 31 March 1933. 49. Ibid. 50. Ahlheim, Deutsche, 265f. 51. Letter from the Association of German Department Retail Stores to Reich Economics Ministry, 28 March 1933, in BArch, R 3101, 13859. See also Nietzel, Handeln, 86. 52. “Berlins Oberbürgermeister gegen die Greuellügen,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 1 April 1933. 53. “Erste Aktionen in Berlin,” Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 31 March 1933. See also Comité, Schwarzbuch, 300f. 54. Shepherd, Israel, 114f. 55. “Nazis say boycott rules today only,” Washington Post, 1 April 1933; “Jüdische Juristen aus Berliner Gerichten entfernt,” Der Angriff, 31 March 1933; “Erlass gegen jüdische Richter und Anwälte,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 1 April 1933; “Ruhiger Boykottverlauf,” Vossische Zeitung, 1 April 1933. See also Simone Ladwig-Winters, Anwalt ohne Recht: Das Schicksal jüdischer Rechtsanwälte in Berlin nach 1933 (Berlin, 1998), 27–49; Ball-Kaduri, Leben, 87, 93–96. 56. See Thorsten Knoll, Berliner Markthallen (Berlin, 1994), 75; Genschel, Verdrängung, 65. 57. “Ganz Deutschland boykottiert die Juden,” Völkischer Beobachter, 2–3 April 1933. 58. Wiemers, Personalpolitik, 62. See also Bajohr, Arisierung, 47. 59. “Boykott bei strenger Disziplin,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, 1 April 1933. See also Wolfhard Buchholz, Die Ausgrenzung der Juden in der Tagespresse des Dritten Reiches, 1933–1941 (Frankfurt et al., 2007), 63–69. 60. “Disziplin: Ein neuer Aufruf des Zentralkomitees,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 April 1933. See also Comité, Schwarzbuch, 311. 61. Eckart Conze; Norbert Frei; Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann, Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik (Munich, 2010), 47. 62. Entry, 2 April 1933, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 2/III, 160.

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63. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, 291. 64. “Schnappschüsse,” Grüne Post, 3 April 1933. The photograph in question was not taken in western Berlin, but rather in front of Leipziger Straße 103–104 in the city centre, as we can tell from the Hemdenmatz outlet in the picture. Thanks go to my daughter Josephine for helping to reconstruct the precise location! 65. “Boykott bei strenger Disziplin,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, 1 April 1933. See also Comité, Schwarzbuch, 308–311. 66. “Boykott in Ruhe und Disziplin durchgeführt,” Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 1 April 1933. The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper also reported that Jews were prevented from entering the Berlin Sate Library. “Bisher ruhiger Verlauf des Boykotts,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 April 1933. 67. “Die Abwehraktion in Steglitz,” Steglitzer Anzeiger, 1 April 1933. 68. “Ganz Deutschland boykottiert die Juden,” Völkischer Beobachter, 2–3 April 1933. 69. “Boykott in Ruhe und Disziplin durchgeführt,” Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 1 April 1933. 70. “Boykott bei strenger Disziplin,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, 1 April 1933. 71. “Spontane Hausse an der judenreinen Börse,” Völkischer Beobachter, 3 April 1933. See also Medert, Verdrängung, 161; “Sales on Berlin Boerse panicky at times are laid mostly to the boycott on Jews,” New York Times, 3 April 1933. 72. “Ruhiger Boykottverlauf,” Vossische Zeitung, 1 April 1933. See also Johannes Ludwig, Boykott, Enteignung, Mord: Die “Entjudung” der deutschen Wirtschaft (Munich and Zürich, 1992), 312–315; Genschel, Verdrängung, 52. 73. “Der Boykott-Tag in Berlin,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 2 April 1933. 74. “Boykott in Berlin,” Berliner Tageblatt, 1 April 1933. 75. “Gedanken zum 1. April,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 1 April 1933; “Die Aktion der NSDAP,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 2 April 1933. See also “Boycott assailed by German newspaper,” New York Times, 3 April 1933. 76. “Boykott und Auslandsmeinung,” Jüdische Rundschau, 4 April 1933. 77. Kreutzmüller, “Augen,” 25–48. Cf. Stephanie Seul. “‘A mad spirit of revived and furious anti-Semitism’: Wahrnehmung und Deutung des deutschen Antisemitismus in der New York Times und in der Londoner Times, 1918–1923,” in Michael Nagel and Moshe Zimmermann, eds., Judenfeindschaft und Antisemitismus in der deutschen Presse über fünf Jahrhunderte. Erscheinungsformen, Rezeption, Debatte und Gegenwehr (Bremen, 2013), 499–525. Martin Herzer, Auslandskorrespondenten und auswärtige Pressepolitik im Dritten Reich (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2012). 78. See Genschel, Verdrängung, 52. Nonetheless, Berlin was not necessarily the center of the boycott, as Francis Nicosia has recently asserted. See Nicosia, Zionism, 94. 79. On the reactions of Jewish institutions see Yehuda Bauer, Jewish Reactions to the Holocaust (Tel Aviv, 1989), 15–24. 80. “More moderation is shown by Nazis,” New York Times, 12 April 1933. 81. See for example “Boycott at an End,” New York Times, 3 April 1933; “Nazi Boycott off until Wednesday,” Washington Post, 3 April 1933; “Heavy Cost of Germany One-day Boycott,” Daily Telegraph, 3 April 1933; “Boycott assailed by German newspaper,” New York Times, 3 April 1933. See also “The First Agression:

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Boycott Day April 1, 1933,” Wiener Library Bulletin, January–April 1953, 8. Cf. Kreutzmüller, “Augen,” 35–38. 82. Comité, Schwarzbuch, 310. 83. “Boykott,” Illustrierter Beobachter, 15 April 1933. 84. “Ganz Deutschland boykottiert die Juden,” Völkischer Beobachter, 2–3 April 1933. 85. See for example Schreiber, Arisierung, 22; Ladwig-Winters, Anwalt, 35; Barkai, Entjudung, 34. 86. See Paltian, Fotografien. See also Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 59. 87. Photo Fritz Steppuhn, private collection of the author; membership card Fritz Steppuhn, born 21.7.1889, n. D. (1931) in BArch, BDC, 3200 W 0037. 88. “Boykott bei strenger Disziplin,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, 1 April 1933. See also Comite, Schwarzbuch, 308f. 89. The Erich Felix company was deleted from the commercial register on 2 June 1937. 90. Complaints by Czech citizens passed on by the Czechoslovakian Envoy, 22 May 1933, in PArch AA, R 100244. 91. Comité, Scharzbuch, 312. 92. World Alliance, J’accuse, 5. The Josef Schimek company was deleted from the commercial register in July 1937. See letter from Oskar Cardinal to Goebbels, 8 August 1933, in BArch, R 3101, 13860. 93. “Nach dem Boykott,” Berliner Tageblatt, 3 April 1933. 94. World Alliance, J’accuse, 24. See also Ahlheim, Deutsche, 263–277. 95. A partial transcription of the radio report can be found in Geisel, Scheunenviertel, 138f. 96. Memo from Kurt Daluege to Goebbels, Hess, and Streicher, 30 March 1933, in BArch, PK C 71. For an analysis of the NSBO/DAF in Berlin see: Rüdiger Hachtmann, and Christoph Kreutzmüller. “Arbeiter und Arbeiterorganisation in Berlin 1930–1945,” in Wildt and Kreutzmüller (eds.), Berlin, 111–126. 97. “Boykott-Pläne für Berlin,” Berliner Tageblatt, 31 March 1933; “Die Maßnahmen in Berlin,” Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 31 March 1933. “Gehaltsvorauszahlungen und Entlassungen,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 31 March 1933. 98. “Heute Boykott dann Pause bis Mittwoch,” Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 1 April 1933; “Keine Vorauszahlung von zwei Monatsgehältern beim Boykott,” Zehlendorfer Anzeiger, 3 April 1933. 99. Letter from Engel to Daluege, 11 April 1933, in GPStA PK, VI. HA, NL Daluege, 36. See also Alexander Szanto, “Im Dienste der Gemeinde 1923–1939,” manuscript (Manchester, 1968), 129–131, in LBI, ME 638; Martin Münzel, Verdrängung, 108f. 100. Letter from Nazi Factory Cell Hüttenwerke C. Wilh. Kayser & Co AG to Daluege, 26 April 1933, in GPStA PK, VI. HA, NL Daluege, 35. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. Lewy resigned from the board in August 1933. Similar dismissals have been documented at nearby the AEG and Kabelwerk Oberschöneweide companies. See letter from Nazi Business Cell AEG to Daluege, 24 April 1933, in GPStA PK, VI. HA, NL Daluege, 58.

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103. CV circular, n.d. (16 May 1933), in CAHJP, HM 2/8693 (RGVA 721/1,18). 104. Order Hitler to the NSDAP, 10 March 1933, in Walter Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus. Dokumente 1933–1945 (Frankfurt, 1960), 55, document 25. 105. CV Zeitung, 22 May 1933, in CAHJP, HM 2/8693 (RGVA 721/1,19). See Longerich, Goebbels, 234f. 106. Dieter Ziegler, “Die Verdrängung der Juden aus der Dresdner Bank 1933– 1938,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 47 (1999), 187–216. See also Thomas Weihe, “Die Verdrängung jüdischer Mitarbeiter,” in Weihe and Herbst, eds., Commerzbank, 43–73: “Notizen zur Deutschen Arbeitsfront,” n.d. (1933–1934), in LBI, AR 1578. 107. Letter from Lippert to Görlitzer, 15 September 1934, in LAB, A Rep Pr Br 057, 1573; Ziegler, Dresdner Bank, 292–325; Ludwig, Boykott, 15–86. 108. “Die Geduldeten,” Jüdische Rundschau, 4 July 1933. See Comité, Schwarzbuch, 346–348. 109. Submission of the CV to Prussian Minsitry of Trade and Commerce, 12 June 1933, in GPStA PK, HA I, Re120 BB XVI, Fach 1, No. 1, Vol. 11. 110. Communiqué of the Polish Emabassy, 8 September 1933, in PArch AA, R 100208. 111. Letter from the Prussian Interior Ministry to Foreign Ministry, 12 January 1934, in PArch AA, R 100210. 112. Stefan Hördler and Christoph Kreutzmüller, “Gewalt gegen Juden. Vom Feindbild zum Mord,” in Hörder, ed., SA Terror, 184–199, here: 191f.; Cf. Hördler Ruilos, 52f. 113. Statement Martha Eppenstein, 17 May 1949, in LAB, C Rep 300, 13. 114. Ibid. See also Hördler, Ruilos, 53. 115. Hördler and Kreutzmüller, Gewalt, 194. 116. Ball-Kaduri, Leben, 171f. 117. Burkert, Matußek, and Wippermann, Machtergreifung, 113. For an overview on the camps in Berlin see: Irene Mayer von Götz, Irene, Terror im Zentrum der Macht. Die frühen Konzentrationslager in Berlin 1933/34-1936 (Berlin, 2008). 118. Report George Messersmith to US State Departement, 21 September 1933, in Database of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC. 119. Communiqué Reich Foreign Ministry to Polish Consulate, 29 January 1934, in PArch AA, R 100209. 120. Letter from the general prosecutor at the Prussian Regional Court to Reich minister of justice, 18 April 1935, in PArch AA, R 100249. 121. Ibid. 122. Letter from the Czechoslovakian General Consul to Gestapo, 2 January 1935, in PArch AA, R 100249. 123. I could not verify whether the merchant Samuel Haupt was the same Samuel Haupt who was born in 1886, deported to Poland on 25 May 1942, and murdered there. See the Central Database of Shoah Victim’s Names, entry Samuel Haupt. 124. Nietzel, Handeln, 87f.; Ahlheim, Deutsche, 360–379. 125. Tooze, Wages, 61–65, 186. 126. Letter from von Heimannsohn to Simonis, 24 January 1935; file note Rubinstein, 8 February 1935, both in CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161).

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127. File note Rubinstein, 18 February 1935, in CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/ 1/3161). Letter from Otto Hirsch to Julius Lippert, 8 March 1935, in SWA, I, 3-5-5. See also Ahlheim, Deutsche, 379–390; Barkai, Boykott, 76f. 128. Christoph Kreutzmüller, “Sticker und Stigmata: Antisemitische Kampagnen in der Wirtschaft 1900–1938,” in Isabel Enzenbach and Wolfgang Haney, eds., Alltagskultur des Antisemitismus im Kleinformat: Vignetten der Sammlung Wolfgang Haney ab 1880 (Berlin, 2011), 123–135, here 129. 129. Letter from the CV to 11th Police Precinct, 1 March 1935, in CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161). 130. Longerich, Goebbels, 303–305. 131. “Richtet den Blick über den Alltag hinaus,” Der Angriff, 5 June 1935. 132. CV file note, 21 June 1935, in CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161). 133. CV file note, 2 July 1935, in ibid. 134. Report, n.d. (August 1935), in Kulka and Jäckel, NS-Stimmungsberichte, doc. 139, 146–148. According to this report, seventy-two people were arrested for “racial defilement” in July 1935. See also report 126th Police Precinct, 10 August 1935, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21621. 135. CV file note, 5 June 1935, in CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161). The Benno Falk company was apparently able to continue and was only deleted from the register on 12 January 1939, after it had been plundered and its owner injured in the November pogrom. See also Karl-August Borchardt, “Meine jüdische Großmutter,” in Lammel, Lebenswege, 131f. 136. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 79f. See Nolzen, Violence, 269f. 137. Longerich, Goebbels, 304. 138. Report CV, n.d. (early July 1935), in CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161). 139. Patrick Vonderau, “Zeitnaher Antisemitismus: Wie ein schwedischer Spielfilm von 1933 im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland vereinnahmt wurde,” Filmblatt 36 (2008), 51–59. See also Peter Longerich, Davon haben wir nichts gewusst: Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Bonn, 2006 [Munich, 2006]), 79. 140. “Juden demonstrieren in Berlin,” Der Angriff, 15 July 1935; “Nazis deny Fry report,” New York Times, 28 July 1935. 141. Letter from the general prosector to justice minister, 16 September 1935, in PArch AA, R 100210. Typically, not only did the German authorities reject the window’s claim for compensation; they also saddled her with back taxes. See letter district mayor to Tilly Kleinfeld, 2 March 1937, in PArch AA, 100210. After the Polish embassy intervened, the district revenue office agreed to “waive the tax debts of Dr. Kleinfeld and release the confiscated pieces of furniture.” See communiqué Foreign Ministry to Polish Embassy, 20 July 1937, in PArch AA, R 100210. 142. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 81f. See also Martin Gumpert, “Menschenhatz unter Polizeiaufsicht,” in Margarete Limberg and Hubert Rübsaat, eds., Sie durften nicht mehr Deutsche sein: Jüdischer Alltag in Selbstzeugnissen 1933–1938 (Frankfurt and New York, 1990), 160–163. 143. Letter from the police president to Interior Ministry, 28 August 1935, in PArch AA, R 100269. 144. “Nazis threaten foreign reporters for ‘lies’ an anti-semitic drive,” New York Times, 25 July 1935.

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145. “Eyewitness Story of Berlin Horror,” New York Post, 16 July 1935, reprinted in Aktives Museum, ed., Ohne zu zögern: Varian Fry. Berlin/Marseille/New York (Berlin, 2007), 40–42. See also Friedländer, Germany, 138. 146. “Jews are beaten by Berlin Rioters. Cafés are Raided,” New York Times, 16 July 1935. See “Shameful but not ashamed,” New York Times, 17 July 1935; “Nazis deny Fry report,” New York Times, 28 July 1935. 147. Bauer, Reactions, 35. 148. Report 133rd Police Precinct to Gestapo, 22 July 1935, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21638. See also Nolzen, Violence, 269. 149. Letter from Max Loewy to Berlin police president, 29 July 1935, in CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161). 150. See Berliner Adressbuch 1935; File Wilhelm Hobleske, in BArch (BDC), E 0246. 151. Letter from Max Loewy to Berlin police president, 29 July 1935, in CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161). 152. “Bericht über die wirtschaftliche Situation, 1.10.1935,” in LBI, AR 1578. 153. “Juden mit der weissen Weste,” Der Angriff, 26 May 1933, 27 May 1935, 28 May 1933, 29 May 1933, and 31 May 1933. “Der getarnte Jude,” Der Angriff, 10 August 1933, 14 August 1935, 15 August 1935, and 17 August 1935. 154. “Judenmarsch auf Berlin,” Schwarzes Korps, 17 July 1935. 155. “Da hilft nur … ,” Schwarzes Korps, 12 May 1938. 156. Kreutzmüller and Weber, Allianzen, 81f. 157. “Handel mit Menschenfleisch: Der Mädchenhandel ein jüdisches Monopol,” Der Judenkenner 1/1 (7 February 1935). 158. “Judenfrechheiten in Berlin,” Der Judenkenner 1/1 (7 February 1935). 159. Christoph Kreutzmüller and Elisabeth Weber, “Der Judenkenner,” in Handbuch des Antisemitismus, vol. VI (Berlin and New York, 2013), 355f. 160. Report on the Economic Situation, 1 November 1935, in LBI, AR 1578; memo Heimannsohn, 19 February 1935, in CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161). 161. Entry 22 April 1938, Goebbels Tagebücher, vol. 5, 268. See also Friedländer, Germany, 145f. 162. Kreutzmüller and Weber, Allianzen. 87–98. 163. “Nachrichten aus der Reichshauptstadt,” Der Stürmer 15/28, July 1937. Cf. Sopade-Berichte 5 (1938), 756f. 164. “Manfred Gottschalk”; “Jud Oswald,” Der Stümer 33/1935 and 34/1935 (August 1935). 165. See Friedländer, Germany, 123; Bajohr, Arisierung, 234. 166. Elisabeth Weber, “Karl Kutschera’s Café Wien and Zigeunerkeller,” in Kreutzmüller and Nürnberg, Final Sale, 44–47, here 45f. 167. Jersch-Wenzel, Leinenhaus, 115. 168. See File Eugen Lichtenstein lampshade factory, in BLHA, Rep 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 163/55, 7. 169. “Juden als Schleichhändler,” Der Angriff, 2 June 1942. Lenek is not listed in either the memorial books of the city of Berlin or the German Federal Archive nor in the memorial at Yad Vashem.

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170. “Der Berliner Polizeipräsident gibt bekannt,” Die Deutsche Eierwirtschaft verbunden mit der Eier-Börse, 6 February 1936. Noech Seitelbach’s business was deleted from the register on 13 September 1937. Seitelbach is not listed in any database, memorial book nor in the files of the International Tracing Service (ITS) so we can assume that he was interned in police protective custody rather than being sent to a concentration camp. It is not known what ultimately became of him. 171. “Den Juden wird geholfen,” Das Schwarze Korps, 14 October 1937. See Kochan, Pogrom, 25. 172. Letter from Else Cohen to Max Warburg, 3 February 1938, in SWA, I, 3, 1333. 173. Friedländer, Germany, 270. 174. Dean, Robbing, 88f. 175. Entry 23 April 1938, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 5, 269f. 176. Urgent report SD-Führer, SS-Oberabschnitt Ost to Main Security Office, 24 June 1938, in RGVA, 500, 1, 645. 177. Jewish Central Information Office: The Position of German Jewry, 18 July 1938, in WL, 066-WL-1625. 178. “Berlins Polizei räumte auf,” Der Angriff, 19 June 1938; “Police raid cafes seize 350 in Berlin,” New York Times, 1 June 1938. 179. Urgent report SD-Führer, SS-Oberabschnitt Ost to Main Security Office, 24 June 1938, in RGVA, 500, 1, 645. 180. Christian Faludi, Die “Juni-Aktion” 1938. Eine Dokumentation zur Radikalisierung der Judenverfolgung (Frankfurt, 2013). 181. Report SD, 1 July 1938, in Kulka and Jäckel, NS-Stimmungsberichte, doc. 332, 278. Urgent report SD-Führer, the SS-Oberabschnitt Ost to Main Security Office, 24 June 1938, in RGVA, 500, 1, 645. See also Nietzel, Handeln, 207; Dirks, Juni-Aktion, 37f. Longerich, Nichts gewusst, 112. 182. Longerich, Goebbels, 261. 183. Ibid., 389f. 184. Announcement Oberabschnitts Ost to Staff Chancellory, 17 June 1938, in RGVA, 500, 1, 645. 185. Photo by Klaus Mirbach of the Cohn furniture company, n.d. (1938), in CJA, 7.82, 10; Kreutzmüller, Simon, and Weger, Pogrom, 42f; Dirks, Juni-Aktion, 25f. 186. Photo by Hans Spieldoch of A. Brünn jr. furniture store, n.d. (1938), in CJA, 7.103. Cf. Kreutzmüller, Simon, and Weber, Pogrom, 57–59. 187. Photo by Hans Spieldoch of F. Boas bed store, n.d. (1938), in CJA, 7.103. Cf. Kreutzmüller, Simon, and Weber, Pogrom, 62. 188. Report SD, 1 July 1938, in Kulka and Jäckel, NS-Stimmungsberichte, doc. 332, 278. See interview with Steven Adler, University of Southern California, Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, 15332. 189. “Goebbels warns Jews must leave,” New York Times, 22 June 1938. 190. Sopade-Berichte 5 (1938), 756. See also Dirks, Juni-Aktion, 34f. 191. Report SD-Oberabschnitt Ost to Staff Chancellory of the SD, 22 June 1938, in RGVA, 500, 1, 645. 192. Wiesen, Marketplace, 34–62.

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193. Report 106th Police Precinct, 17 June 1938, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21629. 194. Report 251st Police Precinct, 18 June 1938; testimony Lothar B., 18 June 1938, both in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21629. See also Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 29. 195. Report 143rd Police Precinct, 20 June 1938, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21629. 196. Report 83rd Police Precinct, 17 June 1938, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21629. 197. Report Hugh R. Wilson to US State Department, 22 June 1938, in John Mendelsohn, ed., The Holocaust (New York, 1982), 139; also printed in VeJ 2, doc. 47, 176–179. 198. Letter from the Hamburg World Economic Institute to Franz Six, 5 July 1938, in RGVA, 500, 1, 645. 199. “Berliners frown on drive on Jews,” New York Times, 20 June 1938. See also Bella Fromm, diary entry 28, June 1938, 274. 200. Ibid. 201. Urgent report SD-Oberabschnitt Ost to SD, 24 June 1938, in RGVA, 500, 1, 645. 202. Letter from the SD Berlin to SD Munich, 29 June 1938, in RGVA, 500, 1, 261. 203. Letter from the staff chancellor of the SD to Security Police, 22 June 1938, in RGVA, 500, 1, 645; Report SD, 1 July 1938, in Kulka and Jäckel, NS-Stimmungsberichte, doc. 332, 278. 204. Urgent report SD-Oberabschnitt Ost to Security Police, 24 June 1938, in RGVA, 500, 1, 645. Internal report SD-Oberabschnitts Ost, 22 June 1938, in RGVA, 500, 1, 645, 16. See also “Reich slows drive on Jews in trade,” New York Times, 2 July 1938. 205. Entry 22 June 1938, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 5, 355. 206. “Berlin feiert die Sonnwende,” Der Angriff, 23 June 1938. 207. Longerich, Nichts gewußt, 112f. 208. The Angriff was the only Nazi newspaper that alluded, between the lines, to the unrest, writing that “several Jews had been taken into protective custody for their own good after the dramatic introduction of anti-social Jewish elements into the Reich capital had provoked agitation and isolation demonstrations among the Berlin populace.” See “Berlins Polizei räumte auf,” Der Angriff, 19 June 1938. 209. Letter from Kurt Wergin, Esq., to Restitution Office, 15 December 1950, in LAB, B Rep 025-03, 212/50. 210. Ibid.; Protocol of the Proceedings of the 44th Restitution Chamber, 13 December 1951, in ibid. 211. Letter from “Non-Aryan textile companies” to Lippert, 20 January 1934, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 057, 1740. 212. Protocol of the Proceedings of the 44th Restitution Chamber, 13 December 1951, in LAB, B Rep 025-03, 212/50. 213. Sopade-Berichte 5 (1938), 766. 214. “Aus der Reichshauptstadt,” Der Stürmer 16/23, June 1938. 215. DjGB. 216. “Aus Berlin,” Der Stürmer 16/34, August 1938. 217. Ibid.; Protocol of the Proceedings of the 44th Restitution Chamber, 13 December 1951, in ibid.

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218. Ruling of the Supreme Restitution Court 340, 14 December 1955, in LAB, B Rep 039-01, 4. 219. Report, 1 July 1938, in Kulka and Jäckel, NS-Stimmungsberichte, doc. 332, 278. 220. “Das Wort Görings wird sich auch in Berlin erfüllen,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 19–20 June 1938. 221. Sopade-Berichte 5 (1938), 756f. 222. Report 64th Police Precinct, 20 June 1938, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21629. 223. Fromm, diary entry, 28 June 1938, 274. 224. Ibid. See also report Hugh R. Wilson to US State Department, 22 June 1940, in Mendelsohn, Holocaust, 139; Friedländer, Germany, 261f. 225. Report Criminal Police, 18 June 1938, in LAB, A Rep 358-02, 2799 (my emphasis). The Adolf Brünn Nachf. Company was deleted from the register on 27 December 1938. Cf. DjGB. 226. Order public prosecutor, 27 March 1939, in LAB, A Rep 358-02, 2799. 227. Entry 22 June 1938, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 5, 355. 228. Entry 8 July 1938, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 5, 372. 229. Wildt, Einleitung, 18f.; Dirks, Juni-Aktion, 35. 230. Reichmann, Bürger, 94. 231. DjGB. 232. Sachsenhausen Deaths Registry, in AS, Standesamt Oranienburg, No. 306/1938. 233. Judgment of the Regional Court, 10 February 1948, in LAB, B Rep 058, 3871. 234. Trude Maurer, “Abschiebung und Attentat. Die Ausweisung der polnischen Juden und der Vorwand für die ‚Kristallnacht’,” in Walter H. Pehle, ed., Der Judenpogrom 1938. Von der „Reichskristallnacht” zum Völkermord (Frankfurt, 1988), 52– 73. 235. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 115. For a description of Jews’ plight, see New York Times, 11 November 1938. 236. Anne-Christin Saß, “Die Weimarer Republik und ihre osteuropäischjüdischen Zuwanderer. Der Fall Moritz Zielinski,” Bulletin des DHI Moskau 2 (2008), 44–54, here 50–53. 237. Entry, Zentralhandelsregisterbeilage des Reichsanzeigers, 28 September 1938, 1. See also DjGB. 238. Letter from Bertha Kleinberger to District Court, 22 December 1938, in AGC, HR A 90, 104149 (Markus Kleinberger). The business was deleted from the register in May 1939. 239. Copy of letter from the Reich economics minister to state premiers, 12 April 1939, in LAB, A Rep p 038-08, 17. 240. Reichmann, Bürger, 110; anonymous report on the events in November (B. 236), in WL, 046-EA-0450. Reproduced in Barkow, Gross, and Lenarz, Novemberpogrom 1938, 223–226. 241. “Die Juden in Berlins entwaffnet,” Berliner Tageblatt, 9 November 1938. In identical wording: “Razzia auf Judenwaffen,” Der Angriff, 10 November 1938. 242. “Vom Obersten SA-Führer befördert,” Der Angriff, 10 November 1938.

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243. Friedländer, Germany, 269–274; Adam, “Pogrom,” in Pehle, Judenpogrom, here 79. 244. Adam, “Pogrom,” 89. See also Longerich, Goebbels, 394–397. 245. Entry 10 November 1938, Goebbels Tagebücher Part 1, Vol. 6, 181f. 246. Zeller, Zeit, 238. See also interview with Jules Erdberg, University of Southern California, Shoa Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, 3160. 247. Report Eduardo Labougle, 14 November 1938, in Bajohr and Strupp, eds., Blicke, 513f. 248. Landau, “The Hell of Sachsenhausen,” in WL, 058-EA-1279, S. 1f. 249. John Greiffenhagen, “Some of my experiences in Nazi-Germany following the progrom [sic] on November 1938,” in WL, 048-EA-0544, S. 2; Erich Kästner, Notabene 1945, Berlin 1961, 181f. See also Simon, “Jahr 1938,” 26–29. 250. Landau, “Hell,” 1f. 251. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 116f. 252. See “Öffentliche Demütigungen,” in Andreas Nachama, Uwe Neumärker, and Hermann Simon, eds., Es brennt. Antijüdischer Terror im November 1938, Berlin 2008, 71–79. For an example of such a public humiliation in Berlin see chapter 11. 253. Anonymous report on the events in November (B. 236), in WL, 046-EA0450; Report of a Dutch merchant (B. 55), in Barkow, Gross, and Lenarz, Novemberpogrom, 215–217. 254. Communiqué Czech Embassy, 21 February 1939, in PArch AA, R 100285. 255. Greiffenhagen, Experiences, 2. 256. Eyewitness report of an “Aryan” woman (B. 161), in Barkow, Gross, and Lenarz, Novemberpogrom, 219f. See also Hans Rainer, Sandvoß, Widerstand in Mitte und Tiergarten (Berlin, 1999), 304. 257. Szanto, Dienste, 215. 258. Kreutzmueller and Weigel, Kristallnacht, 24. 259. Report 108th Police Precinct, 11 November 1938, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21620. See also report British ambassador to Foreign Minister Halifax, 16 November 1938, in Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, third series, vol. III, No. 313. 260. “Das war gerechte Empörung,” Der Angriff, 11 November 1938; “Goebbels an die Bevölkerung,” Berliner Tageblatt and Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 11 November 1938; “Ein Aufruf des Reichsministers,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 November 1938; “Neue gesetzliche Regelung der Judenfrage angekündigt,” Völkischer Beobachter, 11 November 1938. 261. List 17th Police Precinct, 11 November 1938, in BArch, R 8150, 48. See Entry in the logbook of the police precinct 5, 10 November 1938 in LAB, 408, 1. See also “Jahresbericht des SD-Hauptamts für 1938, 13.1.1939,” in Kulka and Jäckel, NS-Stimmungsberichte, doc. 414, 366–377, here 371; Hans Rainer Sandvoß, Widerstand in Mitte und Tiergarten (Berlin, 1999), 304. 262. “Jahresbericht des SD-Hauptamts für 1938, 13.1.1939,” in Kulka and Jäckel, NS-Stimmungsberichte, doc. 414, 366–377, here 377. See also “Die Säuberung des Einzelhandels,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 24 November 1938.

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Violent Persecution

263. Stenographic protocol of the meeting on the Jewish question hosted by Göring on 12 November 1938, in IMT, vol. 28, 499–540, doc. 1816 PS., here 508, 524–526. See also Kochan, Pogrom, 59. 264. “Empörte Volksseele machte sich Luft,” Völkischer Beobachter, 11 November 1938. 265. Kreutzmueller and Weigel, Kristallnacht, 16–22. 266. “Deutscher antijüdischer Aufruhr,” Asahi Zeitung Tokyo, 11 November 1938. I am grateful to Daniel Hedinger in Berlin for alerting me to and translating this source. 267. “Jews are ordered to leave Munich,” New York Times, 11 November 1938; “President says US is shocked by war on Jews,” Washington Post, 16 November 1938. 268. Letter from David Lochner to his children, 28 November 1938, cited in Hermann Simon, “‘Man hatte das Gefühl, dass sich here ein ganzes Volk schämte’: Der Novemberpogrom im Spiegel diplomatischer Berichte aus Berlin,” in Simon, Andreas Nachama, and Uwe Neumärker, eds., Es brennt! (Berlin, 2008), 118–127, here 118. 269. Report British ambassador to Foreign Minister Halifax, 16 November 1938, Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, third series, vol. III, Nr. 313. 270. Sworn testimony Ruth Nüssenfeld, 15 October 1953 and 10 July 1957, both in EAB, 152501 (Elias Feuerstein). The Feuerstein und Czwiklitzer liquor maker and wine seller was struck from the register on 23 May 1940. 271. Reichmann, Bürger, 118; Kochan, Pogrom, 76f. 272. Notice of Changes Personal Effects Storeroom Sachsenhausen, 10 November 1938, in AS, D1 A, 1020 (RGVA, 1367/1/98). 273. Ibid., 21 November 1938. 274. Heiko Pollmeier, “Die Verhaftungen nach dem November-Pogrom 1938 und die Masseninternierung in den ‘jüdischen Baracken’ des KZ Sachenhausen,” in Morsch and zur Nieden, eds., Häftlinge, 164–179, here 171. 275. Reichmann, Bürger, 137f; Reichmann, “On the Sponteneity of the 10 November Action,” in WL, Bericht 333, 046-EA-0450. Reprinted in Barkow, Gross, and Lenarz, Novemberpogrom, 126–133. See also interview with Anne Berkovitz, University of Southern California, Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, 19503; Bajohr, Arisierung, 271f.; Sopade-Berichte 5 (1938), 1344. For the contrary perspective, see Stefi Jersch-Wenzel and Thomas Jersch, “Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin,” in Carolin Hilker-Siebenhaar, ed., Wegweiser durch das jüdische Berlin: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Berlin, 1986), 19–38, here 34. 276. Wildt, Einleitung, 31. 277. Pollmeier, Verhaftungen, 177. See also Kochan, Pogrom, 76–94. 278. Entry in the database Death List Sachsenhausen. 279. Death List Sachsenhausen, in AS, Standesamt Oranienburg, Nr. 440/1938. 280. Letter from Ullmann & Co to District Court, 8 December 1938, in AGC HR A 90, 92103 (Everdry, Der Regenmantel Ullmann & Co). 281. Letter from Ullmann & Co to District Court, 28 December 1938, in AGC HR A 90, 92103.

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282. Announcement of release, 18 November 1938, in AS, D1 A, 1015. See Wildt, Einleitung, S. 31. 283. Memo of economics minister, 21 December 1938, in BArch, R 182, 468. 284. Notarized application for deletion, 31 December 1938, in AGC, HR A 90, 95901, 1939 (Richard Hecht). After his business had been deleted from the registry, Hermann Isaack emigrated to Britain. See DjGB. 285. Harry Naujocks, Mein Leben im KZ Sachsenhausen. 1936–1942: Erinnerungen eines ehemaligen Lagerältesten (Berlin, 1989), 92. See also Wildt, Einleitung, 31; Reichmann, Bürger, 220. 286. Pollmeier, Verhaftungen, 178. 287. Excerpt from an interview with Alfred Silberstein in 1996, in Norbert Kampe, ed., Die Wannsee-Konferenz und der Völkermord an den europäischen Juden: Katalog der ständigen Ausstellung (Berlin, 2006), 51. Silberstein’s business had already been subjected to a slander campaign in the summer of 1936. See “Berliner Brief,” Der Stürmer 32/1936, August 1936.

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Chapter 5

Bureaucratic Persecution

 Embargos and Exclusion as of 1933

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Embargos In the years before 1933 the city of Berlin and its municipal administration maintained lively economic relationships with Jewish businesses. As in other German cities, most of these ties were severed the year Hitler came to power.1 The Procurement Office, the city’s central institution for purchasing goods and services, was ordered by State Commissioner Lippert to draw up lists to further “the exclusion of Jewish suppliers.” These lists came into force in early April 1933.2 In May district welfare offices began to stamp their coupons with the words “not valid in Jewish stores.”3 The same was true for coupons for goods handed out to needy, recently married couples.4 Citing the Law on the Protection of Retail Trade, also issued in May, the city administration and the retail office of the IHK tried to subject Jewish entrepreneurs to an embargo, arguing that they were not reliable business partners.5 The consequences were so severe that the New York Times described them as a “cold pogrom.”6 Jewish businesses suffered even more economic damage when other city institutions such as the public transport authority BVG joined the exclusion practices.7 The Trade Fair Office also began refusing to grant Jews space at commercial events,8 and party groups such as the League of Nazi Doctors drew up black lists.9 Local discriminatory initiatives were common and got underway five years before the Reich Economics Ministry officially prohibited contracts from being given to Jewish entrepreneurs – 151 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

on 1 March 1938.10 In a letter to Lippert on 29 May 1933 the Jewish Community already complained, rightly, that “the formulation and content of the measures are designed to bring about the economic ruin of Jewish merchants and artisans.”11 The suppliers’ source archive of the DAF, essentially an extended arm of the “boycott committee,” assumed the task of checking suppliers. In so doing, the archive not only examined businesses maintaining concrete relationships with state authorities, but surveyed data concerning all commercial enterprises within the Reich. For example, in October 1933 the archive told the Julius Riess ladies’ hat manufacturer to provide an entry in the commercial register and the birth certificate of the company head so that it could decide whether or not the company was “German” and could be recommended. Riess proudly declared that he was Jewish and objected that the query violated the Reich Economics Ministry’s prohibition of discrimination.12 Riess refused to complete the accompanying questionnaire, but he couldn’t prevent other businesses from doing so. In so doing, they not only provided the archive with a data base, but also a large measure of legitimacy.13 In the months and years that followed, as though a matter of course, Jewish businesses were deleted from state handbooks and listings.14 In November 1934 the Reich post office started refusing to accept ads from Jewish firms in phone books,15 while an ever increasing number of newspapers no longer accepted ads from Jewish firms.16 Jewish businesses thus lost most of their publicity outlets.

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Exclusion In May 1933 Berlin’s mayor decreed that government-owned buildings, spaces, and real estate would no longer be rented to Jews and that existing rental agreements would be canceled.17 This mostly affected retail businesses. For example, on 1 January 193418 the tobacconist Zigarrenvertrieb Berolina GmbH had to give up three tobacco shops in the city’s central slaughterhouse and went out of business.19 Rental agreements with four of the six Jewish livestock traders at the slaughterhouse had previously been annulled so that those affected also had to cease operations.20 In December 1935 the leases of the two remaining Jewish sellers, S. Schieren and Louis Rosenberg, were also terminated. The two businesses filed official complaints. Initially, the slaughterhouse administration tried to reach a settlement because it was clear that “an action of eviction would have little chance of success since the denial of commercial space is tantamount to the denial of the right to do business, and that has no legal basis.”21 A few months later, however, the slaughterhouse administration trumped – 152 –

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Bureaucratic Persecution

up a justification and evicted the two Jewish livestock dealers under the pretense that they had failed health inspections.22 Jewish traders at outdoor and indoor markets were all affected by the policy of exclusion.23 In May 1933 the Polish consulate had already complained that Polish citizens were being refused access to markets in certain districts or were being confined to segregated “Jewish rows.”24 In August 1933 the mayor canceled the leases of some one hundred Jewish merchants at the central covered market. The CV determined that “even merchants who had rented stands since the opening of the market” were denied spots there.25 The Association succeeded in getting the decree revoked, but the economic damage resulting from weeks of exclusion was huge.26 Moreover, the NS-HAGO—the successor to the Fighting Association for the Mercantile Middle Classes—did everything in its power to ensure that Jews were disadvantaged in daily business life.27 For example, the stand of a merchant named Salomon Wagner, who had been selling fruit and vegetables at the central covered market since 1907, was revoked with immediate effect because he owed a few days of back rent.28 Various people intervened on Wagner’s behalf and he was reinstated, but instead of his former well-positioned stand, he was given a replacement that, in Wagner’s words, “was so poorly located that continuing business is out of the question since I wouldn’t even be able to earn enough to pay the rent.”29 At the same time that discriminatory measures were taking hold in the retail sector, Jews were also being excluded from the Berlin stock exchange. The “Boerse” was the symbol of the capitalist system and was considered by many to be “Jewified.” Thus it was targeted by a number of SA attacks. The institution had been in crisis since 1931 and was subjected from 1933 onward to massive structural changes. Trade outside the stock exchange gained in significance, and transactions almost exclusively served to refinance the state. In April 1933 the stock exchange board, which had the power of decision over who would be allowed to trade there, was reconstituted at Lippert’s behest so that the influence of Jewish brokers dramatically declined. In July Lippert appointed a commission to review every single trader. On 29 September, as a result of these checks, 155 of 539 freelance traders were excluded from the exchange—90 percent of them were Jews.30 Those who were excluded apparently did not represent the core of the trading establishment, which, owing to their expertise and personal connections, were considered indispensable. The following years saw small waves of “ethnic cleansing.” Yet, it wasn’t until June 1938 that the president of the IHK excluded the final 29 Jewish traders from the exchange on the basis of an unpublished decree by the Reich Economics Ministry.31 – 153 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

A stone’s throw from the stock exchange, on the other side of the Spree River a woman named Emmi Sprenger had been running a refreshments hall in front of the German National Gallery since the beginning of the century.32 When Sprenger died in March 1936, and when her daughter tried to take over the business, the museum director told her: “Investigations have revealed that you are a Jewish half-breed. For that reason, it is not possible to give you the lease for the drinking hall located on the property of the National Gallery.”33 Sprenger filed two complaints with the Ministry of Science, Popular Education and Childhood Development, in which she cited her Nazi Party membership and requested an exemption, arguing that according to the Reich Citizenship Law “Germanic halfbreeds” were to be treated as “Aryans.” But her petition fell on deaf ears and the refreshment hall was torn down in April 1937.34

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The Law on the Restitution of the Professional Civil Service and the Law on Revocation of Naturalization Along with the other measures taken to marginalize and exclude Jews, two 1933 laws put particular pressure on Jewish businesspeople. The first was the Law on the Restitution of the Professional Civil Service, which for the first time established anti-Semitism as official government policy. Hindenburg watered down this legislation somewhat, citing the services of Jewish veterans in World War I, but had nonetheless signed it into law, and it gave momentum to further anti-Semitic campaigns. Moreover, the first supplemental ordinance to the Law of 11 April 1933 contained the initial broad definition of the group targeted for discrimination. It deemed that one Jewish grandparent or a Jewish spouse sufficed for someone to be deemed a “non-Aryan” and be excluded from the civil service.35 This document may have only indirectly defined the category “Jew,” but the basic idea was soon adopted in the economic sector. There was an unprecedented wave of racist firings. This was often subsumed under the category Gleichschaltung, since the exclusion of Jews was seen as part of the process by which Hitler consolidated his hold on power. Historian Martin Münzel has concluded that this development proceeded more radically in Berlin than elsewhere.36 The Law on Revocation of Naturalization and the Deprivation of German Citizenship followed on 14 July 1934. It was primarily directed against Jews from Eastern Europe and was invoked in at least seven thousand cases.37 Many Jewish entrepreneurs were affected—for instance, Adolf, Salomon, Nehemia, and Israel Weinberger, four brothers who had risen from humble beginnings to become some of the largest butter whole– 154 –

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Bureaucratic Persecution

salers in Berlin.38 The brothers had immigrated to Berlin from the Galician town of Tarnów before World War I, and all except Salomon had become German citizens. When they were expatriated in late 1935, they were stateless and thus completely vulnerable.39 The condom manufacturer Julius Fromm was somewhat luckier. He wasn’t officially stripped of his citizenship. Nonetheless, expatriation proceedings represented a serious threat and were the source of great worry to those against whom they were directed.40 Furthermore, Jewish businesspeople were denied residency permits or even had such permits rescinded. One example was Izzak Heisler, who was born in 1892 in the Galician town of Gorlice. Interrupted only by World War I, Heisler had resided continuously in Berlin since 1910, where he had established a pelt and fur business. Although he had never violated any rules, the IHK accused him of representing “unfair competition to the orderly German merchant and artisan trade of this branch.” The official charged with dealing with the case at the police presidium concluded: “Heisler is a typical anti-social East Jew, whose removal would be in the interest of the German economy. Additionally I would remark that in its early statements the Chamber of Crafts consistently noted that the heavy participation of foreigners in the fur trade is one cause of unemployment and misery among ethnic Germans involved in this branch of trade.”41 The Foreign Ministry did not buy this line of argumentation. It pointed out that residency permits could not be revoked merely because the German fur trade was threatened by the participation of foreigners. Evidence leading to the revocation of residency rights had to focus on Heisler’s personal behavior. The Foreign Office offered the following hint: “If unambiguous evidence in this regard has not been collected, it may be advisable to inspect Heisler’s business in order to secure it, perhaps even to see him punished for unfair business practices and thus postpone the question of the revocation of his residence permit until a reason has been found that Germany can justify to Poland.”42 Those affected by the new law often lost not just their citizenship or residency rights but also the name under which they had been naturalized or registered.43 The aim here was to reinstate Jewish-sounding names and render those they referred to identifiable as Jews.44 One example was Mendel Glückstern, who was born in 1884 in the Galician town of Rostiki. Glückstern, who had resided in Berlin as a clockmaker and jeweler since 1903, had registered his business under the name Max Glasberg in 1923.45 In November 1932 he filed the last in a series of applications to change his own name to Glasberg. The police rejected this request in July 1933, and having seen that the jeweler had registered his business under that name, ordered him to change his store to reflect his birth name. Glückstern re– 155 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

sponded that he “was unable to remove the name Max Glasberg from his business since it was commercially registered as such and a removal of the name would entail considerable economic damage.”46 Nevertheless the authorities forced the jeweler to change the name of his business in February 193447 and billed him for administrative costs totaling 123.63 reichsmarks.48 The economic disadvantage he suffered from having to give up an established business name must have been far in excess of that, but he was not compensated for his losses.

Debating Company Names

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German? Even before 1933, when making their evaluations, the IHK had tried to restrict the number of businesses that were allowed to identify themselves as “German,” but the courts regularly got in their way. After 1933 the chances of setting a restrictive agenda dramatically improved. The IHK was no longer concerned with restricting the use of the word “German” so that it reflected reality, but rather, as an unnamed employee wrote in the IHK’s own newspaper, the Wirtschaftsblatt, to prevent “foreign profiteers from embellishing their companies with the title ‘German.’”49 Contemporaries would have understood that the group targeted by such statements was Eastern European Jews, and in early 1933 the IHK got its way on this issue. The registry court followed their line of argumentation and ruled that “the business title ‘German’ is only justified for companies owned exclusively by citizens of the German Reich, trading exclusively in German products and maintaining business relationships across the entire German Reich.”50 The court thereby linked the name of the company not to system-immanent business factors but the citizenship of its owners. On the basis of this new ruling, the IHK began a broad investigation into whether companies “legitimately” bore the title German.51 If the IHK decided that this was not the case, the registry court threatened the business in question not just with punishment, but with deletion from the register if it did not immediately change its name. Thus in September 1933 many businesses received announcements that they were in danger of being officially deleted because “the commercial title ‘German’ is no longer valid according to the most recent judgment of the registry court.”52 Several businesses appealed the ruling—with temporary success—when the Superior Court of Justice decided on 1 December 1933 that the title “German” was merely a decorative addition.53 This decision, which was sharply criticized by the IHK functionary responsible for the commercial register,54 did not put an end to the conflict. On 17 April 1934 the bed frame – 156 –

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manufacturer Deutsche Metallbettstellen-Fabrik Max Mendelsohn, which had existed since 1898 and been listed in the registry since 1912, was deleted ex officio because the company had not met the deadline for changing its name. Its seventy-year-old owner, Max Mendelsohn, was forced to register a new business in early 1935 and to bear the administration costs for both the deletion and the new registration.55 Stubbornness on the part of the registry court and the IHK together with the gradual erosion of legal norms brought the desired results. In October 1934 the Superior Court upheld a ruling prohibiting the use of the title “German” in conjunction with an obviously Jewish-sounding company name. The court justified its opinion by arguing that “the title ‘German’ is increasingly used in its meaning Aryan as opposed to non-Aryan (Jewish). Thus it is … understandable that the title ‘German’ is a reference to the Aryan background of the owner of a business.”56 The Superior Court did, however, rule the registry court’s threats of deletion improper, concluding that the threat of punishment was sufficient to force business owners to rename their firms.57 The decision reached by the registry court and upheld by the Superior Court that “the business title ‘German’ is fundamentally based on the German ethnicity of the owner”58—which came well before the Reich Citizenship Law defined the term—marked the entry of racist logic into commercial German law.59 Particularly significant was the Superior Court’s decision to exclude companies with Jewish-sounding names from bearing the title “German.” The converse of this logic was that there were names that “made it clear to everyone that the owner came from a non-Aryan background.”60 Nonetheless, the main priority of both the registry court and the IHK was the partial exclusion of Jews—and not companies with Jewish-sounding names—from the economic life of Germany. A typical case here is the book distributor Max Löwenstein Deutsches Bücherversandhaus, which the Wirtschaftsblatt of the IHK cited in March 1936 as an example of the impermissible use of the adjective “German” with a Jewish-sounding name. Not long after the publication of this article, the company was liquidated.61

People? Citing a decision by the Leipzig Superior Court of Justice, the IHK asked the District Court in March 1934 whether the Volksbank Iwria eGmbH, which had been listed since 1929, “was a company which had been founded by Jews and was simply using the name ‘Volksbank’ [People’s Bank] to conceal its true nature.”62 The IHK answered this rhetorical question itself by referencing the Leipzig decision: “In our opinion, the desig– 157 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

nation ‘Volksbank’ has to be challenged as misleading since it gives rise to misconceptions in light of current circumstances in Germany.”63 The District Court not only followed this logic. It also ruled on 9 April 1934 that the bank’s original registration as a “Volksbank” had been deceptive and thus invalid. The company was therefore to be deleted from the register:

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The founders of this company are all members of a foreign race. Later co-owners are also all members of a foreign race, and in particular East Jews. Circles like these cannot be considered members of the German people. Therefore the word “Volksbank” is misleading. The name erroneously suggests that this is a bank which works to support and promote the interests of members of the German people whereas in reality only those of a foreign race outside the German ethnic community stand to benefit economically. Since the name was misleading and therefore not permissible from the start, the company is a nullity and must be deleted.64

Naturally, the Iwria Volksbank appealed this decision,65 but the Regional Court rejected the objection on 16 October 1934 and ordered the bank to pay all legal costs. In their decision the judges wrote that they had not been aware “that the word ‘Iwria’ in the company name was Hebrew for ‘Jew.’” Therefore, the court assumed that “the vast majority of German ethnic comrades” would also be unfamiliar with the word and thus be misled as to the purpose of this institution.66 The Iwria appealed against this ruling as well in November 1934—with partial success. On 6 December Berlin’s Superior Court referred the case back to the Regional Court with the remark that the deletion could only be legal if “the company failed to conform to legal requirements at the time of registration.”67 The Regional Court, however, failed to consider this logic or offer concrete proof. Instead, without the introduction of any additional evidence, the Regional Court simply ruled: “Even in early 1928, the majority of the German people, even those who were indifferent to the racial question, refused to entrust their savings to a purely Jewish bank. Since there was clear danger that some of these people deposited money with a bank that was not clearly recognizable as Jewish, the misleading nature of the company at the time of registry was confirmed.”68 On the basis of this logic the Regional Court rendered “a new verdict identical to the earlier one overturned by the Superior Court.”69 This decision, too, was overruled by the Superior Court, which found that the Regional Court had not considered “whether the term ‘Volk’ in ‘Volksbank’ was at the time in question understood to refer to the ‘totality’ of the ethnic German comrades” or whether it more likely described “a kind of banking enterprise run by cooperative association.”70 The Regional Court then – 158 –

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found that “even in 1927–28, the word ‘Volksbank’ was used to indicate an institution aimed at the overwhelmingly non-Jewish majority.”71 With that, the bank could only avoid being deleted from the register by reregistering itself as the Iwria Bank eGmbH, which it did on 11 July 1935. In its annual business report the bank remarked dryly: “Circumstances the previous year made it necessary to change the name the bank has carried since its founding, Volksbank Iwria eGmbH, to Iwria Bank eGmbH.”72 In addition to paying the administrative fees for the name change, the Iwria Bank also had to bear the legal and court charges.

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Brown! In December 1934 Else Czwiklitzer took over ownership of the spirits distiller and store Julius Abraham, which had existed since 1878 and which her father Rudolf had run until his death. Since the business was in the middle of bankruptcy procedures, she registered a new enterprise, the Likör- und Weinhandlung Brauner Weg 100 Else Czwiklitzer,73 on 22 January 1935.74 The address was the same as her father’s company, although the street name had changed multiple times. In the eighteenth century it was known as Grüner Weg (Green Way), but in 1926 it was renamed after the Jewish entrepreneur and SPD politician Paul Singer, who had died fifteen years previously. In 1933 this name was removed from the Berlin city map.75 The police president, who was responsible for naming streets, decided that the former name was to be revived. On 25 October 1933 this was modified to Brauner Weg (Brown Way) to pay tribute to the Nazi’s rise to power.76 Only a few days after Czwiklitzer registered her business, the Reichsnährstand objected to a Jewish firm being located at that address. The Nazi farmer organization argued that “this had to be a conscious effort to mislead people since no one would suspect that a wine shop with ‘Brauner Weg’ in its name was non-Aryan.”77 The District Court didn’t immediately react. Only when the farmers’ organization reiterated its complaint did the court request an evaluation by the IHK, which concluded that there was no reason to challenge Czwiklitzer’s business.78 The Reichsnährstand refused to give in, composing a third complaint on 16 May 1935. It contained the following argument: “If this sort of entry in the register becomes the norm, a Jew named Isidor Levy could, for instance, decide to move to Adolf Hitlerplatz and name his wine shop after it. That would denigrate the Führer’s name. The case is comparable with the designation ‘Brauner Weg,’ which is intended to be a symbol of our National Socialist victory. If a Jewish business is using it today to conceal itself, then the intention is without question to deceive the public.”79 Mentioning the Führer did – 159 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

the trick. On 4 June 1935 the registry court decided to initiate deletion procedures ex officio in order to force the company to change its name.80 Despite the economic disadvantage that entailed, Else Czwiklitzer had to apply for the name change and bear all costs.81

Harassment and Bans

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Associations and Public Corporations In the wake of the so-called New Plan, aimed at reducing imports and unemployment and channeling government funds into war relevant industries, the regime assumed ever-greater control over business sectors deemed particularly important to rearmament and economic self-reliance. Aside from companies that made arms, the firms most directly affected were those involved in food production and distribution. Greater state involvement represented a double threat for Jewish businesses in this sector. On the one hand, rationing meant that there was less room in general for commercial activity. On the other hand, state institutions used their powers of jurisdiction to marginalize Jewish businesses. The Reichnährstand, for instance, systematically discriminated against Jewish grain dealers. In 1934 the CV concluded: “Consumers used to have the freedom to decide for themselves on a supplier. Now a significant number of consumers have severed their relationships with Jewish companies with which they’ve worked for a long time. Not only have Jewish companies been frozen out of contracts, Aryan firms have been favored to an extent completely out of line with these companies’ traditional share of the market or the desires of consumers.”82 The Association added that consumers were dependent on credit from suppliers. But because non-Jewish dealers were unwilling to extend credit to new customers they didn’t know, consumers paid the new wholesalers without repaying old lines of credit to Jewish wholesalers. That gave rise to the perverse situation, wrote the Association, “that Jewish business financed the business of its competition.”83 Egg wholesalers and retailers were also among those affected. The systematic exclusion of Jews from this branch of commerce began on 8 March 1934 with the founding of the Economic Association of German Egg Dealers. Jews were excluded from membership, which was simultaneously required for permission to buy contingents of foreign-produced eggs. In 1935 Jews were barred from the egg exchange. The basis of their commercial existence was thus completely destroyed.84 By November 1935 the German egg sellers’ trade magazine was able to report that “recently 24 large and medium-sized Jewish egg wholesalers in the greater Berlin area have been transferred to Aryan pro– 160 –

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Bureaucratic Persecution

prietorship.”85 One month later the Polish embassy protested against a de facto halt to deliveries to 101 egg dealerships in Berlin, whose Polish owners faced “the loss of their [economic] existence.”86 This intervention seems to have been fruitless. Using the egg trade as a model, in 1936 the Reichnährstand began to exclude Jewish businesses from the import of feed, grain, and seeds, as well as spices.87 Parallel to the Reichnährstand the Reich Culture Chamber was formed in September 1933 as a public corporation with mandatory membership requirements. It was directly connected with the Reich Ministry of Popular Education and Propaganda. Divided up into separate departments for film, the press, music, radio, the printed word, theater, and the graphic arts, the Chamber organized and controlled all areas of artistic and cultural endeavor. Initially, the attitude toward Jews in the chamber as a whole was one of tactical restraint.88 But anti-Jewish policies quickly made themselves felt in the individual subordinate chambers. Being refused membership was tantamount to a prohibition on working in a certain area. Jewish directors had been removed from all the major Jewish-run theaters even before the advent of the theater chamber, and by 1935 their Jewish owners had also been replaced. Early 1935 also saw the complete exclusion of Jews from the newspaper trade.89 The Association of German Newspaper and Magazine Wholesalers published memos listing which businesses could no longer be supplied because they were not members of the Reich Press Chamber.90 Shortly thereafter, Jewish booksellers and art dealers were also excluded from their respective chambers.91 The highly regarded antique book dealer Martin Breslauer officially complained about being excluded in December 1935, but he only succeeded in getting the deadline for his exclusion extended until June 1936 so that he could “transfer his business to appropriate Aryan hands.”92 A few publishers and booksellers were granted exceptions that allowed them to stay in business until 1938 as long as they explicitly identified themselves as Jewish.93

The Police President In late June 1935, in the wake of the outbreaks of violence described earlier, the police president, the Gau leadership, and the SA met to agree on how to proceed against Jews, vowing to harass Jewish businesspeople wherever possible.94 In this spirit the Gestapo refused most of the ice cream parlors affected by the unrest permission to reopen, citing the Ordinance for the Protection of the People and the State as a justification. As was all too typical under the Nazi regime, the victims were portrayed as perpetrators and the Jewish businesspeople and not violent thugs were held responsible for disrupting public order.95 – 161 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

With increasing frequency Helldorf also declared bans on Jews working in specific trades. He based the bans on an ordinance restricting freedom of trade from 1923, which had been issued during the period of hyperinflation as a way of combatting profiteering, especially in the trading of food.96 Although the ordinance was chiefly concerned with food distribution, in mid-July 1933 the police president invoked it against the owners of the textile company Hemdenmatz GmbH, in front of which the photo that is shown on the cover of this book was taken and which had been able to expand despite the Depression and which had therefore come into the crosshairs of the Nazi “boycott” on 1 April 1933.97 Unable to pursue their trade, the owners were forced to sell their company far below its true value.98 Helldorf also invoked the obsolete ordinance to help to finally ban the few remaining Jews from the egg trade. In March 1936 the Angriff was able to celebrate “Once Again [We Have] ‘Aryan’ Easter Eggs.”99 Helldorf found that these arguments resonated with the public, and he would use them more and more. Concerning foodstuffs that had grown scarce because of Germany’s lack of foreign currency and its concentration on military production, the police president simply blamed Jewish middlemen and wholesalers. In March 1936 he banned the butter wholesalers Gebr. Weinberger, who supplied around half (ten thousand) of all of Berlin’s retailers, from doing business.100 Helldorf’s rationale was that in times of butter shortages Jewish businesspeople “supplied their preferred, mostly Jewish, customers while making insufficient or no deliveries at all to small-time Aryan retailers.”101 In December of that year the police president used the same logic to ban a number of meat and sausage sellers.102 Masses of Jewish businesses were also shut down in those sectors, including restaurants and pharmacies, which required state licensing. In October 1933 Jews and those married to Jews were already prohibited from receiving new licenses, and increasing numbers of existing pharmacy licenses were revoked. Helldorf was not above citing transparently slanderous accusations to justify his decisions.103 On 26 March 1936 it was decreed that Jews would no longer be allowed to run pharmacies at all, and Jewish pharmacists were given six months to sell or lease out their businesses. This was an extraordinarily tight deadline. Suitable possessors had to be found for more than 20 percent of Berlin’s pharmacies. The chances of Jewish pharmacists finding a buyer were slim, and that pushed down prices. Only forty-six pharmacies were in fact transferred to new proprietors. The rest were leased out.104 The law was enforced in utterly arbitrary fashion, as exemplified by the southern Berlin pharmacy Residenz-Apotheke mit Drogenhandlung Dr. Hans Friedländer. After the death of the founding pharmacist Hans Friedländer in 1928 the business was leased by his non-Jewish widow to – 162 –

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a Jewish pharmacist named Herbert Götz. As of 1933 the business was marginalized, attacked in the specialist press, and discriminated against by the pharmacists’ trade organization.105 Moreover, Götz and the widow Friedländer were accused of “racial defilement.” Götz ultimately had enough and canceled the leasing contract, whereupon Hedwig Friedländer transferred the pharmacy to Erwin Kantelberg. Kantelberg was non-Jewish but was considered politically unreliable because he had worked in a Jewish hospital once. In mid-1936 he was told that he would not be licensed. He was given until the end of the following January to lease out the business to someone else.106 Kantelberg tried to fight back with a courageous letter of complaint, but ultimately he, too, as he put it, had to “bend … to the power of the state.”107

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The IHK and the Courts The IHK and Berlin’s District Court had already begun harassing and persecuting Jewish companies in 1933. In the case of Hemdenmatz GmbH, for instance, the IHK had stubbornly maintained that the business did not deserve to be preserved, but rather should be broken up and sold to non-Jews.108 And as discussed above, in the case of Heisler, the IHK ruled disparagingly in June 1935 that the furrier represented “unfair competition to the orderly German merchants and artisans in this branch,” thus increasing the discriminatory pressure on the victim.109 Once the Reich Citizenship Law was in place, the IHK and District Court were particularly strict about enforcing the rules when businesses they considered Jewish were concerned. The case of Julius Laufer is a good example of this. Laufer was born in 1890 in the town of Nowy Sacz in what is now Poland. He immigrated to Berlin after World War I and ran a wool and silk clothing manufacturer in the eastern part of the city. By 1935 he had twenty employees and an annual turnover of 142,500 reichsmarks—a scale of business at which companies were normally registered.110 Thus, in late December of that year Laufer received a letter instructing him to officially register the Woll- und Seidenwarenfabrikation Julius Laufer. Simultaneously, however, the Polish consulate had changed his adopted name to his birth one, Jüdel Laufer. By way of compromise, since Laufer had built up his company under his previous name, he suggested that the company should be called Julius Laufer Inhaber Jüdel Laufer (Julius Laufer Owned by Jüdel Laufer).111 The registry court rejected that idea. On 15 July 1936 he gave in and registered his company as Jüdel Laufer.112 One year later the IHK inspected the company and found Laufer guilty of deception. The inspector particularly objected to the fact that the garment manufacturer’s stationery was illegible since Laufer was stamping over his old letterhead – 163 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

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with his new one.113 They threatened him with a fine of 50 reichsmarks and possible deportation. Laufer promised to have a new letterhead made immediately.114 That mollified the inspector, whom the IHK had sent once again to Laufer’s business in Schönhauser Straße. He reported: “The signs on the street have been changed to read Jüdel Laufer. On the signs in the courtyard and the building stairwell, the name Julius has been painted over and is no longer visible. The old stationery has been re-stamped and used up. There is no evidence any more of commercial deception.”115 The IHK behaved similarly in the case of Robert Wertheim’s sewing pattern dealership at Tauentzienstraße 20. Wertheim had patented the name “Dalemo. Das Lebende Modell” (Dalemo—The Living Model) under which his company did business without officially listing the firm in the commercial register. In the course of an audit in December 1936 the IHK noted that not only was Wertheim required to officially register his company, “he seems not to want his own name in the company name.”116 Officials at the registry court understood this as a hint and refused Wertheim permission to found a limited-liability GmbH, which would have allowed the entrepreneur to register his businesses without using his family name.117 In May 1937 Wertheim registered his company as Damelo. Das lebende Modell Robert Wertheim. Almost immediately after he had done this, however, the IHK complained that “the company owner continues to do business with an improper letterhead that doesn’t contain his name.”118 Wertheim was forced, over the course of the next few days, to inform all his business partners, his bank, the post office, and the telephone directory of the change in his company’s name and to restamp his company letterhead.119

Revenue and Exchange Control Offices As early as March 1933, Berlin State Commissioner Lippert had advocated strict inspection of Jews’ tax returns.120 The consequences of such audits could be drastic. For example, in June 1933 a local tax authority rescinded the nonprofit status of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin GmbH retroactively to 1926. All of a sudden the prestigious theater house faced mountains of tax debt that could only be paid by selling off the business.121 As of 1935 systematic anti-Jewish discrimination was evident in revisions of the tax code, and all tax breaks benefiting Jews were repealed.122 Revenue offices also came up with dubious back taxes as a way of increasing pressure on Jewish businesses.123 One firm that got squeezed was the butter wholesaler Gebr. Weinberger, discussed above. The firm was audited in early 1935 without inspectors being able to uncover any irregularities,124 so on 27 August 1935 – 164 –

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the president of Berlin’s central revenue authority, the Landesfinanzamt, ordered a repeat, more rigorous inspection, citing a slanderous article that had been published in the Angriff two weeks previously.125 The second audit found that, although the company’s turnover and profits had plummeted, the firm owed 1,350,000 reichsmarks in taxes. The company’s cash holdings and the private wealth of the Weinberger brothers were subsequently confiscated, increasing the pressure upon them.126 At the same time, as historian Christiane Kuller has stressed, the regime decided to forgo a special “Jew tax” for “economic and foreign-policy reasons”—for the time being.127 Foreign as well as domestic business dealings by Jews were kept under ill-willed scrutiny, as is shown by the example of Nissim Zacouto, a Sephardic Jew from Turkey. The respected carpet wholesaler, who supplied Berlin’s premier department store KaDeWe, was considered in the mid-1920s one of the city’s “few aboveboard Turkish companies.”128 But in 1934 the reports filed by Hans-Joachim Quantmeyer, the district director of the Reich Specialist Group for Carpets, Furniture, and Curtains, were full of racist bias. Zacouto was “a complete expert,” Quantmeyer told the IHK, but he primarily did his business with “hucksters and swindlers.” Quantmeyer went on to cite rumors “that he had been sued 30 or 40 times for irregular and even directly crooked business deals.”129 Apparently without checking to see if they were true, the president of the IHK passed on these unfounded accusations to the president of the Landesfinanzamt, and Zacouto suddenly found himself on treacherous ground.130 The wholesaler was soon denied the right to make business trips, and his goods were confiscated in transit by customs authorities.131 Despite numerous interventions on the carpet dealer’s behalf, the IHK adamantly stuck by their stance that Zacouto should not be given access to a certain amount of foreign currency needed for his import business, but should be forced to apply for it on a case by case basis.132 Zacouto had no choice but to concentrate on his domestic business. In 1939 he emigrated to France where he started a new company.133 Retroactive checks on foreign trade dealings were becoming increasingly oppressive. In his study of the Nazi state’s “fiscal plundering,” historian Martin Friedenberger concludes that “the regulations on foreign currency were so strict and comprehensive that almost every company involved in foreign trade could have been shown to have acted inappropriately—ultimately it was a question of how violations were treated.”134 Here, too, positions were radicalized. In August 1936 an audit of coat maker Bernhard Ahrndsen revealed that he had not correctly declared a small sum in Swiss francs, but the auditors saw this as a misdemeanor and forwent any punishment.135 By the end of that year, however, a gen– 165 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

eral decree was issued that cast suspicion on Jews as a whole and empowered exchange control offices to take “preventive measures” in cases where Jews were possibly planning to smuggle money out of the Reich.136 At the slightest suspicion, Jewish companies were subject to extensive audits. For example, in 1938, despite rising profits, the women’s fashion wholesaler Weiler, Nathanson & Co., which had been listed in the commercial register since 1923, attracted the attention of the currency exchange office. The office wrote: “Since this is a purely Jewish company with no fixed assets and its balance since 1931 is negative, we have to consider the possibility that capital is being moved in the form of exports which are later paid for abroad.” Even though it was never proven that the owners of the company had done anything wrong, the auditor recommended that a DAF-approved administrator be installed to monitor the firm’s business dealings.137 In 1938, after an audit of the ladies’ fashion manufacturer Biberfeld & Weil, which had been listed since 1919, the auditor recommended that the two owners’ passports be confiscated because the company’s bookkeeping had made a disorderly impression and the owners had transferred their shares in the firm to their wives.138 In September 1938 Hannah Zacharias was interrogated by customs authorities and taken into investigative custody to prevent her from fleeing Germany and concealing evidence. Zacharias had given a third person “several thousand reichsmarks,” and the currency control office assumed that she was trying to smuggle it outside the Reich. The office immediately audited her husband Gustav Zacharias’s business, which had been a women’s clothing manufacturer since 1926. The inspection revealed that Zacharias had paid himself a lot of money and that the couple had largely liquidated their household. The auditor suspected they were preparing to flee Germany and had the boarding house room where Zacharias lived searched. The search revealed no new evidence, but the auditor recommended putting the company under the control of an administrator “to prevent any further undermining of its finances.”139 In the case of the ladies’ fashion manufacturer Max Behrendt, whose owner had successfully transferred his company to Britain, partly bypassing German tax authorities, the auditor suggested taking the firm’s non-Jewish general manager into custody as a way of putting pressure on the owners and others who had fled.140 Inspectors were especially rigorous in monitoring Jewish businesses involved in export promotion, the supplementary export procedure discussed above. But because Jewish exporters normally took in large amounts of foreign currency, the export monitoring authorities only fully excluded Jewish businesses from these activities after November 1938.141 – 166 –

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Elimination

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Exclusion from Apportionments and Definition On 27 November 1937, one day after he was appointed interim Reich economics minister, Göring sent a memo around to the monitoring authorities responsible for foreign currency and raw materials management in which he ordered that rations available to Jewish businesses be cut by 10 percent. He also specified that further cuts could be made in individual cases.142 In a supplementary message the Reich Economics Chamber announced on 7 January 1938 that the 10 percent cuts would be just the beginning.143 Subsequently, the professional association all cigarette makers were required to join, the Fachgruppe Tabak, went well beyond the 10 percent to exclude the Garbáty cigarette company entirely from the distribution network, forcing the Jewish owners to sell the business.144 One month later Göring declared a moratorium on new Jewish businesses in the garment industry.145 The major consequence of these decrees was that the businesses affected were finally defined. If the regime intended to discriminate systematically against Jewish businesses, it needed to define what precisely made a business Jewish. In the wake of the Reich Citizenship Law in the autumn of 1935, people had been expecting legal definitions of what made businesses Jewish, but little had happened. Within the Reich Economics Ministry “firms were considered Jewish if more than fifty percent of their capital rested in Jewish hands; companies (and in particular corporations) were considered Jewish if more than one-third of the board of directors were Jews. General partnerships were considered Jewish if one of the partners was a Jew.”146 But this definition was never published. It wasn’t until the beginning of 1937 that Hitler told the Reich Interior Ministry to prepare an ordinance of the Reich Citizenship Law that would define and identify Jewish businesses. Yet conferences at the ministry yielded no concrete results—in part because the Economics Ministry wasn’t included.147 We can safely assume that Reich Interior Minister Frick anticipated opposition from Hjalmar Schacht, who was still in his post as economics minister. When Göring took over Schacht’s position in late 1937 he was able to use Frick’s preliminary work. Göring’s secret decree of 4 January 1938 specified that partnerships should be considered Jewish if any one of the partners fulfilled the categories of the First Ordinance of the Reich Citizenship Law. Corporations were to be considered Jewish if a chief executive officer, board of directors member, or more than a quarter of the supervisory board members were Jewish, or if Jews were deemed to exert a decisive influence on the company.148 Göring’s decree was not only considerably stricter than the Reich Economics Ministry’s internal rule of – 167 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

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thumb, it also spurred on and reoriented the process of destruction of Jewish commercial activity. In early 1938 the Berlin IHK wrote to all businesses on which it had records: “In order to fulfill an administrative requirement,” firms were instructed, as the metal goods manufacturer Feller & Gralle was, to indicate if owners, chief executives, or board members were Jewish and whether more than 25 percent of the business’s capital belonged to Jews.149 If the company answered in the affirmative on any one of these points, its file received the following stamp: “Checked on 11 March 1938. Jewish business according the standards of the Reich and Prussian Economics Minister of January 4, 1938.”150 None of the surviving files contains a stamp dated later than the end of March, so we can assume that the checks were carried out by then. The IHK maintained files on all businesses listed in the commercial register so it had succeeded in determining the racial provenance of forty thousand companies in roughly three months.151 This was a real “achievement,” as the president of the IHK put it in his annual review at the end of 1938.152 On the other hand, it meant that Göring’s decree did not remain a secret for very long. The Jüdische Rundschau newspaper was able to report on it in detail as early as 25 March 1938.153 Building upon the work of the various IHK through the Reich, the spokesman for the economics minister made it known that as of 1 April 1938 there were 39,552 Jewish businesses in greater Germany. Contrary to what historians often assume, however, this figure doesn’t reflect the actual number of existing Jewish businesses. After all, the IHK could only check on companies for which they had files. As a rule these were only companies listed in the commercial register.154

Registration and Permission Requirements Returning from a visit to Vienna, where the destruction of Jewish commercial activity was proceeding in a pogrom-like way, Göring once again seized the initiative. On 22 April he issued the Ordinance against Assistance in Concealing Jewish Businesses, and four days later he and Frick jointly issued the Ordinance concerning the Registration of Jewish Assets. The latter required Jews to declare all private and business assets in excess of 5000 reichmarks. Another edict passed the same day required Jews to obtain permission before liquidating assets of significant value.155 That requirement was an unmistakable signal that the political leadership had decided to eliminate Jewish commercial activity once and for all. CV lawyer Hans Reichmann also had no doubts “that registration of assets is a preliminary step toward confiscation of assets.”156 For its part,

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Das schwarze Korps opined that the ordinance had inaugurated the “Judendämmerung”, the “twilight of the Jews.”157 In Berlin, the police president was the one who ultimately decided on applications for the liquidation or possession transfer of Jewish businesses, but as was the case with the offices that enforced the Law on the Protection of Retailers, a quartet of authorities soon crystalized and was confirmed by an Economics Ministry decree in early July 1938.158 When making his decisions, the police president asked the IHK whether it was in the general economic interest for a given Jewish business to be taken over by non-Jews and whether the potential successor had the necessary expertise. The Gau economic advisor rendered judgment on whether the new owner represented a “threat to a National Socialist company management” and whether the price of sale was low enough. And the DAF was engaged to decide which employees would be retained, which of course meant that all Jewish employees were summarily fired. Where retailers were concerned, the district mayor made decisions in the police president’s stead, but he too solicited advice from that licensing quartet.159 Between late April and late October 1938 the IHK prepared 928 evaluations for the police president. In 70 percent of cases the IHK recommended that takeovers of Jewish businesses be allowed to proceed, although supplemental conditions were stipulated around a third of the time. Some 30 percent of the liquidation applications were rejected. At 34 percent the rejection rate was particularly high for retailers, followed by wholesalers at 31 percent, textile and garment companies at 22 percent, restaurants at 16 percent, and heavy industry at only 14.2 percent. A spokesman for the IHK explained that the category “wholesalers” contained a lot of businesses in the foodstuffs and semi-luxury foods and tobacco sector, which was why there were so many rejections.160 The situation was similar for retailers. The IHK wrote: “Refusals were made because businesses were already in transition or were unprofitable, or because prospective owners lacked the necessary expertise or were personally unreliable or because suspicions arose that they were merely a front for Jewish owners of jam and tobacco shops, pharmacies, gold- and silverware stores, soap shops and furniture stores, areas in which Jews dominate streets and even whole neighborhoods.”161 The registration requirements meant that Jews could no longer do as they wished with their business assets or even get full price for selling them. Jewish businesses were appraised on their assessed tax value and not on the basis of their market value—what they could be sold for. Jews could not cash in on the good will they’d built up over the years, on their business’s positive reputation or their connections with suppliers and cus-

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tomers. Moreover, at the discretion of the Gau economic advisor, the already low asking prices for Jewish businesses were further discounted by up to 20 percent.162

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Systematic Identification On 14 June 1938 a secret decree of 4 January was published as the Third Ordinance on the Reich Citizenship Law. It empowered the economics minister to have Jewish businesses designated as such.163 With that, as a commentator in the periodical Soziale Praxis magazine noted, “a clear line was drawn between German and Jewish businesses … and an end was put to the unfortunate practice whereby the German but not the Jewish entrepreneur identified his business.”164 The unrest on the streets, the raids, and defacement of storefront windows obscured the fact that in 1938 Jewish businesses in Berlin were officially required to identify themselves as such. In his dispatch on the unrest, cited above, the US ambassador to Germany mentioned this change en passant: “On the Kurfürstendamm and the Tauentzienstraße … Jewish shop-owners had been ordered the day before to display their names in white letters.”165 The legal basis for this form of designation was not the Third Ordinance but a decree by the police president. In order to address “justified complaints about deceptions as to the identity of the owners of businesses,” Helldorf had issued an “internal” declaration that “businesspeople who have a public store, restaurant or bar must ensure that a legible version of their family name with at least one complete forename appears on the front of the building or next to the entrance.”166 On 10 June, on the basis of this declaration and exceeding his actual jurisdiction, Goebbels ordered police precinct superintendents to ensure that business locations belonging to Jewish companies be identified by a clearly placed name.167 This meant that in addition to any defamatory external identifying marks, business owners were required to identify themselves by writing their names on their shop windows. A series of photographs published by Das schwarze Korps in July 1938 reveals that there were strict regulations about how they were to do this. The accompanying article reads: “It was high time that Jews in Berlin were made to clearly present their names on their businesses. They felt much more comfortable selling their hats under the moniker ‘Altaba’ or their shoes under ‘La Florida.’ … These tricks are a thing of the past. If someone named Schulze doesn’t mind being called Schulze, we don’t need to make exceptions for an Abramovich. Moreover, we can’t require Aryans to ask to see the Aryan grandmother, if available, in every business and run the risk to be deceived there.”168 – 170 –

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In their June 1938 edition the Berlin editorial board of the Stürmer also effusively praised the ordinance requiring Jewish businesses to be identified. In the somewhat bizarre form of a letter to the editor, one of the Stürmer’s journalists wrote: “Above all it is our party comrades who breathed easier, rejoiced to the bottom of their hearts and pictured what it would look like when every Jewish business in the Reich capital has a sign affixed to it reading “Jewish business.” How great that will be! People will no longer have the excuse ‘I didn’t know the business was Jewish’. … Yes, dear Stürmer, it is a wonderful feeling to see progress being made week for week.”169 It appears that in June 1938 there were two different competing types of identification. On the one hand, entrepreneurs were compelled by law to identify themselves; on the other businesses were being demarked externally as part of the all too familiar street campaign of terrorizing Jews. The latter tended to cover over signs of mandatory self-identification, and has hardly attracted any attention by research done in the field, so far. But while Jewish businesspeople were allowed to clean up graffiti on 22 June, their names had to remain clearly marked on storefront windows. Thus, while there was no general ordinance in the Reich requiring that Jewish businesses by identified as such, in Berlin Jewish shops and stores were easily recognizable.170 The Third Ordinance also stipulated that businesses publicly defined as Jewish were to be registered in a list. Citing an implementing rule issued by the interior minister, a city council representative announced in August 1938 that the lists were to be maintained by commercial divisions of the district revenue offices. Since “no one authority had satisfactorily complete records of existing Jewish businesses, the representative wrote, all businesses in the city would ideally be required to fill out a special form indicating whether they are considered Jewish in the sense of the ordinance.”171 In many German cities, for example Breslau (Wroclaw) and Frankfurt, more or less comprehensive handbooks of Jewish businesses had been published in the mid-1930s. Berlin and Hamburg were the exceptions in having no such lists.172 We can only speculate as to why this was so. Apart from the fears of the consequences such a public list might have had in cities which were reliant on foreign trade, in Berlin the sheer mass of Jewish owned businesses certainly played a role. If a business was considered Jewish, its tax file was marked with a “J.” In addition, every business was supposed to be listed on alphabetized cards as well as on four identical lists. With businesses owned by foreign Jews, or whenever suspicions arose that this was the case, the Reich Economics Ministry was to decide whether they would be entered into the list. Because the council representative assumed that it would take two – 171 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

weeks for the necessary forms to be delivered and two further months to get them filled out, he set a deadline of 10 November 1938.173 But things didn’t proceed that quickly, in part because repression of Jews was being stepped up. In the end, the lists were only finished after the November pogrom, and it wasn’t until early 1939 that they were sent from the district revenue offices to the central Berlin tax administration.174

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New Harassments and Prohibitions On 20 July 1938, one month after the police president had introduced the identification requirement for Jewish businesses, he circulated a confidential memo entitled “Guidelines for Handling Jews and Jewish Matters.” The goal was to establish a unified, radical strategy for “ridding Berlin of Jews and the Jewish proletariat in particular.”175 Not surprisingly, these extremely detailed instructions specified that Jews should be disadvantaged in all legal decisions and administrative procedures. One concrete example was drastic restrictions on authorizations to operate vending machines and maintain public window displays. Jewish stores, businesses, restaurants, and hotels were to be subjected to “more frequent and stricter” fire inspections, Jewish businesses were no longer allowed to hold final sales, and Jewish taxi drivers were to have their licenses revoked.176 The police president’s interpretation of the Ordinance on the Registration of Jewish Assets also amounted to pure harassment. He ruled that Jewish businesses would have to get permission to move, even on the smallest scale, and pressed charges against all those who failed to comply.177 Thus, the police shut down the Ernst Wechselmann real estate office because its owner had moved the business to his private residence.178 On 6 July 1938 the commercial code was altered to prohibit Jews from heading businesses in real estate, security, property management, marriage offices, and the tourist sector as well as all ambulatory trades.179 Almost simultaneously, the relevant department heads in districts with large Jewish populations decided to reduce the amount of space at markets as a means of squeezing out Jewish merchants. On 22 August 1938 Charlottenburg became the first Berlin district to announce that its weekly markets were “Jew-free.”180 In late September district police departments rescinded all trade licenses for Jewish traveling salesmen, writing in a memorandum: “In keeping with the Law on the Revision of the Commercial Code of 6 July 1938, non-Aryans are excluded from the trades of ambulatory salesperson, traveling salesman and traveling representative. The selling of non-licensable wares by non-Aryan ambulant salesmen calling upon private homes is no longer tolerated.”181 “This measure,” a former director of the Reich Deputation of Jews in Germany later recalled, “had a devas– 172 –

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tating effect since at that point most Jews had been excluded from other trades, so that when they were no longer permitted to be company representatives, they had no chance to feed themselves and their families.”182

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The Regulation of the Elimination of Jews from Economic Life of Germany On Saturday, 12 November 1938, while scattered Jewish businesses were still being plundered in the capital, a conference held at the Reich Aviation Ministry decided to impose a “levy of Jewish assets” of 20 percent of whatever personal wealth Jews may have had left.183 This levy hit businesspeople particularly hard since the amount due was calculated on the declarations they had made in April, while almost all Jewish businesses had lost considerable value in the pogrom—if indeed they had survived at all. In the conference it was also decided that all Jewish retailers, cooperatives, and handicraft businesses would have to close by 1 January 1939.184 Reich Economics Minister Funk had already prepared the necessary ordinance. Göring signed it that very day and it was made public on Monday, 14 November.185 The deadline contained in the ordinance was incredibly tight for most of the Berlin businesses concerned. For this reason, authorities and people involved had to make rushed decisions that undoubtedly made the whole process even more brutal. Four days after the publication of the ordinance, the head of the city council specified in a memo to the district mayors how it was to be implemented. In conjunction with the retail office of the IHK, the DAF, and local economic advisors, the district mayors were to evaluate all Jewish retailers and decide whether they should be allowed to continue operating. Such decisions were to be based on the principle that “the eradication of the Jewish retailer [offers] the chance to secure a reliable existential foundation for a reformed Berlin retail sector.”186 But while the Reich economics minister envisioned a third of all Jewish retail businesses staying in operation under non-Jewish management, the head of the city council, citing the estimation of the Gau economic advisor, deemed that one half of Jewish retailers could be taken over.187 Astonishingly, Lippert did not even know how many Jewish retailers there were in the city. In his memo to the district mayors he included an outdated list of Jewish retailers from 1 August 1938.188 It was also unclear how stocks of Jewish businesses condemned to liquidation, insofar as they had not been vandalized during the pogrom, could be sold off. The implementation orders only stipulated generally that the police president should prevent disorderly, everything-must-go sales from taking place. Apparently, at this point, Lippert still assumed that Jewish businesspeople would still be able to liquidate their stocks on their own.189 – 173 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

On 23 November the economics minister contradicted earlier instructions and decreed that liquidators could be appointed for Jewish businesses if “orderly liquidations prove impossible.”190 The reason was likely that the ransacking during the pogrom and the abduction of thousands of Jewish businesspeople into concentration camps prevented the liquidation of the businesses according to commercial law. Furthermore, authorities feared that self-appointed commissars might occupy and seize Jewish companies, as had been the case in March and April 1938 in Vienna. Thus the Reich economics minister explicitly stated that the liquidators were only responsible for liquidating businesses. In addition, extremely specific procedures—similar to bankruptcy proceedings—were instituted.191 Nonetheless, it appears that the district mayors had succeeded in “pushing through” the most important decisions by 28 November.192 After that, everyone responsible came together with the Gau economic advisor to decide how to proceed. They agreed on a fast-track procedure based on the one practiced under the Law for the Protection of Retail Business.193 This entailed having local administrative directors select candidates for takeovers, chiefly “long-standing, proven party comrades with business experience,” according to predefined criteria. People who had lost their apartments as a result of Albert Speer’s large-scale “rebuilding” of Berlin would also receive consideration for taking over a Jewish business as would those who worked in businesses owned by others insofar as they were not “servants of Jews.”194 When dealing with businesses considered worthy of takeover, the district mayors could demand—within the space of three days—to inspect the company’s books for the years 1932, 1936, and 1937 together with two copies of its final balance for 1938. Meanwhile local administrative directors submitted lists of potential possession-transfer candidates who would be evaluated for their business expertise by the IHK. The “acceptance” of an applicant was decided with a minimum of bureaucracy at one of seventy-one meetings of local authorities.195 Those chosen were told to contact the Jewish owner within three days, conclude a contract of sale and report back to the district mayor. On 23 November it was also agreed that while in principle applicants should generally possess sufficient capital for a takeover, exceptions could be made whereby the purchaser made a down payment of at least 51 percent of the price of sale. The remainder would be paid to the Jewish seller within three years.196 In late November 1938 the Reich Economics Chamber hosted a conference of the Society of Industrial and Commercial Chambers. On the topic “De-Jewification in the Retail Sector,” it was noted that a relatively high percentage of Jewish retail businesses had been sold. This, however, apparently referred to Lippert’s initial vision, not the reality on the ground.197 In his final report on the “De-Jewification of the Retail Sector in Berlin” in – 174 –

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early January 1939, the head of the city council concluded that more than two-thirds of retail businesses had been liquidated instead of being taken over by non-Jews.198 The actual number of Jewish businesses transferred to non-Jewish possession was even less than that. In a February 1939 article in the the Wirtschaftsblatt, “De-Jewification of the Berlin Retail Sector,” IHK official Max le Viseur wrote that of the three thousand larger Jewish retail businesses in existence in November 1938, only around seven hundred had not been liquidated. This figure must be basically accurate because it corresponds with the results of an internal Security Service study that was published in an SD secret report on 13 January 1939.199 The percentage of retail businesses that got taken over was thus less than a quarter. Businesses were supposed to be liquidated by their Jewish owner according to strict procedures and were not merely deleted from the commercial register by decree. In the transition from 1938 to 1939 local courts received hundreds of pieces of correspondence from Jewish businesspeople requesting that their companies be deleted because they were no longer allowed to practice their former trades. In many cases they also requested that the court waive administrative costs. The registry court insisted that formalities be maintained and demanded that Jewish entrepreneurs make an official personal or notarized declaration within the space of two weeks. Since notaries meant further costs, many Jewish businesspeople made the trip to the registry court at Gerichtsstraße in the district of Wedding or one of the local district courts. Since such institutions had restricted opening hours, officials there were soon completely swamped, and lines were massive. In most cases, the businesses were deleted from the register for the minimum fee of 5 reichmarks, but there were additional costs for attestation and publication. Entrepreneurs must have been particularly infuriated that they were required to publish the news of their companies’ liquidation not only in the official state newspaper Der Reichsanzeiger and the business newspaper Berliner Börsenzeitung, but in the Völkische Beobachter as well. An announcement there cost 4.20 reichsmarks.200 The number of legal proceedings that were billed at the minimum rate suggests why less than a quarter of Jewish businesses were sold to new owners despite the head of the city council’s claim that he often had three or four applicants. Years of persecution had apparently taken such a heavy toll on retail businesses, or they had been so badly damaged in what is still often called the Night of Broken Glass, that they were no longer suitable for takeover. After World War II the son-in-law of Elias Feuerstein, who had been murdered in the pogrom, recalled: “On account of the total destruction and plundering, selling the business or its stocks, inventory, monies due or good name was completely out of the question, and it was liquidated.”201 – 175 –

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Elimination The Regulation of the Elimination of Jews from Economic Life of Germany required Jewish retailers, cooperatives, and handicraft businesses to cease operation on 1 January 1939. But this did not spell the absolute end of Jewish commercial activity, despite what historians often assert.202 Wholesalers and industrial businesses were allowed to continue for the time being. In addition, citing “Jews’ labor capacities,” the IHK decided that Lohngewerbsbetriebe—small sweatshop-like businesses that supplied a bigger one with parts, such as a tailor making sleeves for a shirtcompany—could be exempted from the edict.203 Thus, even at this early stage, the IHK was thinking about how to “usefully” exploit Jewish labor. Up until 1937 Jewish businesses had been able to argue that they created jobs and thus stabilized the labor market, but by 1938 the prevailing winds had shifted. The massive rearmament of the Reich led to a labor shortage, at which point Jewish businesses came to be seen as a reserve supply of workers that could be cashed in whenever necessary. With this the destruction of Jewish commercial activity gradually shaded over into the first forms of “closed labor deployments” that would eventually become slave labor.204 Only in February 1939, after the economics minister was satisfied that Jews had “generally been removed from retailing, self-employed handwork and jobs associated with public markets,” did he decree that “it [is] the task of senior administrators to use their authority in conjunction with the responsible party organs so as to ensure that those wholesaling and industrial firms which are considered Jewish according to the Reich Citizenship Law be de-Jewified in a manner beneficial to the national economy.”205 The legal basis for this decree was the Ordinance on the Use of Jewish Assets of 3 December 1938, by which all Jewish businessowners could be forced to sell off or wind down their commercial enterprises. Should they refuse, a trustee could be appointed.206 The entire procedure had been supervised since the summer of 1938 by the experienced quartet of the police presidium, the Gau economic advisor, the DAF and the IHK. In May 1939 the IHK reported that it had supervised 1545 “Aryanization” proceedings involving wholesale and industrial businesses, of which two-thirds, some conditionally, had been approved.207 The approval rate was thus far higher than for retail businesses. The IHK did not give any reasons for the difference, but clearly the authorities’ economists did not think that there were too many companies in the wholesaling and in particular industrial sectors. In the summer of 1939, after Jews had been driven from these two areas, the IHK turned its attention to “the de-Jewification of sale agency businesses.”208 The ordinances defining, identifying, and ultimately erad-

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icating Jewish businesses radicalized the IHK. Over the course of 1938 IHK administrators grew accustomed to working along racist lines. This meant, among other things, that they were far quicker and more ruthless in classifying individual businesses as Jewish. Meanwhile IHK reports explicitly acknowledged and analyzed the destruction of Jewish commercial activity in general. In his report looking back at 1938, which was published in March 1939, the president of the IHK praised the chamber “for its participation in the Aryanization of the economy in its area of jurisdiction.”209 One year later Hans Michalke, the senior IHK official in charge of the “De-Jewification Departement” of the IHK, offered the following summary:

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The chamber was presented with 614 de-Jewification cases for review, which in most cases consisted of an audit of the business. In 326 cases, the police president or the economics minister asked the IHK for an estimation of the value of a de-Jewified business and the de-Jewification fee to be paid. In what are estimated to be hundreds of cases, existing Jewish businesses were evaluated with an eye to whether they should be preserved. With businesses that deserved to be de-Jewified we filed requests for immediate liquidation with the police president. With businesses that deserved to be preserved, we applied for the immediate appointment of a trustee charged with selling off the businesses to non-Jews.210

In February 1941 Michalke reported: “The de-Jewification of the Berlin economy made further progress in 1940 and can be regarded as complete in terms of Aryanizing businesses worthy of preservation. In several cases, approval was refused on formal grounds, but Jewish influence has been completely eradicated. Last year, the chamber evaluated 184 Aryanization contracts. In the second half of the year, the focus switched to the liquidation of those Jewish businesses we did not consider worthy of preservation. Recently some 400 Jewish businesses have been closed down.”211

Excursus: Jewish Businesses as Temporary Locations In early 1938 there was an acute shortage of office space in central Berlin due to the expansion of the administrative apparatus of the state and the NSDAP. City planners who worked for the office of General Building Inspector (GBI) feared that the traditional structure of downtown Berlin was being threatened, and the GBI issued a ban in late June on “the use of commercial real estate for other purposes.” Nonetheless, government and party administrators kept applying for exemptions, citing higher priorities. The IHK itself exacerbated the situation by having 25,000 square meters of commercial space in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße demolished to make way for

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

the chamber’s new headquarters. In addition, whole neighborhoods in the Tiergarten district were torn down to accommodate Albert Speer’s plans for a new north-south city axis. The businesses affected by the demolition were supposed to be offered temporary alternative locations.212 In May 1938 the IHK was already proposing that temporary business locations could be opened up by eradicating Jewish companies,213 and in December the GBI decided that “suitable renters of demolished property” should be regarded as candidates to take over Jewish retail businesses.214 But it soon emerged that “no substantial amount of commercial space was freed up when Jewish businesses were closed or transferred to new proprietors.”215 The situation was similar in Berlin’s garment district, which was highly coveted because it was so central. The IHK wrote to the GBI: “The Reich Association of German Garment Industries has informed us that most of the businesses that produce clothing are worthy of being Aryanized. Insofar as firms of this nature are liquidated, their commercial spaces will be needed for the necessary expansion of non-Jewish garment makers.”216 Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the shortage of commercial space had an influence on the destruction of Jewish commercial activity in these parts of the city and made taking over a business located there seem especially attractive.

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Notes 1. Bajohr, Arisierung, 97–103. 2. Letter from Mayor Maretzky to City Public Information Office, 1 April 1933, and protocol of discussion between Maretzky and the Fighting Association, 25 March 1933, both in: LAB, A Pr Br Rep 057, 1739. See also “Boykottaktion in Deutschland,” Jüdische Rundschau, 31 March 1933; Comité des Délégations Juives, Schwarzbuch, 319; Gruner, Kommunen, 85; Gruner, Judenverfolgung, S. 22f. 3. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 64. 4. Letter from the Berlin Procurement Office to Lippert, 16 February 1934, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 057, 1740. 5. See Nietzel, Handeln, 62–64. 6. “3,000,000 in Reich feel ‘cold pogrom,’” New York Times, 16 April 1933. 7. Letter from Siegfried Baumann to Economics Ministry, 1 August 1933, in BArch, R 3101, 13860. 8. Sven Schultze, “Die visuelle Repräsentation der Diktatur. Berlin, sein Messeamt und die Propagandaschauen im Nationalsozialismus,” Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus 27 (2011), 113–131, here 126. 9. “Boykott deutscher Heilpräparate,” Jüdische Rundschau, 30 May 1933. 10. Bajohr, Arisierung, 16.

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11. Letter from Jewish Community to Lippert, 29 May 1933, in Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland (VeJ), vol. 1, doc. 47, 164–166, citation 165. 12. Letter from Julius Riess GmbH to Reichsvertretung, 29 November 1933, in CAHJP, HM 2 8787 (RGVA 721/1/2880). See also letter from the Economics Ministry to Foreign Ministry, 16 February 1934, in PArch AA, R 100246. 13. Genschel, Verdrängung, 53, 63; Heinrich Uhlig, Die Warenhäuser im Dritten Reich (Cologne and Opladen, 1956), 85f. See also Sopade-Berichte 4 (1937), 1565. 14. “Zur Lage der jüdischen Angestellten,” Jüdische Rundschau, 15 September 1933. See also Genschel, Verdrängung, 73. 15. Informationsblätter der Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, 12 November 1934, in CAHJP, HM 2/8693 (RGVA 701, 20). 16. Genschel, Verdrängung, 89f. Cf. Christoph Kreutzmüller, Unter Druck gedruckt. Zeitungsannoncen jüdischer Unternehmen in Deutschland 1933–1942, forthcoming: Jerusalem 2016. 17. Horst Matzerath, “Bürokratie und Judenverfolgung,” in Ursula Büttner, ed., Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt, 2003 [Hamburg, 1992]), 130–159, here 137. 18. Letter from Willy Ringel to the Administration of the Berlin Slaughterhouse, 23 November 1933, in LAB, A Rep 258, 69. 19. The Berolina GmbH cigar company, listed since 1924, was deleted from the register on 23 May 1935: DjGB. 20. Testimony Marie Rosenberg to the Gestapo, 2 October 1935, in LAB, A Rep 258, 69. 21. File note, slaughterhouse inspection, 21 December 1935, in LAB, A Rep 258, 69. 22. Letter from S. Schereen to the inspector of Central Slaughterhouse, 3 August 1936; letter from the inspector to S. Schereen, n.d. (August 1936), in LAB, A Rep 258, 69. 23. Comité, Schwarzbuch, 348. 24. Communiqué Polish Consulate to German Foreign Ministry, 2 May 1933, in PArch AA, R 100211. 25. Letter from the CV to Prussian economics and labor minister, 19 July 1933, in CAHJP, HM 2/8778 (RGVA 721/1/2673). See also Scholem Adler-Rudel, Tätigkeitsbericht der Wirtschaftshilfe der Jüdischen Gemeinde Berlin für die Zeit von der Gründung (Mitte März 1933) bis Ende März 1935 (Berlin, 1936), 5. 26. Economic Department of the Jewish Community to the CV, 26 September 1933, in CAHJP, HM 2/8787 (RGVA 721/1/2879). 27. Letter from NS-Hago, Ortsgruppe Central-Markthalle, to Lippert, 26 September 1934, in LAB, A Rep Pr Br 057, 515. 28. Letter from Salomon Wagner to Lippert, 17 July 1936, in LAB, A Pr Br 057, 517. 29. Ibid., 10 August 1936. The Salomon & Wagner company was deleted form the commercial register on 8 June 1938. See Entry, Zentralhandelsregisterbeilage des Reichsanzeigers, 16 June 1938, 1. 30. Medert, Verdrängung, 163–175.

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31. Ibid., 191–194. 32. Letter from Hertha Sprenger to Bernhard Rust, 2 March 1937, 476f., in Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin/Preußischer Kulturbesitz (ZaSMB), I/NG 370. Thanks to Jörg Friedrich and Anne Scheel in Berlin for alerting me to this source. 33. Letter from director National Gallery to Hertha Sprenger, 1 March 1937, in ZaSMB, I/NG 370. 34. Letter from Hertha Sprenger to Bernhard Rust, 12 March 1937; letter from director National Gallery to Hertha Sprenger, 22 March 1937; letter from Hertha Sprenger to Bernhard Rust, 2 March 1937, letter from director National Gallery to Berlin City Tax Treasury, 12 April 1937; all in ZaSMB, I/NG 370. 35. Erste Verordnung zum Gesetz zur Widerherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums, Reichsgesetzblatt I, 11 April 1933. 36. Münzel, Verdrängung, 100f. 37. Law on the Revocation or Naturalization and Annulment of German Citizenship, in Walk, Sonderrecht, 36. See also Gosewinkel, Einwanderung, 104. 38. Genschel, Verdrängung, 65. 39. Sworn statement Salomon Weinberger, 8 November 1961, in BAZD 6-26010/55, RE 64762, 27. 40. Aly and Sontheimer, Fromms, 85–89. 41. Copy of memo from police president to Interior Ministry, 8 June 1935, in PArch AA, R 100209. 42. Memo from Foreign Ministry to Interior Ministry, 22 July 1935, in PArch AA, R 100209. Nothing further is known about the fate of Heisler’s fur company, which was listed neither in the Berlin address book nor in the commercial register. 43. Walk, Sonderrecht, 84. 44. “Verfügung des Polizeipräsidenten, 1.3.1935,” Amtliche Nachrichten des Polizeipräsidiums Berlin 20/35, 8 March 1935. 45. Letter from the IHK to District Court, 3 March 1923, in AGC, HR A 90, 100141, 1940. 46. Copy of police report, 21 January 1934, in AGC, HR A 90, 100141, 1940. 47. Entry, Zentralhandelsregisterbeilage des Reichsanzeigers, 5 April 1934, 1. 48. Bill for Costs Distruict Court, 10 April 1934, in AGC, HR A 90, 100141, 1940. The business went into liquidation on 31 December 1938 and was deleted from the register in 1940. Both owners were able to flee to Britain. 49. “Der Firmenzusatz ‘Deutsch,’” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 25 February 1934. See also Wiesen, Marketplace, 52f. 50. Ibid. 51. “Firmenzusätze und Firmenwahrheit im Lichte der neuen Verkehrsauffassung,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 10 March 1934. 52. Ruling District Court, 27 September 1933, in AGC, HR A NZ 12138; Ruling District Court, 27 September 1933, in AGC, HR A 90, 92382, 1939; Ruling District Court, 27 September 1933, in AGC, HR A 90, 99604, 1938. 53. “Firmenwahrheit und -klarheit im Geschäftsverkehr,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 January 1936.

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54. “Firmenzusätze und Firmenwahrheit im Lichte der neuen Verkehrsauffassung,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 10 March 1934. 55. Ruling District Court, 24 April 1935, in AGC, HR A 90, 80645, 1938. 56. Ruling Superior Court, 25 October 1934, cited in “Firmenzusatz Deutsch,” Informationsblätter der Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, 3 6/7, 25 July 1935. 57. Ibid. 58. “Firmenwahrheit und -klarheit im Geschäftsverkehr,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 January 1936. 59. Ibid. 60. Decision of the Superior Court, 25 October 1934, cited in “Firmenzusatz Deutsch,” Informationsblätter der Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, 3 6/7, 25, July 1935. 61. “Firmenwahrheit und -klarheit im Geschäftsverkehr,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 January 1936. 62. Letter from the IHK to District Court, 21 March 1934, in AGC, GR, 1741. 63. Ibid. 64. Letter from the IHK to District Court, 21 March 1934, in AGC, GR, 1741. 65. Letter from Iwria to District Court, 10 July 1934, in ibid. 66. Decision of the District Court, 16 Oct. 1934, in ibid. 67. Decision of the Superior Court, 6 Jan. 1934, in ibid. 68. Decision of the District Court, 29 Jan. 1935, in ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Decision of the Superior Court, 9 April 1935, in AGC, GR, 1741. 71. Ruling District Court, 26 April 1935, in ibid. 72. Business reports Iwria e. GmbH for the Business Year 1935, Berlin, 1936, in ibid. 73. Letter from the IHK to District Court, 17 January 1935, in AGC, HR A 91, 80474, 1939. 74. Entry, Zentralhandelsregisterbeilage des Reichsanzeigers, 30 January 1935, 1. 75. The publisher of the SPD-own newspaper Vorwärts Paul Singer & Co was deleted from the register on 20 February 1935. See DjGB. 76. Sylvia Lei and Hans-Jürgen Mende, eds., Lexikon Berliner Straßennamen (Berlin, 2003), 72, 415. 77. Letter from the Reichnährstands to District Court, 7 February 1935, in AGC, HR A 91, 80474, 1939. 78. Letter from the IHK to District Court, 23 March 1935, in ibid. 79. Letter from the Reichnährstands to District Court, 16 May 1935, in ibid. 80. Ruling District Court, 4 June 1935, in ibid. 81. Letter from the IHK to District Court, 10 August 1935, and bill for costs, 22 August 1935; both in ibid. 82. Note CV, n.d. (1934), in CAHJP, HM 2/8806 (RGVA 721/1/3160). See also “Verlauf des ‘Deutschen Getreidehandels- und Müllertages 1933’ in Munich,” Allgemeine Deutsche Mühlen-Zeitung, 29 September 1933. 83. Ibid. See also Further Report on the Development of the Economic Situation of Jews, 9 December 1934, in LBI, AR 1578.

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84. Anne Paltian, “Egg wholesale and retail trade Jacobowitz & Co,” in Kreutzmüller and Nürnberg, Final Sale, 36–39, here 37. See also Steinke, Adler. 85. Die Deutsche Eierwirtschaft, 28 November 1935. 86. Letter from the Foreign Ministry to Reich and Prussian Food and Agriculture Ministry, 4 December 1935, in BArch, R 43 II, 1481. Thanks to Anne-Christin Saß, Berlin, for this helpful reference. 87. Bajohr, Arisierung, 218. 88. It wasn’t until January 1939 that guidelines were formulated to ensure “consistency in the handling of the de-Jewification question in the entire Reich Cultural Chamber.” See “Arbeitsrichtlinien für die Reichskulturkammer, 3.01.1939,” reprinted in Joseph Wulf, Bildende Künste im Dritten Reich. Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt, 1983), 292f. See also Nana Poll, “Die Reichskulturkammer,” in Christine Fischer-Defoy and Kaspar Nürnberg, eds., Gute Geschäfte. Kunsthandel in Berlin 1933–1945 (Berlin, 2011), 122–128. 89. Weigel, “Theater,” manuscript, 11; Bajohr, Arisierung, 103–105. 90. Copy of a newsletter, Association of German Newspaper and Magazine Wholsesalers, 13 February 1935, in CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3163). 91. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 90. 92. Letter from the Reich Authors Chamber to Martin Breslauer, 29 June 1936, reprinted in Kaspar Nürnberg, “Antiquariat Martin Breslauer,” in Nürnberg and Kreutzmüller, Final Sale, 16–19, here 17. 93. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 94; Volker Dahm, Das jüdische Buch im Dritten Reich, vol. 1: Die Ausschaltung der jüdischen Autoren, Verleger und Buchhändler (Frankfurt, 1979), 99–108. 94. Letter from the Gestapo to Heydrich, 31 July 1935, in VeJ, doc. 183, 462f. See also Dean, Robbing, 32f. 95. Note CV, 9 August 1935; letter from Regina Beck to Gestapo Directorship Berlin, 6 February 1935, both in CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161). 96. Verordnung über Handelsbeschränkungen, Reichgesetzblatt I, 28 July 1923. 97. Wiesen, Marketplace, 51. 98. Evaluation Kurt Jonas, 11 September 1955, in LAB, B Rep 025-03, 560, vol. 1. See also Genschel, Verdrängung, 96. 99. “Wieder ‘arische’ Ostereier,” Der Angriff, 11 April 1936. 100. Kreutzmüller, “Butter merchants,” 65f. See also Arno Kuhrt and Birgit Gebhardt, Vom Rosenthaler Tor zum Gesundbrunnen: Die Geschichte der Brunnenstraße (Berlin, 2002), 91. 101. “Scharfe Maßnahmen gegen eine jüdische Butterhandlung,” Berliner Morgenpost, 12 March 1936. See also “Der Jude als Butterwucherer,” Der Stürmer 14/34 (August 1936). 102. Sopade-Berichte 3 (1936), 1655. See also Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 90f. 103. Leimkugel, Wege, 56f. 104. Ibid., 65f. 105. Letter from Chone, Esq., to Restitution Office, 6 February 1950, in LAB, B Rep 025-03, 134/49. 106. Ruling Supreme Restitution Court A/324, 22 December 1954, in LAB, B Rep 039-01, 4.

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107. Copy of a letter from Kantelberg to Lippert, 18 January 1937, in LAB, B Rep 025-03, 134/49. 108. Evaluation Fritz Fenthol, 13 September 1933, in LAB, B Rep 025-03, 560, vol. 2. 109. Copy of a letter from the police president in Berlin to Interior Ministry, 8 June 1935, in PArch AA, R 100209. 110. Letter from the IHK to District Court, in AGC, HR 91, 108504 (Jüdel Laufer). 111. Application for permission Julius Laufer District Court, 25 June 1936, in AGC, HR A 91, 108504, 1941. 112. Application for permission Julius Laufer District Court, 15 July 1936, in ibid. 113. Letter from the IHK to District Court, 17 June 1937, in ibid. 114. Letter from Julius Laufer to District Court, 28 June 1937, in ibid. 115. Letter from the IHK to District Court, 10 August 1937, in ibid. Laufer was deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1939. He died there on 17 February 1940. His business was deleted from the register in September 1941. See DjGB; Gedenkbuch Berlins. 116. Letter from the IHK to District Court, 2 December 1936, in AGC, HR A 90, 93427, 1941 (Dalemo. Das lebende Modell. Robert Wertheim). 117. Letter from Robert Wertheim to District Court, 22 December 1936, in ibid. 118. Letter from the IHK to District Court, 2 June 1937, in ibid. 119. Letter from Robert Wertheim to District Court, 11 June 1937, in ibid. After Wertheim was ordered by the police president to delete his business from the registry, he applied for its removal. Letter from Wertheim to District Court, 26 March 1941, in ibid. Wertheim had been deported to Sachsenhausen after the pogrom, but he was released on 23 December 1938. On 26 February 1943, he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. See Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv. 120. “Der Abwehrboykott beginnt,” Zehlendorfer Anzeiger, 1 April 1933. See also Nietzel, Handeln, 182. 121. Weigel, “Theater,” manuscript, 152. 122. Axel Drecoll, Der Fiskus als Verfolger. Die steuerliche Diskriminierung der Juden in Bayern 1933–1941/42 (Munich, 2009), 162–166; Kuller, Bürokratie, Idem, Finanzverwaltung und Judenverfolgung. Die Entziehung jüdischen Vermögens in Bayern während der NS-Zeit (Munich, 2008), 15f.; Friedenberger, Ausplünderung, 157–163; Susanne Meinl and Jutta Zwilling, Legalisierter Raub: Die Ausplünderung der Juden im Nationalsozialismus durch die Reichsfinanzverwaltung in Hessen (Frankfurt and New York, 2004), 36–39. 123. Sopade-Berichte 5 (1938), 761. 124. Audit Report, 14 January 1935, in BAZD; Steuerakte G Rfa 1888. 125. Letter from the president of the Prussian Finance Office to the Taxation Inspectorate, 27 August 1935, in BAZD, Gebr. Weinberger, Steuerakte G, Rfa 1888. 126. Letter from Dietrich Jacob, Esq., to Restitution Offices, 7 November 1961, in BAZD, Gebr. Weinberger, D-Akte, 64762, 6-1203/60. 127. Kuller, Finanzverwaltung, 16. 128. File note IHK, 5 November 1925, in BLHA, Rep 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 163/55, 6.

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129. Letter from Hans Joachim Quantmeyer to IHK, 25 July 1934, in ibid. 130. Letter from Gelpcke to president of the Prussian Finance Office, 31 July 1934, in ibid. 131. Letter from Zacouto to IHK, 8 November 1934, in ibid. 132. Letter from IHK to Currency Division, 6 January 1936, in ibid. 133. Kreutzmüller and Weigel, Zacouto, 43–56. 134. Friedenberger, Ausplünderung, 151f. 135. Report on the audit of the Bernhard Ahrndsen company, 21 August 1936, in BLHA, Rep 36 A, 2556. Possession of the businesses was transferred to non-Jews in November 1938. 136. “Die verschärfte Devisenkontrolle,” Berliner Tageblatt, 9 December 1936. See also Ralf Banken, “Das nationalsozialistischen Devisenrecht als Steuerungsund Diskriminierungsinstrument 1933–1945,” in Banken and Johannes Bähr, eds., Wirtschaftssteuerung durch Recht im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt, 2006), 121–236; Bajohr, Arisierung, 216; Barkai, Boykott, 112. 137. Report on the audit of Weiler, Nathansohn & Co, 5 February 1938, in BLHA, Rep 36 A, 2252. Posession of the business was transferred to non-Jews in October 1938; DjGB. 138. Report on the audit of Biberfeld & Weil, 6 August 1938, in BLHA, Rep 36 A, 2256. The business went into liquidation on 15 November 1938 and was deleted from the register on 27 January 1940: DjGB. 139. Report on the audit of the Gustav Zacharias company, 12 October 1938, in BLHA, Rep 36 A, 2252. See also Friedenberger, Ausplünderung, 151. The business filed for bankruptcy on 14 November 1938, and was deleted from the register on 19 September 1941: DjGB. 140. Report on the audit of Max Behrendt, 20 October 1938, in BLHA, Rep 36 A, 2556. 141. Letter from the Verification Authority Garment Industry to Deutsche Golddiskontbank, 17 November 1938, in National Archive, Washington (NAW), T 83, Roll 101 (Bankhaus J. H. Stein). Thanks to Tobias Bütow, Nice, for this reference. 142. Nietzel, Jüdische Unternehmer, 287f. 143. James, Arisierung, 55. 144. Meyer, Arisiert, 78f. 145. “Marktregelung,” Informationsblätter der Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland 6/1–2, January–February 1938. See also Nietzel, Handeln, 191. 146. File note Lippert, 6 January 1936, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 057, 1741. 147. Supplentary letter from Interior Ministry on the Third Ordinance to Reich Citizenship Law, 20 February 1937, in BArch, R 18, 5509. See also Safrian, Eigentum, 245f.; Genschel, Verdrängung, 143f. 148. Economics Ministry Order to Chambers of Industry and Commerce, 4 January 1938, in Walk, Sonderrecht, 210. See also Genschel, Verdrängung, 147f. 149. Letter from the IHK to Feller & Gralle, 22 February 1938, in BLHA, Rep 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 163/55, 22. See also communiqué Czechoslovakian Embassy to Foreign Ministry, 26 January 1938, in PArch AA, R 100252. 150. Letter from the IHK to Feller & Gralle, 22 February 1938, in BLHA, Rep 70,

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IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 163/55, 22. The inside of the file folder was stamped. Possession of Feller & Gralle was transferred to non-Jews in January 1939. See DjGB. 151. IHK Akten im BLHA, Rep 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 163/55, 1-163/55, 76. 152. Annual Report Reinhart, Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 17 March 1939. 153. “Wann gilt ein Betrieb als jüdisch?” Jüdische Rundschau, 25 March 1938. 154. Krüger, Lösung, 44. See also Bajohr, Arisierung, 134; Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945, State, Economy and Society 1933–1939 (Exeter, 1984), 561; Dieter Swatek, Unternehmenskonzentration als Ergebnis und Mittel nationalsozialistischer Wirtschaftspolitik (Berlin, 1972), 93; Genschel, Verdrängung, 206. 155. Verordnung über die Anmeldung des Vermögens von Juden, Reichsgesetzblatt I, 26 April 1938. 156. Reichmann, Bürger, 63. 157. “Jetzt wird’s ernst,” Das Schwarze Korps 18/1938, 5 May 1938. 158. Verordnung über die Anmeldung des Vermögens von Juden, Reichsgesetzblatt I, 26 April 1938. See also Nietzel, Unternehmer, 98f.; Bajohr, Arisierung, 224– 227; Genschel, Verdrängung, 151f. 159. “Zur Veräußerung jüdischer Gewerbebetriebe,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 December 1938. Typically, during an interrogation by American authorities after World War II, Hunke insisted that the Reich Economics Ministry, the police president, and the district mayors alone had decided on matters of “Aryanization.” See interrogation Heinrich Hunke, n.d. (1946), in IfZ, OMGUS, 2/234/7. 160. “Zur Veräußerung jüdischer Gewerbebetriebe,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 December 1938. 161. Ibid. 162. Bajohr, Arisierung, 184f.; Genschel, Verdrängung, 155f. 163. Dritte Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz, Reichsgesetzblatt I, 14 June 1938. See also “Juden im Wirtschaftsleben,” in Informationsblätter der Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, 6/5–6, May–June 1938; “Begriffsbestimmung des jüdischen Gewerbebetriebs. Dritte Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 27 June 1938. 164. “Wann gilt ein Gewerbebetrieb als jüdisch?” Soziale Praxis, 47/13, 1 July 1938, 803–807, here 807. 165. Report Hugh R. Wilson to US State Department, 22 June 1938, in The Holocaust, 139. 166. Grasshoff and Röder, Firma, 29f. 167. Urgent report SD-Oberabschnitt Ost to Security Police, 24 June 1938, in RGVA, 500, 1, 645. 168. “Nach außen neutral,” Das Schwarze Korps 29/1938, 21 July 1938. Cf. Kreutzmüller and Weigel, Kristallnacht, 11. 169. “Berliner Brief,” Der Stürmer 16/27, July 1938. 170. “Reich slows drive on Jews in Trade,” New York Times, 2 July 1938. See also Bajohr, Arisierung, 222.

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171. “Verfügung über Anlegung und Führung der Verzeichnisse der jüdischen Gewerbetriebe, 22.8.1938,” Dienstblatt des Magistrats der Stadt Berlin, 1938, 137–141. See also “Beschleunigte Eintragung jüdischer Gewerbebetriebe,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 27 July 1938. 172. See Bajohr, Arisierung, 118f. 173. “Verfügung über Anlegung und Führung der Verzeichnisse der jüdischen Gewerbetriebe, 22.8.1938,” Dienstblatt des Magistrats der Stadt Berlin 1938, 137–141, here 137. 174. Letter from the Tempelhof Revenue Office to Main Tax Administration, 4 January 1939; letter from the Schöneberg Revenue Office to Main Tax Administration, 10 January 1939, both in LAB, A Rep 005-03-02, 1. See also chapter 7. 175. “Runderlass des Berliner Polizeipräsidenten,” 20 July 1938, in VeJ, doc. 68, 234–243, here 234. 176. Ibid. 177. Letter from the CV to Georg Goldstein, 8 November 1938; file note CV, 3 November 1938, both in CAHJP, HM 2/8823 (RGVA 721/1/3362). 178. File note Friedländer, 3 November 1938, in CAHJP; HM 2/8823 (RGVA 721/1/3362). 179. “Verfügung über Anlegung und Führung der Verzeichnisse der jüdischen Gewerbetriebe, 22.8.1938,” Dienstblatt des Magistrats der Stadt Berlin 1938, 137–141. See also Janetzko, Verdrängung, 287f. 180. Gruner, Gemeindetag, 273. 181. Copy of a letter from the Wedding Police Department to Robert Bannas, 22 September 1938, in CAHJP, HM 2/8823 (RGVA 721/1/3364). See also “Abgabe von Vertretungen durch Juden,” Völkischer Beobachter, 21 September 1938. 182. Scholem Adler-Rudel, Jüdische Selbsthilfe unter dem Naziregime 1933–1939 im Spiegel der Berichte der Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (Tübingen, 1974), 148. 183. Kuller, Finanzverwaltung, 16. Friedenberger, Ausplünderung, 197f. See Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat. Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt, 2005), 63. 184. Stenographic protocol of the discussion of the Jewish question hosted by Göring on 12 November 1938, IMT, vol. 28, 499–540, doc. 1816 PS., here 508. See also Friedländer, Germany, 280f. On the connection of the Goering- and the Wannsee Conference, see Kreutzmüller and Weigel, Kristallnacht, 14f. 185. Verordnung zur Ausschaltung der Juden aus dem deutschen Wirtschaftsleben, Reichsgesetzblatt I, 14 November 1938. 186. Memo of the state president, 18 November 1938, in LAB, A Rep 038-08, 17. The memo can also be found in LAB, A Rep Pr Br 057, 375. See also “Die Säuberung des Berliner Einzelhandels,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 24 November 1938; “Zur Veräußerung jüdischer Gewerbebetriebe,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 December 1938. 187. Memo of the state president, 18 November 1938, in LAB, A Rep 038-08, 17. 188. Supplement III to memo of the state president, 18 November 1938, in ibid. On the date of the instructions, see “Jahresbericht des SD-Hauptamts für 1938, 13.1.1939,” in Kulka and Jäckel, NS-Stimmungsberichte, doc. 414, 366–377, here 377.

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189. Memo of the state president, 18 November 1938, in LAB, A Rep 038-08, 17. 190. Ibid., 29 November 1938. 191. Ibid. See also “Die Abwicklung der jüdischen Einzelhandelsgeschäfte,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 December 1938. 192. Memo of the state president, 29 November 1938, in LAB, A Rep 038-08, 17. 193. Brief letter from Funk, 25 November 1938, in ibid. 194. Memo of the Gau economic advisor, 28 November 1938, in ibid. 195. “Die Entjudung des Berliner Einzelhandels,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrieund Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 February 1939. 196. Memo of the Gau economic advisor, 28 November 1938, in LAB, A Rep 038-08, 17. 197. Report on the Discussions in Berlin about the “De-Jewification of the Retail Sector” on 30 November 1938, 2 December 1938, in Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv (RWWA) Cologne, IHK Wuppertal, 22-43-2. 198. Special Report by the State President on De-Jewification of the Retail Sector in Berlin, 5 January 1939, in BArch, R 3101, 32170. See also Biggeleben et al., Arisierung, 46f. 199. “Jahresbericht des SD-Hauptamts für 1938, 13 January 1939,” in Kulka and Jäckel, NS-Stimmungsberichte, doc. 414, 366–377, here 377. See also Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 120; Friedländer, Germany, 316. 200. See Bill for Costs, 17 March 1939, in AGC, HR A 91, 90574, 1939 (Curty Modesalon Kurt Levin). 201. Sworn testimony Jizhak Nüssenfeld, 19 November 1962, in EAB, 152501. 202. Friedländer, Germany, 317. 203. Protocol IHK Board Meeting, 15 August 1939, in BLHA, Rep 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 171/56/7, vol. 1. 204. See Wolf Gruner, “Zwangsarbeit von Juden in der Region Berlin/Brandenburg 1938/39–1943: Entwicklung, Formen und Funktion,” in Winfried Meyer and Klaus Neitmann, eds., Zwangsarbeit während der NS-Zeit in Berlin und Brandenburg. Formen, Funktion und Rezeption (Potsdam, 2001), 47–68, here 50f.; Gruner, Der geschlossene Arbeitseinsatz deutscher Juden: Zur Zwangsarbeit als Element der Verfolgung (Berlin, 1997), 68–83. 205. “Die Entjudung in Großhandel und Industrie,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 23 February 1939. 206. Verordnung über den Einsatz jüdischen Vermögens, Reichsgesetzblatt I, December 1938. 207. “Das Fortschreiten der Entjudung” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 20 May 1939. The IHK was unable to state how many Jewish businesses still existed because work was still underway on the relevant lists: Ibid. 208. Protocol Board Meeting, 15 August 1939, in BLHA, Rep 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 171/56/7, vol. 1. 209. “Beiratssitzung der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 17 March 1939. 210. Report IHK, 1 February 1940, in BLHA, Rep 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 163/55, 88. 211. Report IHK, 14 January 1941, in ibid.

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212. Letter from the Economic Chamber to state president, 18 July 1939, in LAB, Pr Br Rep 107, 235/4; see also Willems, Jude, 119–134; Gruner, Reichshauptstadt, 238f. 213. Report Consulting Office for Businesses Affected by Demolitions, 30 May 1938, in LAB, Pr Br Rep 107, 277/1. 214. Report Legal Department to general building inspector (GBI), December 1938, in LAB, A Pr Br 107, 61. 215. Letter from the GBI to Aviation Ministry, 23 December 1938, in LAB, A Pr Br 107, 235/4. 216. Letter from the IHK to GBI, 2 December 1938, in LAB, A Pr Br 107, 235/4.

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Chapter 6

Voyeurs and Profiteers

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 The destruction of Jewish commercial activity took place in the middle of the city and at the center of society. But did that make it a public process? Historians are skeptical on that score. The continuum of communication that we today regard as the public sphere certainly began to crumble in 1933. Access to information was restricted, and the normal channels of communication were steered from above. Nonetheless, the public sphere was not completely eradicated.1 There was no more open exchange of information, but there were informal discussions in the city and information—albeit rumors—made the rounds. What people talked about was one of the main focuses of the Security Service’s reports on public mood, which historians have extensively analyzed.2 The lack of an accessible public sphere or, perhaps put better, the restrictions on the distribution of information seriously affected the market. According to classic economic theory, everyone participating in the market requires free access to all relevant information to make rational decisions. Potential customers, for instance, have to know that a certain company offers a certain product for a certain price. Otherwise they won’t come and buy it. This describes structurally what the scope of advertising expresses practically: the significance of the flow of information for the economy. Every arbitrary restriction of access and information—like all the forms of price fixing and racist exclusion described in this study—significantly reduces the scope of the “market.” After 1933 there was no German market in today’s sense, even if Berlin was still full of indoor and outdoor marketplaces. The fact that the regime decided who could participate in the

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

economy according to racist criteria alien to economic logic illustrates that the primacy of action rested with the state. It planned and realized public activities—although that, of course, does not mean that those companies that were allowed to continue doing business are absolved of all ethical responsibility for their actions. The issue is not how the neighbors perceived the destruction of Jewish commercial activity, but how they reacted to it—and by “neighbors” I mean primarily those who were neither being persecuted nor directly involved in the persecution. In his seminal study Raul Hilberg dubbed this group “bystanders.” This is a somewhat imprecise term since it neither describes their attitude to what they were seeing nor their function as public audience. Regarding the (restricted) market just discussed, the term is fully inappropriate. In terms of the market, the “bystanders” were potential customers. Hence, persecuting measures such as “boycott” and identification always addressed the neighbors and enlisted the “public.” The blockade of retailers was stylized into a watershed defining who belonged to the racially defined social majority or what the Nazis advertised as the “Volksgemeinschaft” (people’s community). Although Richard Evans rightly points out the public indifference detracting from the boycott’s success,3 the sheer presence of an audience meant that the measure was ultimately successful. If the streets had been completely empty, the SA pickets would have cut extremely ridiculous figures.

The Public

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Customers and Passersby Historians trying to analyze the customers of Jewish businesses quickly run into a problem of sources. Hardly any of the records from Jewish businesses have been preserved, so we have no customer or delivery lists. What few sources we do have all concern Jewish retailers, and the same is true of the customer lists published by the Stürmer in July 1937. Publishing the lists, which the Stürmer admitted were incomplete, was a means not only of damaging Jewish businesses, but also of showing that it was the members of the old, outmoded elites who still frequented them. Since these lists were neither complete nor representative, I will ignore them here.4 In the absence of written sources, using photographic evidence would seem to be a substitute. But the photos that have survived tend to focus on special events, rather than everyday life and thus their usefulness in the present context is limited. In part this is due to the well-known fact that we hardly have any photos taken by the Jews who were being persecuted.5

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Voyeurs and Profiteers

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Moreover, even images taken by “neutral” photo agencies can never capture the total reality. An example of what I mean is a photo published by the New York Times on 12 April 1933.6 The photo is taken from a slightly elevated perspective, probably from atop a photographer’s ladder, and depicts a crowd of people in front of the Hemdenmatz GmbH, which has a placard reading “Germans, defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!” affixed to one of its display windows. Three SA men have been posted at the entrance and are staring straight into the camera. This suggests that the image was made with the (silent) permission of the SA. Most of the passersby are looking at the closed front door to the business, but others are also staring into the camera. Interestingly, two men in the front to the left look rather serious, almost scowling, while a woman in the middle is laughing. It would go too far in the realm of speculation to suggest that the men disapprove of the blockade while the woman supports it; the two men may have disapproved of the photographer taking their picture, while the woman may have reflexively flashed him a camera-friendly smile. What is clear, however, is that many people in the picture are aware of the photographer, and that the act of taking the photograph has influenced what is happening.

Figure 6.1. New York Times photo, Berlin, 1 April 1933. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Photo Archive, Photo Nr. 78589.

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

Nonetheless, it is significant that among the dozens of surviving photographs of the blockade of Jewish owned businesses in Berlin, only two of them depict people violating it.7 Apparently—and this is supported by the newspaper reports about 1 April 1933—the vast majority of people in Berlin observed the pickets or were intimidated by the presence of SA men. However, customers did not permanently turn their backs on Jewish businesses.8 Plenty of evidence for this can be found in the Germany Reports of the German Social Democratic Party, which were based on eyewitness accounts from within Nazi Germany.9 That impression is further reinforced by the recurring complaints in the Stürmer about “ethnic comrades unmindful of their roots” as well as by the fact that Berlin had to resort to the drastic measure of visually identifying Jewish retailers. Yet even after businesses had been so marked, the New York Times ran an article entitled “Berlin Housewives Storm Sales in Stores of Jews” that reported long lines of female customers at the famous Jewish retailers at the start of summer sale season.10 That strongly suggests that, even as late as 1938, big-name retailers on the major shopping streets continued to attract non-Jewish customers.11 Nonetheless, especially in the city’s outer districts, there were repeated attacks on customers trying to enter or exit Jewish stores. Telling examples are the incidents already discussed in Jewish ice cream parlors in the summer of 1935. In addition, those economic areas with heavy government involvement such as food were also particularly affected. For example, the fishmonger Tina Solländer, who inherited from her deceased husband a booming stand in the central covered market, recalled losing 20 percent of her business in 1933. By 1937 her turnover and profits sank to only a third of what they had been in 1931, in the middle of the Great Depression. That plunge, Solländer told a post-war German restitution office, was the result of customers refusing to frequent her stand.12 Some former customers also tried to evade paying their debts to Jewish merchants by declaring that their creditor was Jewish, that prices were artificially inflated, and that wares had been sold under false pretenses.13 We know even less about window shoppers and passersby than we do about customers. It is true that photographs of defaced Jewish storefronts in the summer of 1938 depict passersby showing no reaction to the graffiti.14 But there’s no way of telling if their disinterest reflects familiarity and acceptance or merely big-city hustle and bustle. In written sources passersby only come to life when they don’t hurry on in silence, but stop to make remarks—recorded because they seemed offensive. Because public or semi-public remarks were not kept under very tight surveillance in April 1933, hardly any verbal reactions to the blockade were recorded.

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Voyeurs and Profiteers

By September 1938 a bartender was hauled before the police merely for remarking that he “liked Jews about as much as he liked Nazis.”15 Bar closing hours were liberalized in early 1938 to reinforce the impression that the city was still a cosmopolitan metropolis.16 Thus many establishments were open until the wee hours of the morning between Wednesday, 9 November, and Thursday, 10 November, meaning that plenty of passersby observed the ransacking in streets such as Friedrichstraße and Kurfürstendamm, which contained nightclubs, bars, and stores. One of them was author Erich Kästner. Taking a taxi home at 3 am, he witnessed young men prowling Tauentzienstraße and Kurfürstendamm breaking windows.17 Others who must have seen similar things were taxi drivers, nighttime barmen, and prostitutes. A few hours later workers on the morning shift as well as office workers traveling to work filled the streets, and the destruction must have been evident to them too. Most of them said nothing that was recorded. One older insurance company employee, while riding in a tram, expressed sympathy for the victims and asked who the culprits had been. He was summarily dragged by a fellow passenger to the nearest police station.18 By the time rush hour was in full swing, vandalized stores in the inner city attracted large crowds. The 10 November edition of the Lokal-Anzeiger reported that “traffic this morning in the Reich capital came to a halt everywhere, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the street to express their outrage at the assassination.”19 Police reports paint a more differentiated picture. Berliners throughout the city seem to have discussed what had happened. On the right edge of figure 6.2,20 for instance, which depicts the vandalized store from of the lamp shop Beleuchtungshaus des Westens on Kurfürstendamm, people can be seen talking.21 Nonetheless, Nazi agents among the crowds prevented discussions from being held very loudly or addressing the question of who was responsible. Passersby who asserted that the NSDAP had organized the pogrom, that did not have a name then, were taken into custody.22 Among the people on the street were also individuals who wanted to get an impression for themselves of the extent of the destruction. CV lawyer Hans Reichmann sent one of his employees out to evaluate the damage.23 People had to be careful, however, not to take too much visible interest. In the early hours of the morning a man was taken into custody in the district of Kreuzberg for taking notes about the ransacked department store Gebrüder Leyser.24 A short time later in the Schöneberg district another man was brought to the police station for “noting Jewish businesses with broken windows without permission.”25 At 1:30 pm a police patrol arrested another man in the same district for photographing the destruction at

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

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Figure 6.2. Associated Press photo, Berlin, 10 November 1938. Wiener Library, London.

Bülowstraße 18,26 and only fifteen minutes later people on the street detained a man named Rudolf Neubauer when he tried to photograph the ravaged Kaufhaus Joseph department store. They took him to the police station where his camera and two rolls of film were confiscated.27 The ambassador of Colombia was also threatened by the police for driving up and down Kurfürstendamm taking pictures, causing a serious diplomatic incident.28 Whereas private people in the provinces of the Reich were usually allowed to take photos of the anti-Semitic action, in Berlin this was strictly prohibited. Strikingly, today’s public archives only contain around two dozen pictures of ransacked Jewish businesses in Berlin—nearly all of them taken by press photographers after the perpetrators had left.29 Figure 4.6, which shows non-Jewish Germans looting, had to be taken covertly from behind the flowers on a balcony. There already had been a de facto ban on public photography in Berlin since June 1938. It reflected the regime’s anxiety that photos from the capital could quickly be sent abroad and used by the international press. Nonetheless, on 11 November the New York Times had already published the first wire-transmitted photo of

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Voyeurs and Profiteers

the pogrom, depicting the Beleuchtungshaus des Westens on Kurfürstendamm owned by Wilhelm Philippi reproduced in figure 6.2.30

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Looters Whenever the destruction of Jewish commercial activity turned violent, it was accompanied by looting. Plundering was part of the public unrest in 1935 and 1938, and it was particularly prevalent during the pogrom, as the young painter Charlotte Salomon vividly captured in her gouache series “Life or Theater?”31 Despite Heydrich’s orders to the Security Police to prevent looting, in Berlin it was extensive. In the early morning hours sex workers waiting for clients on Friedrichstraße quickly learned about the pogrom and the “chances” that had arisen as a result. One 27 year old heard from her colleagues that “the windows of a lot of Jewish stores have been broken and there’s nothing stopping people from lifting things through them.” The young woman hastened to the Löffler’s Pelzhaus furrier on Friedrichstraße 118–119 to steal a fur collar.32 A short time later an SS man turned up and claimed he had been asked by the police to prevent damaged shops from being looted. A bystander told him that “the girls had been stealing things,” and he discovered that the young woman was among the looters. At 3 am he turned her in to the police.33 A few hours later workers of the early shift appeared on the street and also began plundering. On Frankfurt Allee a police commando took three men and a woman into custody in a show shop belonging to one Kurt Levy. The looters were a construction worker (43 years old), a pipe layer (33), and a rail worker (35), while the woman (31) worked at an army ordinance depot. None were members of the Nazi Party and only one was part of the DAF. Independently of one another, all four had made a detour on their way to work to plunder the store.34 The verdict rendered by a court in another case reconstructed the following: In the course of the expressions of discontent [i.e., the pogrom], the store windows of the men’s requisites shop Der Andreas-Klub on Friedrichstraße were smashed, and wares from the store were dragged out onto the street. On his way to work at 4:15 am on November 10, M. passed the store and stole a shirt. The defender H., who was also on his way to work, then arrived on the scene, and after a discussion with M., the two men stole two overcoats from the shop. Half an hour later, M., H. and B. met in front of a Jewish jewelry store on the corner of Französische Straße and Kanonierstraße, which had also been the target of expressions of discontent. Here, too, the shop windows had been smashed and wares that had been displayed had been tossed out on the street. Each of the three defendants

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took the opportunity to steal something. Defendant M. stole two silver forks and three silver spoons. Defendant H. stole two silver tablespoons and one silver fork. Defendant B. stole six small silver teaspoons, four knives (silver), three silver forks and three silver tablespoons. Then the defendants went their separate ways.35

The looting continued during the afternoon. One of those who took part was a window cleaner who had already done some plundering on his way to work. Returning home, he stole a ring, a woman’s brooch, two necklaces, and six armbands from the Brandmann jewelry store on Alexanderplatz.36 A Central Jewish Information Office source described the ransacking of this jewelry and watch shop, which was known throughout the city and which had recently advertised that it had been around since 1895.37 The source reported that the grandfather clocks in the store had been “smashed to bits” and that schoolchildren were seen stuffing their pockets with watches and rings.38 Reports of the systematic looting of Margraf &Co. GmbH at Unter den Linden 21—one of the largest jewelers in the city and one whose damages were estimated at the Göring conference to be around 1.7 million reichsmarks—made it all the way to Hitler’s ears.39 Responding to a question posed by Hitler on 23 November, Goebbels answered that “a Jew has ‘plundered’ his own jewels—which amuses him greatly.”40 It was so difficult to put an end to the plunder that on 10 November Heydrich felt he had to send two separate cables to local Gestapo headquarters with orders for them to stop the looting.41 Still the plunder continued. In the night between 10 and 11 November a rapid-response commando even apprehended an SA Führer red-handed in the Schaja Flormann clothing shop in Kreuzberg.42 It wasn’t until evening of Saturday, 12 November, that the looting truly ended. That was because everything available had already been looted from damaged businesses, not because the police or the SS cracked down.43 Many of the stolen items wound up on the black market, which began to coalesce in Berlin in early 1939.44 We don’t have enough reliable sources to reconstruct the overall extent of the looting in Berlin. But it was doubtlessly extensive, and waves of plundering went on for days, reaching periodic swells as the violence developed a dynamic of its own. The so-called Night of Broken Glass did not at all take place on a single night, but lasted for several days. That suggests in turn that a large number of people participated in it. By this point people did not have many inhibitions about enriching themselves at the cost of Jewish entrepreneurs. The anonymity of the big city, which had previously worked in favor of Jewish businesses, may have contributed to this phenomenon. The extent of the looting and the booty plunderers – 196 –

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could expect were one reason, if not the main reason, for the unbelievable explosion of violence that, as Michael Wildt has stressed, has never been fully explained.45

Colleagues, Competition, and Corruption

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Silent Profiteers Most merchants seem to have gotten quickly accustomed to thinking in racist categories. A copy of the 1935 Address Book of German Booksellers is a telling example of the influence of the new categories since the unknown owner stamped all booksellers he or she thought to be Jewish with a red “J.”46 Moreover, since business names were the chief indication that businesses were Jewish, some changed the names of their firms to make clear that they did not fall into that category. On 11 April 1933 Erich Kleinschmidt, who ran a grain dealership under the name Adolph Cohn, thus reregistered his company under his personal name.47 A short time later Robert Foerster, who ran the Hermann Aronsheim painting business, followed suit.48 Racism also informed businesses’ advertising strategies,49 although there was disagreement as to how to package racist arguments.50 One example was a large advertisement taken out by the Edeka grocery franchise chain in the Angriff. It combined older nationalistic slogans with racist ones: “German housewife, where do you stand? Your household money should be circulating in the people’s economy. Buy your necessities from a German retailer. In doing so you are fulfilling your patriotic duty.”51 Moreover there was no consensus about the proper term to identify businesses as “non-Jewish.” The Cords clothing company claimed in its summer 1933 advertisement in the Angriff to be “a German specialty firm,” while J. E. Degner furniture store called itself a “venerable Christian firm.”52 It was only after the verdict rendered by the Berlin Superior Court in October 1934 that the terms “German” and “Jewish” were deemed mutually exclusive.53 In the wake of the announcement of the Nuremberg laws, the word “Aryan” was used more and more, and entrepreneurs pointed out that they weren’t Jewish both in advertisements and on their company letterhead. This practice was particularly common in branches where Jews were also heavily represented.54 In addition, the suppliers’ source archive issued official certifications that a business was non-Jewish and sold stickers reading “German business” that could be affixed to storefront windows.55 DAF or NS-HAGO insignias, raising the Nazi flag, and the use of Nazi forms of greeting were other broad hints that could be used to gain a – 197 –

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competitive advantage in an economy increasingly structured along racist lines.56 An example of how common such means of differentiation became in the course of time was a criminal complaint filed by the merchant Hermann Witthauser against a certain Felix Singer on 6 November 1940. Witthauser accused Singer of being a Jew, of concealing the ethnicity of his business and of not using the mandatory forename on his letterhead. As evidence for his claim that Singer was Jewish, Witthauser cited the facts that the former advertised in the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper and signed his correspondence with the word “Respectfully” instead of “Heil Hitler.”57 State prosecutors took the accusation seriously and investigated, eventually determining that Singer, who had been born in 1869 in Katowice, had been baptized as a Christian but should in fact be considered a Jew according to Nazi racist categories.58 Thousands of non-Jewish companies profited without taking active part in the process. Even if the NSDAP didn’t keep the promise of its party platform and move against department stores in general, the destruction of Jewish commercial activity was in keeping with pro-middle-class Nazi propaganda and indeed served to reduce competition in branches such as retailing.59 A revealing article in the Angriff in January 1936 asserted that “the current shortages of certain wares [offers] small retailers the chance to win over the hesitant masses of consumers as long-term customers for themselves.” Nonetheless, the paper continued, retailers should be wary of resentful accusations toward customers along the lines of: “You used to pretend not to know me, but now that you can’t get butter any more in your Jewish stores, you come back to me.”60 In the wake of the November pogrom, the drive to completely exclude Jews from the retail sector was reflected in Lippert’s statement that “the eradication of the Jewish retailer will create a secure existential foundation for the rest of Berlin retailers.”61 An article entitled “Retail Changes in the Main Commercial Streets” in the trade magazine of the Association of Berlin Retailers and Industrialists concluded that the changes “were almost exclusively the results of measures against Jewish retailers,” which had given many non-Jewish businesses the chance to move from side streets to better locations.62

Banks as Business Partners The behavior of the major high street banks has been thoroughly researched and can be used here as an example of the reactions of Jewish companies’ business partners. We need to remember, however, that many banks themselves were affected by the destruction of Jewish economic existence. For instance, Dresdner Bank, which had a lot of Jews in its man– 198 –

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agement and was thus considered the “most Jewish” of Germany’s mayor banks, was radically restructured as of 1933. Thereafter, it was at pains to present itself as an especially loyal and radical supporter of the Nazi cause and was involved in several instances of forcible seizure of Jewish property in Berlin.63 Yet, as a rule, large banks were less aggressive, preferring to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. They were resistant to radical changes in companies’ management since that involved significant financial risk.64 For that reason, in 1933 then Chairman of the Commerzbank and later President of the IHK Friedrich Reinhart intervened in the case of the Hüttenwerk C. Wilh. Kayser & Co. AG smelting works and succeeded in having Erich Lewy, a Jewish board member who had been forced out by the Nazi factory cell, temporarily restored to his post. Nonetheless, once a company had become a target for persecution, the large banks usually helped remove the reason for the persecution—i.e., by firing the Jewish directors and managers and facilitating the sale of the business to nonJews. A sign of a business partner being considered Jewish and persecuted was his sinking creditworthiness. Through no fault of their own, it became increasingly difficult for Jewish businesses to obtain loans from nonJewish banks—even ones with which they enjoyed long-standing business relationships.65 After the Nuremberg laws Jewish customers were subject to increased review, and 1938 was a watershed year in big banks’ policies toward their Jewish business partners.66 Only a few days after Göring’s secret decree defining Jewish businesses, the central office of the Deutsche Bank—itself a Jewish enterprise according to Göring’s criteria—ordered branches to draw up lists of their Jewish customers so that they could be offered for sale to potential non-Jewish buyers.67 The management of Commerzbank confidentially informed their branches about the secret decree but merely noted that they could expect the destruction of Jewish commercial activity to be intensified.68 The Dresdner Bank, too, only acted after the public announcement of the Third Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law, instructing their branches on 9 July 1938 to draw up, within a week, lists of all Jewish businesses potentially worthy of takeover and to contact them with the offer of finding a suitable buyer.69 There is no evidence of Commerzbank taking this sort of concerted action, but the announcement of the Third Ordinance removed any doubts as to whether Jewish commercial customers had prospects for the future. On 6 September instructions were given to mark the files of Jewish customers as such and to restrict lines of credit to the value of the securities backing them. On 9 December 1938 Commerzbank officially prohibited loans to Jews, but well before then the good name of a business had ceased to be a factor in the bank’s estimation of creditworthiness.70 All in all, as Ludolf Herbst has rightly – 199 –

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determined, the large banks did not play the decisive role in the destruction of Jewish commercial activity that some historians and large parts of the public have given them.71 But they did accept racist rules, integrated them into their business calculations, and thus made the persecution of Jews more severe. While the behavior of the major banks has been thoroughly researched, little is known about how the city’s savings and loan institution, Berliner Sparkasse, treated its Jewish customers. It is likely that many small- and medium-sized Jewish businesses had accounts with the Sparkasse, and we can safely assume that this savings bank—which, despite having a balance in the mid-1930s of almost half a billion reichsmarks, was still part of the city administration and thus a public institution—would have been far more radical in pushing through anti-Jewish measures than the large banks, which also had reputations abroad to worry about.72 But all we know is that after the pogrom, Lippert ordered the Berliner Sparkasse and the Stadtbank to offer “Aryanization loans.”73

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“Hungry Commercial Hyenas” In addition to all of the “silent” profiteers there were also many people and businesses who actively tried to benefit. Especially in the early years of anti-Semitic persecutions profiteers regularly used the instrument of informing. As so often was the case, victims were often stylized into perpetrators. For instance, the Working Community of Retailers and Entrepreneurs of Greater Berlin informed the Economics Ministry: “There is an underground boycott of Christian manufacturers being maintained by ‘Jewish business owners’ and especially ‘Jewish manufacturers.’ We receive daily reports from Christian manufacturers who say that delivering goods to Jewish companies they have supplied in the past is being made impossible.”74 Included in the letter was a long list of Jewish companies “which we’ve determined no longer order anything from Christian merchants as they have in the past.”75 The Reich Economics Ministry didn’t respond, prompting the Main Community of German Retailers to repeat the allegations.76 Informing on competitors was particularly prevalent in the garment sector—the lead informant since 1932 was the Working Community of German-Aryan Garment Manufacturers (ADEFA). The CV characterized the director of that organization as a man “obsessed with a pathological mania … and an extreme Jew-baiter especially around the time of April 1 [1933].”77 ADEFA’s influence was slow to develop, so that it wasn’t until 1935 that non-Jewish customers began to annul their contracts with Jewish garment manufacturers.78 In 1937 ADEFA began a “veritable barrage of anti-Jewish articles,” all of which were penned by Otto Jung, – 200 –

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the managing director of the Economic Group Garment Industry, which gave the articles an official aura and made them more effective.79 By 1938 ADEFA, whose membership had grown to seven hundred, was playing a central role in the persecution of Jewish business in the garment sector, organizing a declaration of debt guarantee for larger member companies who wished to take over Jewish textile businesses.80 The Society for the Advancement of Aryan Leather and Finery Retailers, which was founded in July 1938, pursued similar ends. In August 1938 it boasted of “having initiated and practically realized a number of Aryanizations of Jewish retail businesses.”81 Along with business associations, individuals also tried to profit from the persecution of Jews. Looking at Hamburg, Frank Bajohr has concluded that 40 percent of those who bought Jewish businesses were “unscrupulous profiteers,” 40 percent were “passive participants,” and 20 percent benevolent purchases.82 The data collected in our research project does not allow for conclusions about whether similar percentages might apply to Berlin. Even if all of the contracts of sale and permissions from back then had survived, we would still face the problem of what the estimated value of a business at the time of sale was—necessary information for judging the scrupulousness of the purchaser. Even in a free market, where all the numbers are revealed, it is difficult to calculate the value of a company and it’s basically impossible within the steered economy under National Socialism. But a few examples might help illustrating the situation and highlight certain factors. In the spring of 1935 Max Cohn decided to sell his ice cream parlor, which was located on a busy square in the Neukölln district. Business had dropped dramatically because customers were staying away, and he was being subjected to repeated intimidation. In a postwar restitution hearing, the manager recalled that employees had been physically attacked, and thugs had spat into tubs of ice cream.83 This was the situation when a man named Hermann Wiegelmann bought the ice cream parlor in the summer of 1935.84 Weigelmann paid 5250 reichsmarks to the state property administration office on 29 July. Part of that money was earmarked to pay for overdue rent, with the remaining 3650 to be paid out once Wiegelmann had obtained a license to sell ice cream. Since Cohn had already emigrated to Prague, it was agreed that his brother-in-law would receive the money. After Weigelmann had procured his license, the agreed sum was paid out, but the next morning Weigelmann appeared with two police officers. They forced Cohn’s brother-in-law to come down to the local police station and return the price of sale.85 Around that time in the district of Charlottenburg, Erich Mundt took over as the administrator of two middle-class apartment buildings. – 201 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

Mundt, who was born on 23 March 1900, was a member of the notorious SA Sturm 33. Hardly had he been installed in his new post than he started harassing Jewish tenants, removing the handles to their apartment doors and stealing their furniture.86 By the summer of 1937 he had enriched himself enough to be able to acquire, together with a lawyer named Max Schmidt, the Jewish companies Gebr. Ullendorf GmbH and Löwenstein Nachf. in Berlin and Gebr. Levy in Forst.87 Following on the heels of the Wehrmacht, Mundt expanded in 1941 to Luxembourg where he acquired a department store.88 The possession transfer of Gebr. Ullendorf can be reconstructed fairly precisely. The business produced fine ladies wear and, according to the widow of the Jewish owner, it encompassed 60–65 supervising managers, at least 600 people who worked from home, and around 90 permanent employees.89 In 1936 the brothers Berthold and Curt Ullendorf emigrated via Switzerland to Palestine. Following the accusation that “in the past two years they had removed a sum of between 150,000 and 170,000 reichsmarks from the company coffers and smuggled it as cash and items of value abroad,” there was a trial, the main owners’ shares in the company were confiscated, and the company was sold off for a ridiculously low price to Mundt and two partners.90 In both examples the purchasers didn’t directly use violence. To promote their interests at the expense of Jewish entrepreneurs they linked up with institutions that could achieve their aims and found accomplices. Significantly, even someone who was no stranger to violence like Erich Mundt adhered to business norms and etiquette in taking possession of a Jewish business. But small-time party functionaries and operators weren’t the only ones to benefit. High-ranking party officials also personally profited from the destruction of Jewish commercial activity. For example, Gau Economic Advisor Heinrich Hunke acquired a company called Ebro that specialized in producing padding material for the automotive industry and whose customers included Auto Union, Daimler Benz, and Opel. Hunke had had his eye on this company, which was well positioned, expertly run, and profitable. Company founders Richard Friedmann and his brother Kurt did everything in their power to stave off a hostile takeover, only relenting after Hunke and his chief negotiator threatened to break up the company and expropriate the owners. And if the sale was imposed on the Friedmanns, the selling price was doubly so. Although the market value of the company was at least 900,000 reichsmarks, Hunke acquired it in June 1938 for 375,000.91 To finance the acquisition Hunke took out a loan at the state-owned Reichskreditgesellschaft, Ebro’s regular bank, which essentially handed the Gau economic advisor a blank check, even though after the war the US Office for Military Government for Germany determined that Hunke had no experience at all in industrial production.92 A – 202 –

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few weeks later on 21 July 1938, also using coercion, Göring acquired the Fromm condom factory for his godmother.93 Not surprisingly, these two politicians took possession of companies in areas that promised to yield high returns against the backdrop of the planned war. After the November pogrom at the latest, the final constraints of business etiquette and humanity were removed. Although the city’s administration was at pains to portray the disorder of the pogrom as a short-lived exception, pretending that normalcy had returned and business could once more be conducted in orderly fashion, such was not at all the case. On the contrary, as Bajohr has shown, people “feverishly competed to enrich themselves.”94 On 22 November, only four days after the issuance of the “implementation orders,” Lippert had to forward a telegram from the economics minister to local administrators that stressed that “the Aryanization measures are to be conducted within the existing legal framework.”95 Two-and-a-half weeks later, on 9 December 1938, Lippert reiterated these instructions and enclosed a copy of decree to that effect from Nazi Party headquarters in Munich from 12 November. It was an attempt to appeal to “party reason.”96 On 5 January 1939 Lippert summed up the situation: “The overall impression left behind by Aryanization, if we ignore the results for Berlin, is not a happy one. I would never have believed that the possibility of taking over a Jewish business as a German would have called forth such an extraordinary storm of applicants or that I’d be asked if I didn’t have ‘a good Jewish object’ by people from circles that should be above that sort of thing.”97 .

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Corruption Bajohr has described the eradication of the economic existence of German Jews as “a crystallization point of corruption.”98 The extent of the greed and corruption among party members is indicated by the fact that the director of the Commission on NSDAP Economic Policy, Bernhard Köhler, complained at the Reich party conference in September 1938 about the “excesses of hungry commercial hyenas.” The point, Köhler added, was “not to take something away from the Jews to put it into the hands of greedy interested parties.”99 It’s doubtful that many people heeded Köhler’s admonitions, even if they did conform to official standards. In Berlin, too, the destruction of Jewish economic existence was accompanied by massive corruption—although the regime always claimed that fighting corruption was a priority.”100 In his diaries Goebbels rejected the ostentatious corruption of a part of the leadership clique, whom he described as behaving “like pashas.”101 On the other hand, he had no qualms about “rewarding” himself for his – 203 –

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hard work and commitment. He also wrote without embarrassment in his diaries of having sold the right to publish his journals to the party publisher Franz Eher Nachf. for a stately sum.102 Berlin’s Gauleiter was not only inconsistent on the issue of corruption. He was also naïve, writing in his diary that the reason corruption was so widespread among party functionaries was that they weren’t paid enough.103 Against this backdrop it’s not terribly surprising that there was hardly a senior administrator in what Goebbels once described as “that stall of corruption Berlin”104 who was not involved in some sort of scandal. On 3 August 1935 Görlitzer and Helldorf reported to Goebbels about “cases of corruption in the Gau involving the blackmail of Jews.”105 We don’t know much about the specifics, but Görlitzer himself was involved. Hitler and Goebbels eventually concluded that this was a misdemeanor and let him off with a warning.106 The affair didn’t end as innocuously for two lower-level employees of the Gau whom Goebbels tried to have sent to a concentration camp.107 The pogrom offered functionaries a host of possibilities for lining their pockets. One of them was the apparently systematic, mass plundering of Jewish stores on 10 November, which Goebbels initially defended.108 Hardly had the shards of glass been swept away than Gau Propaganda Director Werner Wächter began to force Jews to pay compensation for non-Jewish entrepreneurs whose businesses had been mistakenly damaged during the pogrom.109 The money was also intended to recompense the party and its members for the costs of initiating the havoc. Interior Minister Frick quickly banned such “collections,” but Goebbels noted in his diaries that “more money than needed was taken in.”110 The funds were administered in an account called the “shards fund”; 300,000 reichsmarks went to pay for the state funeral of Ernst vom Rath, but most of the money went to the party and its subordinate organizations.111 Hitler gave Goebbels permission to use “2 million of the Jew money” to make urgent repairs in the poorer parts of Berlin’s old city center.112 At the same time Lippert, who portrayed himself as a money-conscious, modest civil servant, collaborated with Hunke to ensure that some of the money went to “loyal veteran party members who suffered during the street-fighting days.”113 In 1939 an employee of the Gau personnel office in the Prenzlauer Berg district was even sentenced to three years in jail for taking bribes and exploiting his office above and beyond the norm to derive personal advantage from the destruction of Jewish commercial activities.114 That was just the tip of the iceberg. As of 1935 a help-yourself mentality took hold not just among Gau functionaries, but within the police presidium as well—and the victims were of course persecuted Jews. One of the worst offenders was Police President Helldorf, who refused to issue passports to Jews with assets of more than 300,000 reichsmarks. He would only grant – 204 –

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permission to leave Germany in return for a fee, euphemistically referred to as a “donation.” In the case of the entrepreneurial Garbáty family, the donation was more than one million reichsmarks.115

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Notes 1. Longerich, Nichts gewusst, 23–26. 2. Ibid., 32–53. 3. Evans, Coming, 436. See also Ahlheim, Deutsche, 259f; Friedländer, Germany, 42f. 4. Kreutzmüller and Weber, Allianzen, 87–98. 5. Kreutzmüller, Vernichtung, 46f. 6. “More moderation is shown by Nazis,” New York Times, 12 April 1933. The photo can be found in US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Photo Archive, Photo No. 78589. The Berlin branch of the agency, The New York Times GmbH Wide World Photos, went into liquidation in November 1935 and was deleted from the register on 7 May 1937. See DjGB. 7. Photo by Hans Schaller, 1 April 1933, in Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz 3005415; Associated Press photo, 1 April 1933, in USHMM, Photo Archive, CD 0009, WS 85346. The identity of the two women in question is unknown. Despite information to that effect by both the Illustrierte Beobachter and the USHMM archive, there is no evidence as to whether the woman passing through the pickets (an SA man and a man in civilian clothing) with full shopping bags was Jewish. See also “Boykott,” Illustrierter Beobachter, 15 April 1933. 8. Friedländer, Germany, 122–128. 9. Sopade-Berichte 2 (1935), 928; and Sopade-Berichte 3 (1936), 21. 10. “Berlin Housewives Storm Sales in Stores of Jews,” New York Times, 26 July 1938. See also “Berlin Bargain hunting,” The Times, 26 July 1938; “German women at the sales,” Manchester Guardian, 26 July 1938. 11. File note SD, 20 May 1937, in RGVA, 500,1, 346. See Grünfeld, Heimgesucht, 102–113; for a similar conclusion regarding Hamburg, see Bajohr, Arisierung, 135f. 12. Application for Compensation for Damaged Career Prospects, 26 August 1956, in EAB, 272085 (Tina Solländer). On 17 September 1941, after Solländer had emigrated to Palestine, the business was deleted from the commercial register. The case was much the same for the Feuerstein u. Czwiklitzer liquor maker and wineseller. See Application for Compensation for Damaged Career Prospects, 10 July 1957, in EAB, 152501. 13. Report Willy Piepenburg, 5 July 1935, in RGVA, 500-1-138. 14. See CJA, 7.82, 1-11, and CJA, 7.103, 1-11. Cf, Kreutzmüller, Simon, and Weber, Pogrom, 27–67. 15. Report 81st Police Precinct, 25 September 1938, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21619. 16. Entry 22 January 1938, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 5, 133. 17. Kästner, Notabene, 181f.

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18. Report 180th Police Precinct, 10 November 1938, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21620. 19. “Überall Kundgebungen der Volksempörung,” Der Lokal-Anzeiger, 10 November 1938. 20. After the pogrom, the owner of the Beleuchtungshaus des Westens lamp shop, Wilhelm Philippi, sold the business to the non-Jew Arno Krumpelt and emigrated to Argentina. Clearly visible in the photo are also the smashed windows of the neighboring business, the Berthold Neumann piano wholesaler, which was deleted from the register in April 1940. See the reports of various police precincts, 10 November 1938, in LAB, A Rep Pr Br Rep 030, 21620. 21. “Jewish Shop and Synagogue wrecked by Nazis,” New York Times, 11 November 1938. The photo can be found in a number of achieves, including WL, 072-PH-1808, 162. 22. An informant of the Central Jewish Information Office reported people being arrested. See Anonymous Report on the Events im November (B. 1), in WL, 046-EA-0450. Reprinted in Barkow, Gross, and Lenarz, Novemberpogrom 1938, 101–118. 23. Reichmann, Bürger, 113f. 24. Report 108th Police Precinct, 11 November 1938, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21620. 25. Police Log Book 174th Police Precinct, 10 November 1938, in LAB, B Rep 020, 6949. 26. Report 180th Police Precinct, 10 November 1938, in LAB, A Pr Br Rep 030, 21620. 27. Ibid., 11 November 1938. The photographer, Heinz Goldstandt, was deported to Auschwitz on 1 May 1943, where he was murdered on 9 April 1943. See Gedenkbuch Berlin. See also Police Log Book 174th Police Precinct, 10 November 1938, in LAB, B Rep 020, 6949; report British amabassador to Foreign Minister Halifax, 16 November 1938, in Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, third series, vol. III, No. 313. Cf. Christian Dirks and Hermann Simon, eds., From the Inside to the Outside: The 1938 November Pogroms in Diplomatic Reports from Germany (Berlin, 2014). 28. Simon, “Gefühl,” in Simon, Nachama, and Neumärker, eds., Es brennt! (Berlin, 2008), 118–127, here 123f. 29. Kreutzmüller and Weigel, Kristallnacht. 30. The New York Times published three additional Associated Press photos on 18 November 1938. See “Britain questions colonies on Jews,” New York Times, 18 November 1938. 31. Astrid Schmetterling, Charlotte Salomon 1917–1943: Bilder eines Lebens (Frankfurt, 2001). 32. Testimony Martha Nesgen, 10 November 1938, in LAB, A Rep 358-02, 118836. The Löffler’s Pelzhaus furrier, which had been listed since 1928, was deleted from the commercial register on 8 January 1940. 33. Testimony Klaus Tönsfeld, 12 January 1939, in LAB, A Rep 358-02, 118836. 34. Report 251st Police Precinct, 10 November 1938, in LAB, A Rep Pr Br Rep 030, 21620.

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35. Court verdict, 4 September 1939, in LAB, A Rep 358-02, 118422. 36. Ibid. 37. Advertisement, Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischem Gemeinde zu Berlin, 22 May 1938. 38. Anonymous Report on the Events in November 1938 (B. 236), in WL, 046EA-0450. Reprinted in Barkow, Gross, and Lenarz, Novemberpogrom 1938, 223–226. 39. Stenographic protocol of the discussions about the Jewish question hosted by Göring on 12 November 1938, in IMT, vol. 28, 499–540, doc. 1816 PS., here 514. Margraf & Co filed for liquidation on 3 December 1938. 40. Entry, 24 November 1938, Goebbels Tagebücher, vol. 6, 199. 41. Telegrams Heydrich to State Police Directorships, 10 November 1938, in IMT, vol. 31, 518f. 42. Report 108th Police Precinct, 11 November 1938, in LAB, A Rep Pr Br Rep 030, 21620. 43. Landau, Hölle, 3f. 44. Anonymous charges filed 30 July 1949, in LAB, B Rep 058, 9928. See also Zierenberg, Schieber, 85–123. 45. See Michael Wildt, “Polizei der Volksgemeinschaft: Terror und Verfolgung im Deutschen Reich,” in Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, eds., Topographie des Terrors. Gestapo, SS und Reichsicherheitshauptamt in der Wilhelm- und Prinz-AlbrechtStraße. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin, 2010), 274–285, here 279. See also Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft, 318. 46. Adressbuch des Deutschen Buchhandels 97 (Leipzig 1935). The copy discussed is kept in the Joseph Wulf Library of the House of the Wannsee Conference. 47. Entry, Zentralhandelsregisterbeilage des Reichsanzeigers, 21 Apil 1933, 1. 48. Ibid., 13 May 1933, 1. 49. Björn Weigel, “‘Märzgefallene’ und Aufnahmestopp im Frühjahr 1933: Eine Studie über den Opportunismus,” in Wolfgang Benz, ed., Wie wurde man Parteigenosse? Die NSDAP und ihre Mitglieder (Munich, 2009), 91–109, here 100–102. 50. Wiesen, Marketplace, 50f. 51. Advertisements, Der Angriff, 20 May 1933. 52. Ibid., 1 August 1933. 53. Ruling Superior Court, 25 October 1934, cited in “Firmenzusatz Deutsch,” Informationsblätter der Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, 3/6–7, 25 July 1935. 54. Letter from Emil Simon, eggseller, to Main Association of the German Egg Trade, 16 June 1936, in BArch, R 17 II, 1936. See also Kreutzmüller, “Sticker,” 125f. 55. Nietzel, Handeln, 91; Kreutzmüller, “Sticker,” 124. 56. Guidelines NS-Hago, n.d. (March 1934), in CAHJP, HM 2/8802 (RGVA, 3093). See also “Germany hastens ‘Aryanizing’ trade,” New York Times, 28 July 1938. 57. Charges filed by Hermann Witthauser against Felix Singer, 6 November 1940, in LAB, A Rep 358-02, 122069. In November 1937 Jews were forbidden from ending official letters with the Nazi formulation “mit deutschem Gruß” (with German regards). See “Deutscher Gruß,” Informationsblätter der Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, 5/11–12, November–December 1937. 58. Letter from the general prosecutor to Registy Court, 27 December 1940, in LAB, A Rep 358-02, 122069. Charges were in fact filed against Singer, but he died in Berlin’s Jewish Hospital before his trial was complete. See Protocol of the Public

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Meeting of the 6th Criminal Division of the Regional Court, 3 June 1941; and Death Certificate Felix Singer, 1 December 1941, both in ibid. 59. Benno Nietzel. “Nazi Economic Policy, Middle-Class Protection and the Liquidation of Jewish Businesses 1933-1939,” in Kreutzmüller, Wildt, Zimmermann, National Economies. 60. “Chance für den kleinen Kaufmann,” Der Angriff, 7 January 1936. See also Bajohr, Arisierung, 242f. 61. Memo from the state president, 18 November 1938, in LAB, A Rep 038-08, 17. This memo is also contained in LAB, A Rep Pr Br 057, 375. See also “Die Säuberung des Berliner Einzelhandels,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 24 November 1938. 62. “Die einzelhändlerische Veränderung in den Hauptkaufstraßen,” Zeitschrift des Vereins Berliner Kaufleute und Industrieller 20/5 (May 1939). 63. Ziegler, Dresdner Bank, 182–228. 64. Ziegler, “‘Aryanization,’” 51f. 65. Letter from the CV to regional branches, 8 December 1933, in CAHJP, HM 2/8693 (RGVA 701, 25). 66. Herbst, “Banker,” 90f.; James, Arisierung, 54f. 67. James, Arisierung, 56f. 68. Bernhard Lorentz, “Die Commerzbank und die ‘Arisierung’ im Altreich,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 50 (2002), 237–268, here 249. 69. Correspondence Branch Offices with Central Headquarters, in HAC, DB, 29995-2001.BE; 29997-2001.BE. See also Ziegler, Dresdner Bank, 183–185. 70. Herbst, “Banker,” 91–93. 71. Ibid., 74–137. See also Ziegler, Dresdner Bank, 5–10; Lorentz, Commerzbank, 237–268. 72. See “Bilanz der Sparkasse der Stadt Berlin,” Deutsche Volkswirtschaft 4/28 (5 October 1935). 73. Special Report of the State President, 5 January 1939, in BArch, R 3101, 32170. 74. Letter from the Working Community of Retailers and Businessmen to Reich Economics Ministry, 29 August 1933, in BArch, R 3101, 13860. 75. Ibid. 76. Letter from the Main Society of Retailers to Reich Economics Ministry, 6 September 1933, in BArch, R 3101, 13860. 77. File note CV, 7 December 1933, in CAHJP, HM 2/8793 (RGVA 721/1/ 2971). 78. File note CV, 27 August 1935, in CAHJP, HM 2/8793 (RGVA 721/1/ 2971). See also Westphal, Konfektion, 114–125. 79. Letter from the Local Group Krefeld to CV, 7 October 1937, in CAHJP, HM 2/8806 (RGVA 721/1/3162). 80. Westphal, Konfektion, 118f. See also “Das Zeichen für Ware aus arischer Hand,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 7 May 1938; “Wandel in der Bekleidungsindustrie,” Der deutsche Volkswirt, 19 February 1937. 81. Letter from the Economic Group Retail to Gauleiter Bürckel, 17 August 1938, in ÖStA, 04/02, 2160/00, vol. I. See also Nietzel, Handeln, 198; Herbst, “Banker,” 78. 82. Bajohr, Arisierung, 315–319.

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83. Letter from Dr. Fritz Brandenburg, Esq., to Greater Berlin Magistrate, Restitution Office, 20 November 1950, in LAB, B Rep 025-02, 283/50. 84. Letter from Emmy Kloth, Esq., to Greater Berlin Magistrate, Restitution Office, 2 October 1950, in LAB, B Rep 025-02, 283/50. 85. Letter from Dr. Fritz Brandenburg, Esq., to Restitution Office, 20 November 1950, in LAB, B Rep 025-02, 283/50; Ruling Supreme Restitution Court, 31 January 1955, in LAB, B Rep 039-01, 6. 86. Testimony Maria Noack, 15 March 1948, in LAB, B Rep 058, 10314. 87. Interrogation Protocol Erich Mundt, 24 September 1948, in ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Letter from Max Rosenzweig, Esq., to Berlin Restitution Offices, 31 January 1961, in LAB, B Rep 025-03, 3875/55. See Ruling of the Supreme Restitution Court, 17 August 1961, in LAB, B Rep 039-01, 14. 90. Ibid. 91. Balz and Paltian, “Ebro,” 25f. 92. File note OMGUS, n.d. (1946), in IfZ, OMGUS, 2/232-1. See also Militärregierung der Vereinigten Staaten für Deutschland, Finanzabt., Sekt. für Finanzielle Nachforschungen, Ermittlungen gegen die Deutsche Bank—1946/1947—übersetzt und bearbeitet von der Dokumentationsstelle zur NS-Politik Hamburg (Nördlingen, 1985), 61. 93. Aly and Sontheimer, Fromms, 94f. 94. Bajohr, Arisierung, 283. 95. Memo from the state president, 22 November 1938, in LAB, A Rep 038-08, 17. See also letter from the Kurmark Gau economic advisor to district economic advisors, 15 November 1938, in BLHA, Rep 61 A, Luckenwalde, 186. 96. Memo from the state president, 9 December 1938, in LAB, A Rep 038-08, 17. 97. Special Report of the State President on the De-Jewification of the Retail Sector in Berlin, 5 January 1939, in BArch, R 3101, 32170 (emphasis in original). 98. Bajohr, Parvenüs, 105. 99. “Rassenkampf in der Wirtschaft,” Völkischer Beobachter, 21 September 1938. 100. Bajohr, Parvenüs, 137f. 101. Entry, 27 July 1940, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 8, 241. See also Bajohr, Parvenüs, 67. 102. Entry, 22 December 1936, in Goebbels Tagebücher, part 3, vol. 2, 222. The Gauleiter himself also profited from the destruction of economic existence of Jews. In 1936 Goebbels took over a villa on the island of Schwanenwerder, which Julius Lippert had purchased dramatically below its actual value from the Jewish doctor Charlotte Herz. See Bajohr, Parvenüs, 65; Longerich, Goebbels, 315–324. 103. Entry, 28 October 1937, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 4, 378. 104. Entry, 11 August 1935, ibid., part 1, vol. 3/1, 274. 105. Entry, 3 August 1935, ibid., 270. 106. Entry, 21 December 1935, ibid., 351. 107. Entry, 23 November 1935, ibid., 332. 108. Wunderlich, Göring, 157. 109. Letter from the Interior Ministry to the Foreign Ministry, 14 February 1939, in PArch AA, R 100285. See also Bajohr, Parvenüs, 104. 110. Entry, 23 November 1938, Goebbels Tagebücher, vol. 6, 197.

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111. Hans-Erich Fabian, “Der Berliner Scherbenfonds,” Der Weg 1/37 (8 November 1946). See also Bajohr, Parvenüs, 104f. 112. Entry, 4 December 1938, Goebbels Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 6, 210. 113. Special Report of the State President on the De-Jewification of the Retail Sector in Berlin, 5 January 1939, in BArch, R 3101, 32170. See also Bajohr, Parvenüs, 114 114. Letter from the general prosecutor to state president, 29 December 1939, in LAB, A Rep Pr Br 057, 102. 115. Meyer, “Arisiert,” 82f.; Bajohr, Parvenüs, 37; Rex Harrison, “‘Alter Kämpfer’ im Widerstand. Graf Helldorf, die NS-Bewegung und die Opposition gegen Hitler,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 45 (1997), 385–422, here 406.

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Chapter 7

The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity



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Jews in Berlin, 1933–1945 The open and structural use of violence led Jews who were politically visible and whose career prospects were destroyed early on to flee Berlin. From 1933 to August 1935 the number of registered Jews sank from 160,564 to 153,022.1 According to calculations by the Statistics Office, 4244 Jews left the city between August and December 1935 alone. The Office also concluded that “Jews from the western districts are more heavily represented in the exodus than poor Jews from the older city districts.”2 Hence, the chance to emigrate was connected to an individual’s wealth. At the same time, migration was also going on within Germany. Between August and December 1935 nearly 3,000 Jews moved to Berlin, mostly from rural Brandenburg.3 The city attracted them because its sheer size seemed to offer some protection from persecution and because many Jews hoped that in the capital they could acquire life-saving official documents and get help transferring some of their assets to safety.4 In May 1938 the Gestapo noted that “an enormous influx of Jews to Berlin has recently become noticeable, which probably goes back to the fact Jews see fewer and fewer possibilities for existence in small towns with their stricter surveillance and thus hope that they can disappear in a big city.”5 It was owing to this internal migration that, despite increasing waves of emigrants, 82,457 registered Jews and 78,713 members of the Jewish congregation still lived in Berlin in May 1939, the first time the figure was collected according to the racist categories of the First Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law.6 – 211 –

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We do not have a comprehensive picture of which countries Berlin Jews emigrated to, but several statistics allow us to draw some conclusions. Between August and December 1935 Palestine was the main destination, followed by Poland, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Czechoslovakia.7 By 1938 the United States had become the most popular choice, followed by Great Britain, Palestine, the Netherlands, Argentina, and Czechoslovakia.8 With the situation getting more and more threatening in 1939, and Berlin becoming less a place of refuge than a collection point, Shanghai became an important destination.9 In terms of development and destinations, Jewish emigration—which all too often was actually a desperate flight—from Berlin was not much different than that from other parts of Germany. That is hardly surprising because one third of all German Jews lived in Berlin, meaning that they had a huge statistical influence. The simultaneous destruction of the economic basis of Jewish existence is also reflected in the statistics. In 1933, 101,904 Jews were registered as employed, but by 1939 that figure had been halved to 51,844. Meanwhile, the number of Jews who were “self-employed without a job” rose to 36,075.10 We can assume that the “self-employed jobless” were mainly Jewish entrepreneurs who had been forced to give up their businesses in the wake of the November pogrom. As of December 1938, at the behest of the labor administration, Jews were increasingly forced to work—particularly in garbage removal. By the spring of 1940 these “deployments” had officially been transformed into slave labor.11 Emigration and elevated death rates, which were partly caused by increasing numbers of suicides, reduced the number of Jews in Berlin to 73,842 by June 1941—half what it had been in 1933.12 Four months later the first Jews were deported. In the years to come, between 52,301 and 53,469 Jews were forcibly removed from the city. Most of them were murdered.13 An unknown but by no means insignificant number of Berlin’s Jews were captured by German troops invading countries to which the former had emigrated. Most of them were also deported and murdered. The Berlin Memorial Book of Jewish Victims of National Socialism lists the names of 55,696 people who were the victims of systematic mass murder. It cannot, of course, be complete.14

The Statistics of Destruction In the Database Although there were anti-Semitic attacks and blockades long before 1933, it’s impossible to determine how much they may have constrained Jewish entrepreneurs, particularly since the large number of Jewish/non-Jewish – 212 –

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mixed marriages shows that there were also opposing tendencies.15 According to the Database of Jewish Businesses the number of such businesses sank from 7045 to 6851—or by 2.8 percent—between the end of 1930 and 1933.16 The steepest decline took place in the restaurant sector, which was hit quite hard by the Depression.17 The number of businesses listed in the commercial register overall declined from 44,382 to 41,720—6 percent—during the same period, so the drop in the number of Jewish businesses was well below average.18 The same was true of Jewish businesses in Frankfurt, which suggests that in the main Jewish businesses had a solid foundation allowing them to withstand economic crisis and blockades.19 Between 1933 and 1938 the destruction of Jewish commercial activity accelerated exponentially. In 1933 we can identify 340 businesses that were liquidated or sold to non-Jewish owners—that’s compared to 122 Jewish businesses that went bankrupt in the Depression year of 1932. The first year of Nazi rule saw the demise of several well-known Jewish companies. Moreover, since many Jews were also being forced out of supervisory and directorial boards, the entire destructive process had a very significant effect. The number of Jewish firms that went bankrupt or were sold off declined slightly in 1934. In the wake of outbreaks of violent unrest, bureaucratic harassment, and the Reich Citizenship Law, the number of liquidated and sold-off businesses rose to 466 in 1935. In 1936 that number was 813, with pharmacies and egg- and butter-selling companies being particularly hard hit. The “high” point was reached in 1937 with 926 firms forced to cease business. Yet the 2869 registered Jewish businesses that were stroked off the commercial register between 1933 and 1937 were somewhat compensated by 1010 new Jewish firms entered into the commercial register, so that on the whole the number of Jewish businesses “only” dropped by 28.7 percent. Thus, before 1938, the substance of Jewish commercial endeavor was damaged but not destroyed, as it had been many small- and medium-sized cities and even in Breslau, which had Germany’s third-largest Jewish community. In those places Jewish business had more or less been eradicated by 1936 or 1937.20 As we can see in table 7.1, the destruction of Jewish commercial activity in Berlin proceeded with varying intensity in different economic sectors. The number of Jewish pharmacies dropped by 93 percent, making that the most badly affected sector. Hard hit were the areas “photo and film” and “restaurants (both 56.3 percent), “books and art” (52.7), and “banks and insurance companies” (51.1), too. The greatest number of businesses were destroyed in those areas, like pharmacies, in which Jews were legally excluded or, as with cultural firms and stock exchange traders, in which the state was prone to intervene. The fact that the restaurant – 213 –

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Table 7.1. Decline in Jewish businesses from 1933 to 1938 according to sector Sector

Number in 1933

Number in 1938

Percentage of Decline

Textiles and garments

2438

1966

19.4

Foodstuffs

815

548

32.8

Banks and insurance companies

691

338

51.1

Leather and shoes

271

227

16.5

Chemical and drugs

266

212

20.3

Furniture

262

192

33.7

Metal and metal goods

239

169

29.3

Machines and motor vehicles

201

156

23.4

Publishers and printers

177

99

44.1

Paper and paper goods

161

127

21.1

Pharmacies

156

11

93

Building materials and fuel

153

115

24.8

Real estate

113

65

42.5

Jewelry and precious metal

101

86

14.9

Books and art

93

44

52.7

Household goods

92

78

15.2

Department stores

92

59

35.9

Electrical goods

79

59

25.3

Restaurants

64

28

56.3

Construction

62

45

27.4

Photography and film

32

14

56.3

Advertising

32

19

40.6

Transport

27

20

25.9

Used goods

22

18

18.2

Other/unknown

249

184

–

Total

6888

4909

28.7

sector was also so greatly affected was the result of blockades and, as the case of Kutschera illustrated, and frequent harassment by building inspectors. The smallest declines in Jewish businesses came in the areas “jewelry and precious metals” (14.9 percent) and “household wares” (15.2). The areas “textile and garments” and “leather and shoes,” which were crucial to continued Jewish economic existence, also proved astonishingly robust. – 214 –

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The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity

250

197

200

155 150 122 100

89

84

84

77

66 42

50 14

59 48

43

42

Possession Transfers Liquidations

18

16

6

5

8

5

9

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

4

5

4

Jul

Aug

Sep

0 Jan

Oct

Nov

Dec

Figure 7.1. Destruction of Jewish commercial activity in Berlin. Possession transfers and liquidations in 1938.

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Over the course of 1938 the devastating effect of the process made itself unmistakably felt even in the cities of Berlin and Frankfurt.21 It was accelerated with the annexation of Austria and proclamation of the “Ordinance on the Registration of Jewish Assets.” In June of that year, against the backdrop of further popular violence and the Third Ordinance of the Reich Citizenship Law, sales and liquidations of Jewish businesses rose once more. Their levels remained constant throughout the summer, before swelling again in September during the Sudetenland crisis. Then in October mass deportations, the November pogrom, and the Regulation of the Elimination of Jews from Economic Life of Germany accelerated and increased the destruction to previously unimagined levels. 350 303 300

250

200

181 162

150

Possession Transfers Liquidations

150 110

106

97

100

99

87

77 50

50 4

3 3

Jan

Feb

3

7

3

3

1

1

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

Aug

Sep

1

2

Nov

Dec

0 Mar

Oct

Figure 7.2. Destruction of Jewish commercial activity in Berlin. Possession transfers and liquidations in 1939.

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

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In 1939 the destruction of Jewish commercial activity as a process was dominated by the aftereffects of the pogrom and the legal initiatives from 1938. Jews were by now completely excluded from broad sections of the economy. Most of the firms that were deleted from the register in January and February 1939 had been ransacked in the pogrom or fell under government bans. In June 1939 the IHK and the Registry Court began forcing wholesale firms, which had previously been spared, into liquidation. Together with the Reich’s increasingly tenuous foreign-policy position after the German army marched into Prague in March, which was reflected in the commercial register, the Nazis’ increasingly comprehensive hold on the economy led to another rise in deletions of Jewish companies from the Berlin. In August their numbers declined—only to climb again after the Reich invaded Poland. In 1938, 1948 Jewish firms were liquidated or sold off to non-Jews. In 1939, 2350 businesses folded. In 1940, 954 Jewish firms went under— more than in 1937. Even in 1941, 325 Jewish companies were deleted from register—almost as many as in 1934. The destruction of Jewish commercial activity in Berlin can be seen as a steadily growing wave that crested in 1939, but whose ripples could be felt all the way into 1945 (see figure 7.3.). The commercial register reflected only a business’s bureaucratic status so it’s difficult to ascertain how much time passed between the deletion of a company and its practical end. While a relatively high number of businesses that had previously ceased operation were deleted in the wake of the general revision of the register in 1937, in 1938, as far we can tell, cessations of business and deletions were only separated by a few weeks.

2500 2138 2000

1500

1380 Possession Transfers Liquidations 927

1000 697 568

528 500

326 285

181 210 159 140 114

320 229

212 27

5

1940

1941

81

38

8

6

1942

1943

1944

1945

0 1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

1939

Figure 7.3. Destruction of Jewish commercial activity in Berlin. Possession transfers and liquidations from 1933 to 1945. – 216 –

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In 1939 the interval between the two once again became longer—perhaps because many business owners were fleeing the Reich. Government administrators continued to delete Jewish companies from the registry until the final weeks of World War II. One of the two final firms to be deleted was the Max Kann shoe accessory company. In this case the procedure was drawn out because Kann had died on 16 October 1942, and it took quite some time to find his heirs, who had been deported.22 In August 1944 the Registry Court initiated deletion proceedings ex officio, and the matter was finally settled on 14 March 1945.23 That same day, and under very similar circumstances, the Ernst Caro linen goods company was also deleted from the register.24 The deletions thus continued for a full month after the Reich economic minister ordered all records concerning “de-Jewification” to be destroyed,25 and up until a little over a month before the Red Army started its attack on Berlin.26 Along with the question of what happened when, the relationship of possession transfers to liquidations is particularly significant. Here, too, caution is advised, since takeovers were only noted in the commercial register if the owner of a business changed. If a business was taken over by non-Jews by transferring the business to a newly founded firm, it was often not reflected. And in some cases possession transfers and liquidation were more or less indistinguishable and double counting inevitable. Nonetheless, to a certain extent, we can identify a dominant tendency. In 1933 the relation of liquidations to possession transfers was 53.3 to 46.7—the two categories were almost even. After that the proportions shifted to between 70 to 30 (1935) and 75 to 25 (1937). Takeovers peaked in 1938 with 568. But because 1380 businesses were liquidated that year, the relation remained 70 to 30, as it had been the previous year. The situation changed dramatically in 1939. The number of liquidations (2138) dwarfed that of takeovers (212). The difference reflects the effects of the pogrom and the fact that Jewish firms were no longer attractive for their goodwill and their good name, so that companies were sometimes liquidated while operations continued. In an internal report in November 1941 about “The Cleansing of the Economy,” the IHK concluded, “in 1939 the number of Aryanizations in the commercial sector swelled.”27 The Berlin chamber distinguished between “de-Jewification” and “Aryanization,” so it’s clear that what they meant was that the number of possession transfers of Jewish firms had increased in 1939.28 But this was not reflected in the commercial register, so there is no way of saying how many Jewish businesses were transferred to non-Jewish owners in and after 1939. In general, however, it seems we can go along with Benno Nietzel’s conclusion about Frankfurt that “the destruction of Jewish commercial activity was above all a massive liquidation program.”29 – 217 –

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In the years up to and including 1938 pharmacies (66.7 percent) and transport companies (41.3) were especially likely to be taken over by nonJews. The high possession-transfer rate of pharmacies relates back to the fact that pharmacists required state licenses and getting a new one was both time-consuming and expensive. Non-Jews apparently tended to take over those transport companies that competed for Jewish shipping contracts. Moreover, possession transfers were also relatively common in areas closely connected to rearmament, such as electrical products and machine and motor vehicle construction, or areas like “chemicals and drugs” with heavy exports. By contrast, in the areas “banks and insurance companies” and “jewelry and precious metals” only 11.4 and 12.9 percent of Jewish companies respectively were taken over by non-Jews.30 The reasons were the structural decline of Berlin as a financial center along with its stock market, while the effects of looting had so damaged the substance of jewelry and precious metal companies that it made no sense to take them over. All in all possession transfers—as an undercurrent in the larger process by which Jewish economic activities were destroyed—charted a somewhat different course than liquidations. Here the peaks came in 1933, 1936, and 1938. In 1933 many businesses were transferred to non-Jews because of Jewish fears of repression. It was a means of protecting firms that had already been hit hard by the Depression. In 1936 it was primarily the ordinance concerning pharmacies that caused the number of possession transfers to jump. And 1938 saw the sale of many venerable Jewish businesses whose owners had recognized the signs of the times. For the phase up to and including 1938, the relation of liquidations to possession transfers was 68.9 to 31.1. Larger businesses were also more likely to be taken over. Smaller Jewish businesses were usually liquidated, which is one of the primary reasons that liquidations clearly outnumbered possession transfers. Here, too, we can see that the destruction of Jewish commercial activity was an extremely radical and extremely vicious process.

In the City Records of Jewish Businesspeople In the late autumn of 1938, after the Third Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law, Berlin’s district revenue authorities drew up and maintained lists of Jewish businesses. In addition to businesses defined as Jewish by the provision, authorities were also instructed to include businesses whose owners had Jewish spouses. If one or more of the owners of a business was a foreign national, permission from the Economics Ministry was required to enter it on the list. It was originally planned to complete the lists by 10 November 1938,31 but given the violence of the November pogrom, it’s questionable whether this timetable was kept. In any case, the – 218 –

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files were destroyed—with a few exceptions upon which the following conclusions are based. On 19 September 1938 Gau Economic Advisor Hunke summarized the initial results and informed the Gau treasurer that Berlin contained 46,000 “unambiguously Jewish businesses,” 2500 “so-called ‘dissident businesses’” (commercial endeavors by people who weren’t Jewish themselves that nonetheless were considered Jewish under the First Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law), and 12,000 “disguised” businesses.32 Thus in total, one could speak of 60,500 Jewish businesses in the city.33 Even if the number of “disguised” businesses was made up or based on racist paranoia, and notwithstanding the fact that Hunke undoubtedly wrote the summary to convince the Gau treasurer to fund more positions in his office, we can be confident that the other figures were basically accurate. All the Gau treasurer would have needed to do to check them was to contact the central tax authority. Nonetheless, the central tax authority used a very broad definition of what constituted a business that included entities that did not expect to make a profit, like bridge circles, and thus would not normally be considered commercial endeavors. On the other hand, the number of such entities was quite small. In the district of Schöneberg, for instance, only 78 or 10 percent of the 773 registered Jewish businesses in early 1939 were noncommercial. Extending this logic, we can estimate that 10 percent or 4750 of the 47,500 businesses in Hunke’s summary were noncommercial. Therefore we can assume that in September 1938 there were still more than 42,750 commercial Jewish businesses in Berlin. If the calculations made in chapter 3 are correct, and there had been about 50,000 Jewish businesses in Berlin in 1933, then despite large numbers of people emigrating the number of businesses had only declined by around 14.5 percent by 1938. What had decisively changed was the size of the businesses. In 1933 Jewish businesses were disproportionately listed in the commercial register because they tended to be larger than nonJewish ones. Within the space of five years, the situation was reversed. For September 1938 there are around 4330 firms in the database. Even if, as was explained in the introduction, only two-thirds of Jewish businesses could be identified as such, the maximum number of Jewish businesses remaining on the commercial register in the late summer of 1938 was around 6500. The proportions of listed to nonlisted businesses had swung round dramatically in favor of the latter, meaning that the majority of Jewish commercial endeavors were relatively small.34 This is evidence that Jews were increasingly becoming impoverished. Persecution pushed masses of people below the level of subsistence, and there was a significant migration of Jews leaving the countryside to try to eke out a meager existence in Berlin.35 We have no comparable figures – 219 –

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Attacking Jewish Commercial Activity

for other cities, but there is good reason to think that this unusual, almost paradoxical phenomenon was unique to Berlin. Statistical questions notwithstanding, the surviving Lists of Jewish Business of the Central City Tax Authority provide deeper, if also temporally and geographically limited insight into the structure of Jewish businesses too small to be commercially listed. The surviving lists were apparently drawn up in early January 1939 and thus reflect the situation after the pogrom. And while lists survived from the districts of Köpenick, Lichtenberg, Neukölln, Pankow, Reinickendorf, Schöneberg, Steglitz, Tempelhof, Tiergarten, Treptow, Weisensee, and Zehlendorf, the ones from precisely those districts—Kreuzberg, Charlottenburg, Mitte, and Wilmersdorf—with the highest concentrations of Jewish businesses are missing.36 The best basis for drawing conclusions thus seems to be to focus on the districts of Neukölln and Schöneberg, which had a relatively high concentration of Jewish businesses, but which also featured very different social structures. Neukölln was widely considered a blue-collar district, but locations along main roads were also dominated by small- and medium-sized companies.37 In 1933, 119 Jewish companies could be identified there, and the popular unrest against Jews that led to the persecution of Jewish businesses in 1935 and 1938 originated in this southern district. For this reason among others, of the 134 businesses that were primarily registered by the tax office in Neukölln in 1939, only 5 were retailers and only 8 were handicraft businesses. By contrast, 60—or roughly half—were commercial representatives. There were also 29 wholesaling and 12 industrial companies, a taxi service, a pawn shop, a private school, and a patenting and real estate agency. At the “lower edge” of the scale, eleven Lohngewerbebetriebe were listed. For example, Henriette Heiser of Braunauer Straße 170 did typing work, while Hedwig Loewinski of Berliner Straße 11 mended linens.38 Schöneberg was an affluent, upper-middle-class district with 695 identifiable Jewish businesses in 1933, so the picture there was far different. In early 1939, of 773 Jewish businesses, only 16 were retailers and 9 artisans. While the proportion of Lohngewerbebetriebe (5 percent) was slightly less than that in Neukölln (7), there were far more commercial representatives in Schöneberg—410 in total or 54 percent. The biggest deviation, however, was in the category “other.” Here, we can see that even after 1938 there was still a host of Jewish entities in Schöneberg, including 5 bridge circles, 2 children’s circles, 2 lunch clubs, and 10 bed and breakfasts. In addition, there were 44 property management companies.39 A comparison of the type of Lohngewerbebetriebe work done in Neukölln and Schöneberg also reveals an interesting difference. In the latter, almost two-thirds (24 – 220 –

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The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity

of 38) of those registered offered typing and bookkeeping services, and only a third worked with their hands. In Neukölln those percentages were reversed—with three people doing secretarial and bookkeeping work and six working with their hands. Retailers and handicraft enterprises were struck from the lists in late 1938 or January 1939 after the Ordinance on the Removal of Jews from German Economic Life. The only exceptions were businesses owned by foreign nationals, who had been only listed in the registries with the express permission of the Economics Ministry anyway. There were two such businesses in Neukölln, a tobacco dealer and a fabric merchant, that belonged to Polish nationals and were initially not struck from the list. In Schöneberg no firms were spared deletion because of their owners’ nationality. Statistical analysis of the dates of deletion reveals that the final destruction of Jewish commercial activity in Neukölln was basically carried out in the first three quarters of 1939. It affected most business branches equally and the Lohngewerbebetriebe sector in particular. While the liquidation and deletion of retail, wholesale, handicraft, and other businesses was already in full swing by the end of 1938, with most of the companies affected disappearing in the following few months, it wasn’t until the second quarter of 1939 that the destruction of industrial businesses reached its peak. In Schöneberg two-thirds of businesses were deleted within the space of a year: 441 in 1939 and 61 in 1940. Nonetheless, one can preliminarily conclude that the destruction of Jewish commercial activity took longer there than it did in Neukölln. The process gained momentum at the start of 1939, peaked in the second quarter of that year, and continued until the year’s end. The jump in deletions in the second quarter resulted on the one hand from the discontinuation of play circles, lunch clubs, and similar entities because people were being forced to emigrate. On the other hand, this statistical spike reflected the fact that piecemeal and wholesale firms were increasingly liquidated. However, unlike the commercial register, tax office files ceased to be kept as of 1941. While the vast majority of Jewish businesses were gone by that point, especially in Neukölln, others still hadn’t been wound down. We have no way of knowing whether those businesses still existed, or whether the incomplete records resulted from a lack of administrative personnel caused by World War II.

Notes 1. “Die Jüdische Bevölkerung Berlins,” Berliner Wirtschaftsberichte 12/12 (June 1935). 2. Overview of the Movement of Berlin’s (Religious) Jews from 1 August to 31 December 1935, n.d. (January 1936), in LAB, A Rep Pr Br 057, 373.

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3. Ibid. 4. See chapter 10. 5. “Memorandum on the treatment of Jews in the Reich capital in all areas of public life,” 16, in YVJ, O8-17. 6. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 172. 7. Overview of the Movement of Berlin’s (Religious) Jews from 1 August to 31 December 1935, n.d. (January 1936), in LAB, A Rep Pr Br 057, 373. 8. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 174. The large number of Jews “emigrating” to Poland were the result of the deportations of October 1938. 9. See Christiane Hoss, “Wer waren die Shanghai-Flüchtlinge aus Mitteleuropa?” in Georg Armbrüster, Michael Kohlstruck, and Sonja Mühlberger, eds., Exil Shanghai 1938–1947: Jüdisches Leben in der Emigration (Teetz, 2000), 103–132, here 117–120. 10. Genschel, Verdrängung, 44–49. See also Ribbe and Engeli, Berlin, 953f. 11. See Gruner, Zwangsarbeit, 50f.; Gruner, Arbeitseinsatz, 68–83. 12. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 172; Sara Fischer, Erzwungener Freitod: Spuren und Zeugnisse in den Freitod getriebener Juden der Jahre 1938-1945 in Berlin (Berlin, 2007), 15f. 13. Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 176–179. See also Ingo Loose, ed., Berliner Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt 1941–1944: Ein Gedenkbuch (Berlin, 2009). 14. Gedenkbuch Berlins, 1405. 15. Nietzel, Handeln, 47. 16. These are adjusted figures. There were 406 new businesses listed in the commercial register in 1931 and 1932. For that reason the number of deleted Jewish businesses can be estimated at 600. See DjGB. 17. Between 1931 and 1933 the number of firms in the restaurant sector declined from 71 to 64, or 9.9 percent. With drops of less than 1 percent, the declines were the smallest in the pharmacy and publishing sectors. Moreover, despite the financial crisis, the banking sector declined by only 2.1 percent, with the number of businesses sinking from 706 to 691. See DjGB. 18. Statistisches Jahrbuch Berlins, 1933, 82; Statistisches Jahrbuch Berlins, 1935, 230. 19. Kreutzmüller, Loose, and Nietzel, “Persecution,” 34–43. 20. Ibid., 32–34. See also Bruns-Wüstefeld, Geschäfte, 122–125. 21. Nietzel, Handeln, 159–166. 22. Letter from the police president to District Court, 3 May 1944, in AGC, HR A 90, 92023, 1945. The subject was Martha Kann, née Skurnik, and her daughter Marion, who were deported to Auschwitz on 29 November 1942, where they were murdered. See Gedenkbuch Berlins, 614, and Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv, “Martha, geb. Skrunik am 30.8.1888 in Kurnik und Kann, Marion, geb. 16.6.1926 in Berlin.” 23. Ruling District Court, 14 March 1945, in AGC, HR A 90, 92023. 24. Ibid., in AGC, HR A 90, 102170 (Ernst Caro). 25. Memo from the Economics Ministry, 16 February 1945, in Barch, R 3101, 9042. 26. Anthony Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (London, 2002), 291ff. 27. IHK Report on thr Cleansing of the Economy, n.d. (November 1941), in BArch, R 3101, 9042 (my emphasis).

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The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity

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28. See Herbst, “Banker,” 75. 29. Nietzel, Handeln, 164. 30. My own calculations based on the DjGB. 31. “Order Mackensen, 22. Oktober 1938” Dienstblatt des Magistrats der Stadt Berlin 1938, 137–141, here 137. 32. Letter from Hunke to de Mars, 19 September 1938, in BArch, NS 1, 550. 33. Ibid. 34. See Nietzel, Handeln, 157. 35. “ Memorandum on the treatment of Jews in the Reich capital in all areas of public life” 16f., in YVJ, O8-17. 36. The files are kept in LAB, A Rep 005-03-02, 1–3. 37. Ramm, Gewerbebetriebe, 290–307. 38. Register of Jewish Commercial Businesses in Neukölln, Main Files, in LAB, A Rep 005-03-02, 3. Hedwig Loewinski is not listed in the memorial books of either the city of Berlin or the Federal Archive. Henriette Heiser was deported to Auschwitz on 4 March 1943, where she was murdered. See Gedenkbuch Berlins; Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv, “Heiser, Henriette, geb. Cohn, geb. 2.2. 1899 in Inowraclaw.” 39. Register of Jewish Commercial Businesses in Neukölln, Main Files, in LAB, A Rep 005-03-02, 1.

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Part III

Asserting Jewish Commercial Activity

 “We are entitled to let ourselves be helped if we German Jews above all, who have an ancient prestige and reputation to preserve, have first and with all our force helped each other.”1

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“T

he extraordinary speed with which disaster struck Germany Jewry forced the emergence, in a matter of days, of an extensive apparatus which, from the very outset, could barely keep up with the demands made on it,”2 Salomon Adler-Rudel3 wrote in 1933. Of course, it took some time for a broad-based network of institutions to develop and evolve into institutionalized strategies for self-preservation. Clearly, divisions between the various groups first needed to be overcome. But differences between protagonists operating on the national level and local groups, between Zionists, liberals and orthodox were soon covered by the general hustle and bustle of what Arnold Paucker called the “Jewish defense battle,” and many of the defense mechanisms that had partly developed even before 1933 in Berlin were eventually implemented across the whole Reich.4 It was implicitly understood that this “defense battle” would be nonviolent, since the violence-prone party cadre was officially seen as representative of state power and any attack on it would inevitably have had grave repercussions. Under these circumstances Jewish businesspeople were constrained in their resistance to violent persecution and, along with various

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Asserting Jewish Commercial Activity

Jewish organizations, were forced to concentrate on damage-limitation strategies in response to bureaucratic persecution. “For anyone in need of help, the most obvious thing to do was to turn to their community,” remarked Avraham Barkai laconically. “With the Jewish community isolated, commercial solidarity marked the start of its intellectual and organizational self-preservation.”5 It remains unclear whether this led to the formation of a Jewish “economic sector” in Germany.6 Given the size of the Jewish community, it is possible that a critical mass existed that allowed for the emergence of a relatively autonomous segment of the German economy. In mid-1939 the Jewish community in Berlin numbered some eighty thousand, making it roughly the size of a medium-size German town. Jewish businesspeople and institutions were also in a position to turn to their personal networks and resources. Although these are often conflated, I have distinguished between them, focusing first on institutional strategies for self-preservation and then on individual ones. I have concentrated not only on the cases of those who remained in Germany but also of those who managed to leave. My first priority was to consider the apparatus that developed in order to organize the transfer of assets. This was a key factor in decisions regarding emigration, because it gave people the means to flee Germany. Finally, I will document and analyze various individual strategies in five case studies, to compare and contrast different types of strategy for self-preservation. In so doing I want to shed light on the manifold institutional and individual counter-strategies developed by almost all Jewish businesspeople, which defy straightforward categorization.

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Notes 1. Leo Baeck and Carl Melchior, “Preface,” in Zentralausschuß der Deutschen Juden für Hilfe und Aufbau, ed., Hilfe und Aufbau (Berlin, 1933), 3. 2. Adler-Rudel, Tätigkeitsbericht der Wirtschaftshilfe der Jüdischen Gemeinde Berlin für den Monat September 1933, vol. 2. Cf. idem, Selbsthilfe. 3. Salomon (Scholem) Adler-Rudel was, between 1930 and 1934, inter alia manager of the labor and Professional Welfare Fund of the Jewish Community in Berlin. He then moved to the Reich Association and was expelled from Germany in 1936. In exile in Great Britain he first worked for the Council for German Jewry and, in the 1950s set up the Leo Baeck Insitute in Jerusalem. Cf. Israel Gutman, ed., Enzyklopädie des Holocaust, 3 vols. (Munich and Zurich, 1997), vol. 1, 6f. 4. Arnold Paucker, Der jüdische Abwehrkampf gegen Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus in den letzten Jahren der Weimarer Republik (Hamburg, 1969). 5. Barkai, Boykott, 59. 6. Ibid.

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Chapter 8

Institutional Counter-Strategies

 Interest Groups and Communities

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Reich Deputation of German Jews Jewish interests were not represented at a national political level prior to 1933. It was only in April 1933 that the Central Committee for Help and Reconstruction was established, with the support of the American Joint Distribution Committee.1 Significantly, the initiative did not come from the top representatives of German-Jewish interest groups, but from Carl Melchior, an associate of the highly esteemed bank M. M. Warburg & Co., Wilfrid Israel, co-owner of Berlin’s oldest department store, N. Israel, and Hans Schäffer, a senior manager at the famous Ullstein Publishing House.2 The Central Committee served as an umbrella organization for Jewish institutions and eventually evolved into the Reichsvereinigung der deutschen Juden (Reich Deputation of German Jews), established in September 1933. Headed by Leo Baeck, this body’s name was changed after the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws to the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Deputation of Jews in Germany). It brought together under one roof all the main Jewish groups, ranging from the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (CV) to the Zionists.3 Although the top of the regime refused to deal with the Reich Deputation of German Jews, it was soon politically active and did its best to use its contacts through semi official channels. In time, however, this became increasingly difficult. “Specific issues I worked on meant I had a lot to do with the authorities,” recalled one staffer. “In the years 1933–34, I – 227 –

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was able to discuss these issues with ministry rapporteurs, even without a formal remit, but the ministry’s stance then changed completely (or the rapporteurs’ fear that they were under observation became greater). The reticence of Trapp [the rapporteur with whom he dealt at the Reich Finance Ministry] was so absolute that I realized that there could be no more meetings at the ministry.”4 The Reich Deputation of German Jews nevertheless remained an important mouthpiece of Jewish interests. In March 1935 its chairman, Otto Hirsch, wrote a letter to Julius Lippert, who had told the US Chamber of Trade, despite knowing better, that there were no impediments to Jewish commercial activity in Germany. Hirsch vehemently contradicted this assertion in a letter several pages long, which he also sent to the Reichsbank and Foreign Ministry, citing numerous examples that illustrated how “many Jewish businesses in Berlin have been sold or passed into Aryan hands under pressure from Nazi authorities, while Jewish directors and senior staffers with large companies have been dismissed for being ‘intolerable.”5 Various committees were set up under the aegis of the Reich Deputation to coordinate efforts to help specific groups, such as craftspeople. Early in 1935 the Craftspeople Committee drew up a comprehensive directory of Jewish craftspeople based on questionnaires sent out by the Statistical Department of the Reich Deputation.6 The Central Bureau for Jewish Economic Relief was founded at the end of March 1933 and headed by Cora Berliner.7 This eventually began coordinating the work of the 55 economic relief offices set up in municipalities and provinces along the lines of the Berlin model and issuing regular reports on the situation of Jews in the economy.8 In a similar vein, the Reich Deputation, as of 1933, published pamphlets containing information designed to keep readers up to date on significant new laws, decrees, and general developments.9 In the summer of 1933 the Central Office of the Jewish Loan Kassas, founded in January to provide favorable loans to established loan societies from the funds of the American Joint Distribution Committee, was subsumed into the Central Bureau for Jewish Economic Relief.10 The Central Office was also merged with the Darlehnskasse (Berlin Loan Kassa), which, as I will explain, served as the basis for the loan kassas movement in Germany. Their importance is illustrated by the founding of twenty-two new loan kassas in 1933 alone, bringing their total number in Germany to forty-seven. By the mid-1930s the figure had risen to sixty-eight, whereafter measures introduced to destroy Jewish commercial activity led to the closure of many of these micro banks.11 When the last of the loan kassas went into liquidation in 1939, the funds provided by the Joint Distribution Committee could at least be used to facilitate emigration.12

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Institutional Counter-Strategies

On 29 November 1938, two weeks after the pogrom, the Reich Deputation was the sole body representing Jewish interests to reopen, specifically in order to coordinate emigration. In July 1939 it absorbed all Jewish associations and foundations that still existed and a decree was passed making membership compulsory for all Jews in the German Reich.13 By the time it had absorbed the Berlin Jewish Community in 1943, the Reich Deputation had long involuntarily become an integral, albeit subordinate, element of the Nazi’s persecution apparatus.14

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Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (CV) While the purpose of the Reich Deputation was to represent all Jews in Germany, the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (CV), founded in 1893, was designed to represent the interests of liberal German Jews and to tackle rising anti-Semitism. In the aftermath of the First World War, the CV, which in 1932 numbered sixty thousand members, campaigned vociferously against the growing number of attacks on Jewish businesses,15 working on occasion in close cooperation with the police.16 The attitude of its members is best illustrated by the response of city councilor Eugen Panofsky to the case of a young man he caught putting up posters calling for action against Jewish businesses close to the Jewish Cemetery in the district of Weißensee in the summer of 1920: as a “decent Jew,” he wrote to his son, he saw it as his duty to confront “the lad” and report the incident to the CV.17 It is characteristic of the CV’s standpoint that the first edition of the association’s newsletter to appear after the Reich-wide embargo carried on its front page an article by the historian Ismar Elbogen, with the headline “Haltung!” in which he commented that the regime could condemn Jews to going hungry but not to starving. The situation of Jews was only desperate, he argued, if Jews despaired of themselves.18 But when the situation failed utterly to improve after the official end of the blockade, the CV sent its members a detailed questionnaire in June 1933 designed to provide it with an overview of Jewish businesses.19 On the basis of the information gathered, the CV then attempted to combat instances of persecution, starting with a lead article by the CV’s legal adviser, Alfred Wiener, published in the association’s newspaper, the CV-Zeitung, in June 1933. Under the headline “Zwischen Himmel und Erde” (Between Heaven and Earth), Wiener wrote, “Since Jewish enterprises cannot be cut out of the economy like a slice of cake, certain paramilitary National Socialist groups and cells should bear Germany’s interests in mind and consider how much damage could be done to its

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economy, and ultimately to its working classes, not only when businesses are closed down but when they change hands in transactions that are not necessarily voluntary.”20 In order to contain the effects of persecution measures, the CV opted for a path of political petitioning, taking advantage of the differences of opinion between and within the various authorities.21 In this the CV was supported by petitions submitted by the Reich Federation of Jewish Front Soldiers (RJF), in particular to Hindenburg, concerning discriminatory practices against the veterans who were in business.22 The CV’s approach is best illustrated by the example of Jewish market traders who were barred from trading in markets in Berlin and surrounding areas. In June 1933 Wiener drew up a petition for the Prussian Trade Ministry’s rapporteur in charge of markets, in which he cited the principle of freedom of trade and the economic repercussions of persecution.23 After Wiener had emigrated to Amsterdam, where he published a pamphlet on the “economic boycott”24—the first publication in a series forming part of his collection of material documenting the rise of anti-Semitism—the market traders’ cause was taken up by Julius Brodnitz, the chairman of the CV. On 4 August he drew up a petition for Reich Economics Minister Kurt Schmitt. His basic gist was that local authorities were contravening freedom of trade and that “the destruction of Jewish livelihoods will cause serious economic damage since it will also adversely affect the deliverers, stall-constructors, transporters and restaurant-keepers who also work in the street trade.”25 On 25 September 1933 Schmitt did in fact issue an order against the impeding of Jewish commercial activity: “Unequal treatment of Aryan and non-Aryan, or not purely Aryan, companies or businesspeople is in breach of the basic principle of free markets and free trade.”26 Shortly thereafter the Prussian Ministry of Trade and Industry sent this order to all the intermediate Prussian authorities.27 But the result was that many markets simply began to separate Jewish traders in extra rows, which, as the CV stated in a further petition, was tantamount to “eliminating” them.28 The Prussian Ministry of Trade and Industry telephoned those responsible to call them to account,29 but their instruction was ignored by many—from heads of local administrations to managers and the general public.30 All the CV could do was to gather and forward information about markets where Jewish traders were not hampered, thereby helping them to carry on with business as usual.31 Two years later the CV’s influence had declined even further. The association looked on as a wave of violence rolled across Berlin in the summer of 1935, as powerless to stop it with rational argument as it would be again when the Reich Citizenship Law was announced.32 Its reduced

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Institutional Counter-Strategies

power to intervene was also apparent in November 1935, shortly after that law’s first decree was announced, when Jewish traders were barred from the weekly market in the district of Schöneberg, ostensibly on the grounds that the market was to be scaled down due to road works.33 After several traders turned to the CV for help,34 the association tried to resolve the matter with a telephone call to the local police station in January 1936. The official who took the call informed the CV that the market grounds in question were once again available and that there was no reason why the traders could not return. But when the CV took the case to the District Authority, it was told that there was in fact still a shortage of space at the market. Moreover, they were informed that the traders were selling undergarments and that there was a surfeit of undergarment stalls at the market that needed to be reduced.35 Although the CV was unwilling to leave it at that, it also came to the realization that the market traders had little experience of bureaucracy and often failed to stick to agreements. It was a month before the CV had collected and collated all the relevant paperwork from the traders in question for a petition it submitted in early February 1936 to Berlin’s central market office.36 The district office answered in lieu of the central market office and rejected the petition. The district mayor justified the traders’ exclusion not only by citing the supposed shortage of space, but also with the argument that they were not the only ones affected because older traders were being given notice for “social reasons.”37 In March the CV protested again with a letter to the mayor of Berlin in which it requested that he investigate these cancellations of contracts.38 His deputy replied in April, claiming to have looked into the matter; but, he said, he saw no reason to intervene, since the notice given to the traders was necessitated by a reduction of the market.39 At this point the CV informed the traders that it no longer wished to pursue the matter.40 Even though the CV most probably did not lobby as hard as it could have on behalf of the market traders, most of whom were not members of the association, it was apparent that its influence had declined considerably. Against that backdrop, the oldest of the Jewish interest groups in Germany changed its course in 1936 and began openly backing emigration.41 After Hjalmar Schacht resigned as minister for economics in the fall of 1937 and was replaced by Göring, the Reich Economics Ministry ceased even answering the CV’s petitions. This prompted Hans Reichmann, who had replaced Alfred Wiener as the CV’s legal adviser, to predict, at a meeting of the CV’s board, the complete destruction of Jewish commercial activity, particularly the retail sector, within a year.42 No further interventions in the economy are documented after this, although the CV contin-

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Asserting Jewish Commercial Activity

ued its efforts to advise and, primarily, to collect data on persecution. On 10 November 1938, in what was to be his last official undertaking before his arrest and the dissolution of the CV, Reichmann tasked a colleague with assessing the damage wreaked in Berlin in the pogrom.43

Wirtschaftshilfe: The Jewish Community’s Economic Assistance Program

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Using its experience with social welfare work—such as that of the Welfare Office set up in 1922 during the period of hyperinflation—the Berlin Jewish Community founded the Wirtschaftshilfe economic aid office in March 1933. The tasks facing this new body, which was soon serving as a model for similar offices across the Reich, were daunting.44 In 1935 Salomon Adler-Rudel recalled that “desperation and helplessness had become so widespread in Jewish circles that, in the first days and weeks of its founding, several hundred, if not a thousand, people were visiting the office every day. The office endeavored to re-establish order from the chaos that had descended on these shocked and confused people. Its aim was to

Figure 8.1. Photo by an unknown photographer of the staff of the Wirtschaftshilfe, Berlin, undated (1936/37). From left to right: Hans Rosenthal,47 Lotte Auerbach,48 unknown, Manfred Fackenheim,49 Else Juda,50 Martin Brasch,51 “Frl. Dahlmann,”52 Heinrich Grunwald,53 Dr. B. Mendelsohn,54 “Frl. Herzog,”55 and Boto Horwitz.56 Archive of the Jewish Museum Berlin, 2000/321/0. – 232 –

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Institutional Counter-Strategies

relieve their burdens, compile lists of their losses and to categorize them according to their line of work and the type of difficulty they were facing, so as to gain a rough overview of the extent of the crisis and allow them to set up a systematic assistance program.”45 Alexander Szanto, the former director of the office’s Department for Statistics and Accounting described the situation in similar terms: “The Wirtschaftshilfe began its work at a chaotic time, amid chaotic circumstances, and with thousands and thousands of the National Socialists’ victims turning to the Jewish Community and flooding its offices, it struggled to find ways of providing constructive assistance to its members, whose bread and butter had been taken from them and their lives plunged into crisis overnight.”46 In the summer of 1933 the Wirtschaftshilfe created a number of departments to tackle what was called “employment restructuring” and to address the needs of the various professionals affected, including lawyers, civil servants and employees, doctors and pharmacists, artists, and traders.57 Of these departments, the Economics Department was “initially the most overrun, since it was there that the many small and medium-sized merchants and small business proprietors turned when events left them without an income from one day to the next or they found themselves in difficulties.”58 Reports by Adler-Rudel reveal that in the first six months of its existence some 3500 businesspeople used the services provided by the Wirtschaftshilfe.59 The number of people seeking assistance then proceeded to fall steadily, with some 400 per month visiting the office up to March 1934, 375 over the following six months, and some 230 between September 1934 and March 1935.60 In early 1934 Adler-Rudel reported that “a greater degree of calm had returned to the circles of those seeking our assistance. There was a greater tendency to open new businesses and to restructure existing ones to adapt to the times”61 One year later, he observed that applicants for assistance were less despairing and more inclined to take the initiative themselves.62 After Adler-Rudel moved to the Reich Deputation in June 1935, no further detailed reports of the Wirtschaftshilfe have survived, making it impossible to gauge precisely how the office developed.63 Alexander Szanto, however, observed that every further radicalization of persecution measures brought with it a renewed flood of visitors to the office.64 Who exactly sought out the program’s assistance remains unclear. Other than sketchy data on professional groups, no information has survived to shed light on which sections of society applied for help from the Wirtschaftshilfe. Was it the degree of blameless desperation that determined whether a businessperson turned to its support? Was it skill in dealing with aid organizations—or simply familiarity with Jewish organizations? – 233 –

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Most visitors to the Wirtschaftshilfe were simply given reliable information, legal advice, and moral support, with only one-fifth of them actually taking out a loan. Looking back on its first year of existence, the Wirtschaftshilfe compiled some examples of its loan activity in 1934:

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One applicant used a loan to finance the purchase of a vehicle in order to set himself up in business as a road haulier. Other funds were made available to set up a coal handling business, a cheap summer clothing business, a menswear store attached to a warehouse, as well as a womenswear store, a newsagent’s and a tobacco store. … The most pressing debts incurred by a fashion house were reduced by negotiation with creditors and liquidity restored to the businesses with the help of new funds. Given the low number of Jewish fruit and vegetable stores, the guarantee of a loan facilitated the takeover of a profitable business by a member of the Jewish community. … Several sewing machines were bought and rented to workers seeking new employment; the purchase of an electric machine revived a tailor’s workshop; a hairdressing salon was rescued from collapse; a beautician was able to open her own business within an existing hairdressing salon; a tie-maker was given the opportunity to start a business; and a bicycle enabled a man with disabilities to earn a living.65

In the summer of 1936 the Wirtschaftshilfe granted the Hungarian market trader Salomon Wagner an interest-free loan. Wagner had been running a fruit and vegetable stall in the central covered market near Alexanderplatz since 1907. In 1919 he listed his business as Firma Salomon S. Wagner in the commercial register. Although he never incurred debts and enjoyed such an excellent reputation that even non-Jewish suppliers came to his defense, he was given notice in June 1936 on the grounds of a negligible delay in paying rent.66 After the Hungarian Embassy intervened on his behalf, he was allowed to use a temporary stall, but had no goods left to sell.67 A loan of 500 reichsmarks enabled Wagner to buy more goods and restart his business, which he went on to run until June 1938.68 Few of the loans granted by the Wirtschaftshilfe were as large as Wagner’s. One-third of the loans it granted amounted to microcredits of under 50 reichsmarks. Another third were under 150 reichsmarks. The remaining third could be as high as 1000 reichsmarks, but were mostly less than 600 reichsmarks.69 Many of the loans were not financial but took the form of goods, which the economic aid agency acquired itself from mainly Jewish suppliers.70 Against this backdrop, Adler-Rudel remarked on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Jewish economic aid agency that it was “astonishing how even small sums of money are enough to help small businesses survive and even flourish.”71 The remark clearly contains an element of forced optimism, since the office’s resources were limited,72 a – 234 –

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fact which came in for some behind-the-scenes criticism. Georg Kareski— who was in fact himself a member of its board as well as on the board of a Jewish cooperative bank, which I will describe in further detail below— went so far as to write to Jewish Community leaders about the “failure of the community to assist Jews who have suffered damage from specific incidents,” by which he meant the businesspeople bearing the brunt of the many acts of violence occurring at the time.73 As well as providing loans, the Wirtschaftshilfe also organized collections for “needy traders.” In late summer 1933 Berliner garment companies arranged a fabric and clothes collection, with the result that “some of the poorest traders were able to take up their work again.”74 A similar collection for the Christmas trade took place among various wholesalers in October 1933. A veritable brokerage business developed in the course of time, with the economic aid agency not only supplying retailers with goods from Jewish wholesalers and manufacturers but also acting as their guarantor.75 The office also tried to identify potential investors for companies that were either in need of a financial boost or were “on the market” owing to the emigration of their proprietors. Like the major high street banks, the Wirtschaftshilfe also compiled regular newsletters aimed at reconciling supply and demand: “Former manager of shoe store, aged 35, willing to invest 2000 reichsmarks in a shoe or leather goods store”; “Accountant, former proprietor of a textiles business, willing to invest 4000 reichsmarks in a business”; “Drugstore and Perfumery dispatch and distribution business, operating for 2 years, seeks Jewish chemist or businessman as partner to invest approximately 12,000 reichsmarks.”76 Once the November pogrom put an end to the possibility of any kind of gainful employment, the Wirtschaftshilfe guaranteed what were known as liquidation loans to some of its customers. These loans often had to be written off, but they at least gave some the immediate funds they needed to emigrate.77

Interest Groups and Associations Most of the Jewish interest groups and associations had their headquarters in Berlin, since it was not only the capital of the Reich but also home to the largest Jewish community. In 1933 the Gestapo reckoned that there were 990 Jewish organizations based in Berlin. Of course, the secret state police did not only count them: above all, it monitored and persecuted them. By 1936 their number had fallen to 450. In 1938 only 221 Jewish organizations were left in Berlin.78 In economic terms, the most significant of these was the Association of Independent Craftsmen of the Jewish Faith, – 235 –

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founded in 1895—two years after the funding of the CV. Its chairman was Wilhelm Marcus, a Berlin master glazier. The association aimed to promote Jewish craftsmanship and to tackle “existing prejudices against Jewish craftsmen.”79 Headed by an interior decorator named Louis Wolff, the Berlin chapter of the association was the main one, since almost half of the roughly 30,000 Jewish craftsmen in Germany lived in the capital in the early 1930s.80 The association comprised a legal advice bureau, a loan fund that provided members with funds for “productive purposes” as well as a foundation to support “colleagues in need.” Much like a guild, it also established a provident fund for dependents of deceased members.81 In 1925 the Berlin chapter of the association published its first membership directory.82 In the preface to the 1929 edition the publishers declared that the booklet was “a warning and a wake-up call to all those who are not yet members and who are not yet aware that we are providing Jewish reconstruction work. This booklet is also an appeal to the conscience of those in other professions to support Jewish craftsmen in their work and, if necessary, to convince them of the skill of Jewish craftsmen.”83 In the face of encroaching systematic persecution, the association’s efforts to appeal to Jewish customers and partners appeared to have been quite successful. In October 1933 Wolff announced that the economic situation of Jewish craftsmen was generally good. Orders from non-Jews might have been dropping off, but this was made up for by orders from Jews.84 It is hard to prove the accuracy of his pronouncement. But the number of members attests to the success of the association. According to the association’s bulletin, Der jüdische Handwerker, which first appeared in 1908, some 100 new members joined the association between 1930 and 1932. After 52 new craftsmen joined in 1933, the number of new members rose to 84 the following year and reached its apex with 172 new members in 1935 and 124 in 1936, the majority of whom joined in spring. The last new member was registered in August 1936.85 The association did not keep a record of membership cancellations, making it hard to establish its precise size. A comparison of membership handbooks sheds some light on the figures: in 1929 the membership handbook comprised approximately 600 names, listed on 37 pages. In 1936 it was 86 pages long and contained 1150 names. This correlates with the net growth of 520 new members, which can be extrapolated from the association bulletin. It suggests that few members left the organization. Its membership nearly doubled between 1929 and 193686 and only began to fall as a result of emigration. A fully fledged dissolution became apparent when the association president, Marcus, emigrated in September 1938. Stressing that the organization’s work had not been in vain, he published an open letter in the association bulletin which read almost like an obituary. “All – 236 –

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those who worked with us … for so long will go on to spread our ideas where destiny now takes them.”87 The Reich Association of Jewish Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses was founded in Berlin on 15 June 1933 as a spin-off of the Association of Independent Craftsmen of the Jewish Faith. Describing its goals, the Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, the official newspaper of the Jewish community, chose its words carefully: “Developments in the last six months have engendered interest among thousands of businesspeople, traders and self-employed people in closer economic collaboration. The founding of this new organization arises out of this interest. Its stated aim is primarily to help maintain the livelihoods of Jewish people and to represent their interests in economic and other vital matters.”88 The report also spelled out the fact that the organization’s advisory board was to comprise representatives of “various professional groups” while Wilhelm Marcus served as its president. The Association of Jewish Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses did indeed fill a gap in the scene of Jewish associations and found wide acceptance, numbering 720 members in Berlin alone by 1936.89 Apart from such specialist professional groups there were other Jewish organizations dedicated to bolstering Jewish business, as well as addressing other tasks under their rules. The Jewish Women’s Association, founded in 1903 and headed by social scientist Käthe Mendes, was an alliance of professional women.90 The group’s purpose was to give women a chance to exchange information, but it also saw as its task representing the interests of professional women and published lists of its members and their businesses. Around a thousand copies of these lists were printed.91 A letter to Mendes penned by a seamstress named Marthe Landsberger attests to the success of this form of advertising: in it, she asked the latter to “win more customers for our work among the ladies of the Jewish Women’s Association, now that we are feeling the effects of how emigration has reduced our circle of friends, and few customers are coming to us on recommendation.”92 A high number of Berlin members of the B’nai B’rith organization—founded in Germany in 1885—were Jewish businesspeople,93 and of course used their membership to promote their business interests, as did the members of the Cartel of Associations of German Students of the Jewish Faith. The detailed information on businesses included in the directory of members illustrates this point.94 The Cartel of Associations also had an economic assistance fund for its members.95 On balance, persecution resulted in a diversification and clear growth of association structures. The stricter prohibitions introduced in 1937 therefore marked the loss of support networks and contacts amongst businesspeople.96 – 237 –

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Jewish Newspapers and Magazines The significance of Jewish newspapers and magazines, especially after 1933, cannot be overstated. In an internal report in July 1934 the SD observed that the Jewish press had, in the past year, undergone “almost undreamt of development. The readership of association newsletters and local community bulletins multiplied, their content became more substantial and their print runs increased. The CV’s newspaper is an example. Only a few years ago, this was a modest, small-format newsletter. In the fall of 1933 it was launched as a normal-size newspaper, expanding its political section and adding legal and economic sections … as well as an extensive advertisements section.”97 The Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin developed in a similar fashion. Initially published monthly, it became a weekly in February 1934 and, although print runs fell slightly between 1935 and 1938, it still had a print run of 39,000 in the summer of 1938, and the CV newspaper a print run of 39,500.98 As of 1933 both introduced new columns in order to focus more heavily on economic issues. While the CV newspaper and the Gemeindeblatt refrained from systematic reports on the destruction of Jewish commercial activity, the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau provided detailed coverage of possession transfers and liquidations of Jewish businesses in the German Reich. In doing so, its editors most probably wanted to illustrate how Jews’ economic standing was being eroded and to stress the urgency of emigration. But it is extraordinary that the sole—albeit incomplete—contemporary “chronicle” of the destruction of Jewish commercial activity was published in the Zionist publication, which, incidentally, served as the basis for Helmut Genschel’s pioneering study in the 1960s.99 What all Jewish newspapers had in common was that they published “Bezugsquellennachweise” (suppliers indexes) listing and recommending Jewish businesses by branch. As well as these official lists, they also published personal ads. As of 1933, classified ads also began spreading in the Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Reformgemeinde and the Israelitisches Familienblatt. The number of announcements published in all the Jewish newspapers rose steadily. In May 1933, the figure had risen to 330 and to 492 by October. By the end of 1937, 430 small ads and 470 indexes of suppliers had appeared in the Gemeindeblatt.100 While this figure had fallen to roughly 300 per edition by spring 1938, in May one of the newspaper’s editors pointed out that “in the past, many Jewish businesses did not specifically target Jewish customers. It was only in recent years that they have begun to advertise in the Jewish press.”101 Only days earlier, mulling over the small ads market, Das Schwarze Korps had noted with disgust that “the Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt serves pri– 238 –

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marily to remind Jews of each other’s existence.”102 After the pogrom, the quantity of small ads in the sole Jewish publication still permitted, the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, fell steeply, although Jewish businesses continued to place ads up to 1942.103 Small ads and indexes of suppliers provided readers with a virtual marketplace where Jewish businesspeople could raise their profile for the price of 1 or 2 reichsmarks.104 Close examination of the small ads in the Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin and the Jüdische Rundschau reveal a number of common denominators. Firstly, the ads cover a wide range of sectors and services. Starting in 1935/36 there was an increase in ads for businesses offering products or services related to emigration. Secondly, the ads frequently include titles such as “judge,” even though this reveals little about the business credentials of the advertiser. Thirdly, the people buying the advertising space barely changed. On the whole, the adverts remained the same between 1933 and 1935/36. Businesses rarely moved premises and, if they did, they usually remained in the same neighborhood if not the same street. Fourthly, businesses tended to be clustered within the various districts, not only on the main shopping streets but also in the surrounding side streets. This was especially noticeable in and around the Kurfürstendamm, where many businesses advertising in Jewish newspapers were clustered in the short stretch between the side streets of Meineckestraße and Bleibtreustraße, which was also where the Jüdische Rundschau and many other Jewish institutions helping pave the way for emigration had their offices. Fifthly, as of 1936 anonymous ads and use of abbreviations became more frequent. A growing number of businesses were by appointment only and apparently operated out of private homes, with ads including only a telephone number. The destruction of Jewish commercial activity was thus reflected in the classified advertisement sections of the Jewish press.

Loan Kassas and Jewish Cooperative Banks Loan Kassas After the American Joint Distribution Committee founded loan kassas for beleaguered Jewish communities in the Soviet Union in 1922/23,105 the launch of similar schemes was mooted at the Association of Independent Craftsmen of the Jewish Faith Congress shortly thereafter.106 Germany’s first Jewish loan kassa was founded as a limited company on 13 June 1924 in Berlin. Representing the Jewish Community, the founders were the sculptor Eugen Caspary, the lawyer Karl Goldschmidt, and the metal trader Adolf Schoyer. Caspary was the chairman of the Jewish Community’s welfare office, while Schoyer, who was also a member of the – 239 –

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“Gesellschaft der Freunde” (Society of Friends),107 represented the community’s board.108 Once it was entered on the commercial register, the loan kassa began operations in October 1924 on the premise of the welfare office on Rosenstraße 2–4. Schoyer privately contributed a further 20,000 reichsmarks to the start capital of 6000 reichsmarks, raised in equal parts by the founders, while the community contributed 25,000 reichsmarks.109 A further 23,000 reichsmarks were supplied by the aforementioned businessman Jakob Michael.110 The loan kassa was controlled by the community via a working committee, while the Berlin chapter of the Association of Independent Craftsmen of the Jewish Faith played a key role in the institution’s affairs and was permanently represented in its management. In the early days, Max Katzenstein, the association’s legal adviser, served as managing director, and was succeeded by Wilhelm Marcus in 1928. After Marcus resigned in January 1935, his wife was appointed in his place and remained in office until 1938.111 In keeping with the institution’s purpose— “to guarantee loans to struggling Jewish small and medium-sized businesses based in Berlin so as to allow them to continue to exercise their profession or trade”112—the loan kassa awarded interest-free credit of up to 500 reichsmarks from its funds, which was secured by assignment of merchandise or third-party guarantors. This business model, described by Caspary in 1928 as “productive welfare,” proved so successful that the funds ran out just months after the institution’s launch.113 In the first decade of its existence, the loan kassa awarded a total of 1170 loans, of which 347 (29.7 percent) were taken out by craftsmen and 498 (42.6 percent) by traders without their own stores, while just 95 (8.1 percent) were taken out by store proprietors and 120 (10.3 percent) by people in need of a bridging loan. Amid the turbulence of the crisis years 1930 and 1931 the institution awarded loans totaling some 200,000 reichsmarks in volume. With hindsight, Marcus remarked that the events of 1933 confronted the kassa with “difficult decisions. … With no one able to predict with any certainty to what extent Jews will remain in gainful employment as long as we are not in a position to establish the parameters of our existence, the loan kassa must practice restraint,” he wrote.114 Nevertheless, the kassa awarded 425 loans worth 100,000 reichsmarks in 1933. By this point, a growing number of store proprietors were among those availing themselves of financial assistance.115 As of 1933 the loan kassa began cooperating with the Wirtschaftshilfe, which assumed part of the responsibility for applicants’ credit assessments.116 The limited data that has survived suggests that around a quarter of the loans it approved were arranged by the loan kassa.117 In the wake of the Regulation of the Elimination of Jews from Economic Life of – 240 –

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Germany, the loan kassa went into liquidation118 and was incorporated in the Reich Deputation at the behest of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in January 1940.119

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Volksbank Iwria Founded on 22 December 1927, on the premises of the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße, Iwria was Germany’s first explicitly Jewish cooperative bank and was entered into the Register of Cooperatives on 28 February 1928.120 In an open letter published on 9 January 1928 the bank’s founders stressed that they were responding to long-standing calls within “wider Jewish circles” for such a bank because smaller Jewish business-proprietors for “obvious reasons” were not able to join a single one of the one hundred existing cooperative banks in Berlin, while other banks showed little interest in their custom given their low profits.121 The bank’s founders included Salomon Drimmer, a furniture dealer whose company Driha, Möbelhäuser, Drimmer & Halpern was located at Elsässer Straße 37 and Jewsej Altschul, who owned a timber wholesaler’s at Knesebeckstraße 96.122 However, it appeared that the bank’s business direction was determined by Georg Kareski, chairman since 1929 of the Jüdische Volkspartei (Jewish People’s Party). Although this was essentially a Zionist party, it did not support the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine and enjoyed strong support primarily among Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe.123 A controversial figure, Kareski124 became chairman of the supervisory board125 when the bank was founded and its general manager in November 1935.126 At first Iwria was based in Französische Straße, but did not survive for long in the city’s banking district and moved to Alexanderplatz in 1932. Despite its ambitious agenda only 276 cooperative members joined in the first year of its existence, subscribing a total of 766 shares.127 By the last trading day of 1930 the number of members had risen to 307, but they held just 589 shares.128 In the wake of the economic crisis the number of members had fallen to 288, who subscribed for 464 shares by the end of 1931.129 After the bank’s business continued to stagnate in 1932, the beginning of the systematic destruction of Jewish commercial activity led to a reversal of the trend, which the board addressed in its annual report. “The year 1933, an eventful one in the history of the Jewish people, was also an unusual one in terms of our bank’s development. Its founders’ goal of making Iwria the bank of choice for Jewish small- and medium-sized businesses, which was propagated with all the modern means of advertising available, has only been achieved on a modest scale. … But the political turbulence of recent years has demonstrated the true standing of Jews in Germany and awakened a sense of solidarity which serves as the basis for – 241 –

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the philosophy of the cooperative bank in general and the Jewish cooperative bank in particular.”130 Although only 50 new members joined in 1933, balance sheet totals doubled. This shows that members had intensified their business dealings with Iwria and that the institute had begun, by the board’s own admission, to make greater efforts to attract customers, especially among medium-sized Jewish businesses, since the microcredit market was already cornered by the loan kassa.131 This entailed the opening of a branch in Fasanenstraße in September 1933 and a transfer and goods department in 1934 designed to foster goods traffic with Palestine.132 By 1934, the number of members had risen to 314 (subscribing 488 shares) and balance sheets expanded by 50 percent to reach 1.5 million reichsmarks by the last day of trading in 1934.133 Despite emigration the bank also managed to attract 20 new members in 1935. Up by 100 percent to 3.48 million reichsmarks, the balance sheets rose even more rapidly than membership.134 In terms of balance sheets, this made Iwria’s Berlin branch only fractionally smaller than the independent, established sister institutions in Breslau, Chemnitz, Leipzig, and Stettin altogether.135 What makes the advancement of the bank all the more astonishing is that from 1933 onward it faced systematic obstacles. In December 1933 the regional tax office warned that Iwria could channel funds out of the country.136 In 1934 the bank had to conduct the legal battle mentioned above and change its name in 1935. At the same time, Iwria—like all the other Jewish cooperative banks—was excluded from the auditing association of the German Cooperative Federation. Then, in 1936, the Reich Interior Ministry also recommended “first and foremost investigating … whether there is reason to object to the continued existence of a Jewish cooperative bank per se.”137 In its annual report in 1935 the bank published a list of its members for the first time. It showed that 66.8 percent of them were business proprietors; of these, 26.5 percent were wholesalers, who therefore made up the largest group by far, followed by craftsmen at 14 percent, factory proprietors at 13.5 percent, and retailers at 11.5 percent.138 Interestingly, onethird of members were not business proprietors, as illustrated by the fact that the “bills of exchange” rose at a markedly slower rate than the rest of the balance sheets.139 While 135,476 reichsmarks were attributed to bills of exchange in 1933, the figure in 1936 was 237,122 reichsmarks, representing a fall in the share of the total from 12.9 to 5.6 percent.140 In early 1936 Iwria continued to flourish, with the balance sheets rising to 4.2 million reichsmarks and membership to 458. However, the bank also had to adjust its valuation to the tune of 340,000 reichsmarks and turn to the Jewish community for support. At this point the supervisory board was, however, still confident “that our cooperative, after eradicating the losses in– 242 –

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curred by those businesses within our remit, will in future continue to be able to fulfill its objective to serve small and medium sized businesses.”141 This hope, however, proved to be unfounded. Shortly after the annual report for 1936 was published, it became apparent that members of the board had approved each other’s speculative credits, which could no longer be serviced and now had to be written off. On 23 July Kareski had to step down.142 The bank attempted to offset the losses by doubling the price of shares for members from 250 to 500 reichsmarks.143 Although this measure was approved at the general meeting on 30 August 1937 it was subsequently rejected by the Reich commissioner for credit as insufficient,144 and also caused much consternation among members.145 As a result, the community’s board announced that “in the interests of preserving numerous Jewish livelihoods, the community has made a fund of 1 million marks available to the Iwria Bank in order to reestablish liquidity, and acted as guarantor to depositors for over 300,000 reichsmarks, but is not in a position to guarantee the Iwria Bank further sums.”146 At the behest of the Reich commissioner, the Iwria was closed down on 15 September 1937.147 After the failure of a judicial settlement proceeding, the bank went into liquidation on 11 January 1938 but was stroked off the Register of Cooperatives only in August 1955.148

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Jewish Credit Association for Trade and Commerce Another bank was founded shortly after Iwria in January 1928: the Jüdische Kreditvereinigung für Handel und Gewerbe (Jewish Credit Association for Trade and Commerce), which also aimed to rival Iwria, was founded in the conference room of the synagogue in Fasanenstraße. It opened its doors near the Hackescher Markt in March 1928, before the Iwria had even been entered in the Register of Cooperatives.149 The Credit Association was founded on the initiative of Dr. Wilhelm Kleemann, chairman of the Jewish Community board.150 A member of the board at Dresdner Bank, Kleemann had been in charge of the bank’s city branches and ran Dresdner Bank’s important cooperatives department between 1910 and 1916.151 As he explained in a position paper in January 1932, he was firmly of the opinion that credit cooperatives were “the natural supports” of small- and medium-sized business and that Jews needed to be prompted to embrace the principle of the cooperative.152 It was thanks to Kleemann that the Credit Association was able to join with Dresdner Bank’s cooperatives department, which granted it a start-up loan. Kleemann was joined on the supervisory board by only one other representative of big business: Samson Buttenwieser from the Baer & Stein Metalworks. The rest of the supervisory board members came – 243 –

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from small- or medium-sized businesses or were self-employed or professionals. As he had at the loan kassa, Wilhelm Marcus served as deputy chairman and ensured close ties with the Association of Independent Craftsmen of the Jewish Faith.153 He also ensured that Robert Gutheim, the association’s treasurer, joined the Credit Association’s board. In an article published in the Gemeindeblatt in January 1928, Goldschmidt, who was also on the Community board, laid out the reasons why, for the first time, “Jewish circles established an organization that emphasizes its Jewish character in the field of the wider, inherently inter-faith economy.”154 While he ignored the Iwria bank, he stressed that the Credit Association was by no means “drawn from the fertile soil of anti-Semitism” and specified its Jewishness for the sole reason that it was founded by “Jewish fathers” and was aimed primarily at Jewish small- and mediumsized business. In June 1929, in its first statement of accounts, the board laid out the Credit Association’s business philosophy: “The Jewish Credit Association is to be a tool of small- and medium-sized business; it is not a welfare organization but an assistance office.”155 Citing check and bill transactions as the association’s core business and their intention to steer clear of speculative dealings, the members of the board again gave reasons for the cooperative’s founding with reference to general economic arguments—specifically war and inflation—but made no mention whatsoever of either anti-Semitism or the Association’s rival, the Iwria bank. Despite its best efforts, the support given to the Credit Association by Jewish institutions remained disappointing. In its second annual report the board stressed that “economic and political developments increasingly call for solidarity within the Jewish public. The prevailing hardship cannot be better tackled than with constructive financial assistance, which is the best defense against impoverishment. But sufficient financial assistance is only possible if all parties involved see it as their duty to contribute.”156 This renewed call for membership met with little success, however.157 In the summer of 1931 the institute was not welcoming new members but dealing with the repercussions of the banking crisis. Alfred Jaulus, co-owner of the private bank Veit, Simon & Co., switched from the supervisory board to the managing board, apparently because his skills were required in this time of economic turmoil.158 In August 1931, without consulting its members, the bank raised the cooperative share contribution from 250 reichsmarks to 400 reichsmarks, sparking the ire of many members.159 Felix Salomonis, manager of the J. Salomonis glaziery and mirror factory, vented his indignation at the additional payment in a letter dated 31 August 1931, maintaining that the hike offended his business principles: “I cannot hide the fact that I simply cannot understand how members can be forced into accepting a rise in fully paid contributions. If the decision – 244 –

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taken at the general assembly [on the raising of the contribution] proves legally valid and it can be assumed that similar unexpected decisions might become the norm, I cannot reconcile my responsibilities as a prudent businessman with continued membership of such an association.”160 Salomonis’s prediction proved accurate, with many members of the association giving notice in subsequent months. An emergency general assembly was held in late December 1931, which also resulted in a crucial vote on the name of the association. While the supervisory board proposed replacing “Jewish” with “Matana” (the Hebrew word for gift), forty of the forty-four members present voted for removing the word “Jewish” from the company’s name.161 The lack of detail in the minutes of the meeting makes it impossible to form an opinion about this remarkable step. But the bank’s change of name did not appear to stop it from identifying itself as a Jewish institution and its ties to the Jewish community remained close. The Association’s balance sheets continued to be published exclusively in the Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, and Kleemann remained chairman of the supervisory board. In the wake of the economic crisis and in protest at the rise in membership contributions, even more members left in the course of 1932,162 with the trend continuing in 1933 and 1934 as circumstances changed. At the end of 1934 only 246 members were left. The Credit Association’s management was also affected, with three members of the supervisory board emigrating in 1933,163 including the bank’s mentor, Kleemann. Even before the announcement of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, he had been forced off the board of the Dresdner Bank and emigrated to Switzerland.164 He was replaced by Heinrich Stahl, who took over as chairman of the board of the Jewish Community in June 1933. His appointment to the supervisory board of the Credit Association attested to its continued close ties to the community. Although a further drop in membership was rooted in the increased ostracization of Jewish businesses, the remaining members intensified their business relations allowing for a steady rise in the Credit Association’s balance sheets to 575,000 reichsmarks in 1935.165 From 1935 onward, membership also began to rise again, attracting a record high of 133 new members in 1936. In total, the association numbered 316 members with 385 share subscriptions.166 The volume of business had meanwhile doubled, enabling the bank—which now employed a staff of 18 along with the board—to enlarge its premises considerably.167 The number of members rose to 349 in 1937.168 Growth continued into 1938 when the bank took in a number of former members of the Iwria bank, which had gone into liquidation. On 14 October 1938 Arnold Lichtenstein, who owned a hat wholesaler’s near Alexanderplatz, became the last member to join.169 Despite the – 245 –

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loss of some members as a result of emigration and the closure of some businesses, the number of members had risen to 403 by this point. But it was then that the cooperative, which had been ordered to change its name to the Bank des jüdischen Mittelstandes. Kreditverein für Handel und Gewerbe (Bank for Small- and Medium-Sized Jewish Business. Credit Association Trade and Commerce) in April,170 was plunged into the maelstrom of persecution. The board assembled for a meeting on 9 November 1938 in order to discuss the disqualification of a total of 53 members. The bank no longer even knew the whereabouts of 37 of them.171 Shortly after the board had sent minutes of the meeting to the Registry Court on 10 November, Alfred Jaulus either fled or was arrested by the police. On 14 November 1938 the supervisory board called an emergency meeting in order to appoint Robert Gutheim to the board in place of Jaulus, who was “indisposed.”172 Given the new regulations, a decision to shut down the bank was reached at an extraordinary general meeting on 29 December 1938. Board member Max Gronemann and the attorney Bruno Gerson were appointed liquidators.173 They were able to pay off the deposits of the bank, which had moved into premises of the Jewish Community at Oranienburger Straße 31 in September 1939, and had the association removed from the Register of Cooperatives on 27 July 1942.174 In its 1932 annual report the association’s board included a list of its members according to occupation. Eighty percent of members—216 of 271—ran businesses: 56 of those were self-employed craftsmen and 162 were self-employed merchants or factory proprietors. The rest of the members were civil servants (23), office workers, laborers, or in other lines of work (30).175 This ratio, which clearly distinguished the association from the Iwria, remained more or less constant. The members included a few private bankers, such as Albert von Goldschmidt176 and Ernst Wallach,177 but most were small- and medium-sized businesspeople. Of roughly 780 businesspeople who were members of the bank between 1928 and 1938, only 245—or 31 percent—were listed in the commercial register. The majority of companies were so small that they were not legally required to be registered.178 The Credit Associations’ balance position “bills of exchange” reflected this high proportion of businesspeople, as well as the bank’s growing importance for them, increasing from 51,276 to 139,699 reichsmarks between 1933 and 1936, a rise from 10.6 percent of the balance to 28.7 percent.179

The Esra Provident Loan Society A third Jewish credit cooperative, the Leih- und Sparverein Esra (Esra Provident Loan Society), was founded in Berlin in May 1932. A key role in its creation was played by the Central Association of East European Jews – 246 –

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in Berlin, which made its premises at Rosenthaler Straße 55 available to Esra’s free of charge.180 While the IHK was of the opinion that the Iwria was founded by East European Jews, clearly not all the East European Jews living in Berlin felt it represented them. Even though the two institutions were essentially rivals, a close cooperation developed between them. The Iwria not only provided a bank account, it also temporarily provided premises in 1935/36.181 Georg Kareski joined Esra in November 1932.182 Entries in the cooperative’s register do not include information on place of birth, so it cannot be said with any certainty whether or not the members actually did come from Eastern Europe. What can be deduced, however, is the fact that only a few of them resided in the Scheunenviertel neighborhood in the district of Mitte where many Jews from Eastern Europe lived. This does not of course rule out the likelihood that the bank was supported primarily by East European Jews.183 In terms of membership structure, the Esra did not differ significantly from either the Credit Association or—though to a greater degree—from the Iwria. Esra’s membership was also made up primarily of businesspeople. Of a total of 259 natural and legal persons who joined the Esra between 1932 and 1940, only 32 (or 12 percent) were listed in the commercial register, indicating that Esra’s members were mainly small traders or businesses. This assumption is underscored by the fact that the highest loan the bank would award was 500 reichsmarks, while shares in the cooperative could not exceed 25 reichsmarks. For this reason, the supervisory board estimated that it could attract a thousand members within a year.184 But at the very first official general assembly, held in the Café Dobrin at Hackescher Markt in July 1933, the chairman of the supervisory board, Dr. Boris Silbert, conceded that only 230 people had joined the bank.185 Neither business volume nor membership increased significantly in subsequent years. By the end of 1936 Esra’s balance was in the four digits186 and it numbered only 256 members. In the wake of emigration and the expulsion of members who failed to pay the full cooperative contribution, membership dwindled to 121 by late 1937.187 As a cooperative the Esra had to go into liquidation on 1 January 1939 and was removed from the commercial register on 29 October 1940.188

The Role of Jewish Credit Cooperatives As early as the late 1920s the development of Jewish cooperative banks reflected the growing ostracization of Jewish business. These banks were founded in response to the racism that had crept into business relations. In 1936 the German Association of Cooperatives boasted that even before Hitler seized power, the cooperatives had generally ceased to accept – 247 –

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Jews as members: “In districts where they continued to be accepted, Jewish members must now be expelled. This process has already led to the founding of strictly Jewish loan cooperatives.”189 It is noteworthy that the initiative came from Berlin, of all places, already home to numerous Jewish private banks. This undermines Albert Fischer’s theory that cooperative banks were only founded in the absence of efficient Jewish private banks.190 Cooperative banks were founded in Berlin because, on the one hand, private banks traditionally catered to a more upmarket clientele. On the other hand, the founders of the Iwria, at least, were deliberately seeking to build on the Jewish cooperative banking sector that had developed in Eastern Europe. It was almost as though the founding of the Iwria put the liberal and German members of the community under pressure to found their own cooperative bank—one that was admittedly rooted in the loan kassa established in 1924. The founding of the credit association allowed the community to provide acceptance facilities the businesspeople needed. The cooperatives could also offer loans to a wider customer base than the loan kassa, which was basically a welfare institution that did not charge interest and was therefore unable to expand the capital basis it had obtained in the exceptional form of donations. Given that the Iwria and the Credit Association were geared to the same customers, the Reich Economics Ministry considered a merger between the two banks in the wake of the banking crisis in July 1932.191 However, this met with resistance from both parties because their respective supporters hailed from rival Jewish groups. The proposed fusion was rejected in August 1932.192 The case demonstrated that the gulf between Jewish groups could not be bridged, which led to a fragmentation of resources. This was possibly one underlying reason why none of the main Jewish institutions—neither the Reich Deputation nor the Jewish Community—ever transferred their accounts to the Iwria or the Credit Association. Altogether, the Jewish credit cooperative numbered 810 members at the height of their success in 1936, and balance sheets of less than 5 million reichsmarks. But they mainly granted microloans, thereby supporting businesses that would otherwise not have been able to borrow funds. In 1934 the Credit Association awarded 87 loans under 200 reichsmarks and 85 loans under 1000 reichsmarks; 100 loans under 200 reichsmarks and 119 loans under 1000 reichsmarks in 1935.193 In subsequent years the banks did not include similarly detailed figures in its annual reports. It can be extrapolated from the annual report in 1936 that the average loan was well below 1000 reichsmarks.194 The 1937 annual report showed that 244 loans of up to 1000 reichsmarks had been granted.195 – 248 –

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While the Esra awarded considerably lower loans than the Iwria, the latter also concentrated on loans below 1000 reichsmarks, which were often awarded as overdrafts secured by commodity assignments, as well as discount credits. Both the Credit Association’s and the Iwria’s 1936 balance sheets showed bill holdings of 376,800 reichsmarks. The bills of exchange endorsed by the banks and adopted by the Reichsbank were not taken into account.196 An overwhelming majority of the Credit Association’s members listed in the commercial register were also members of a Jewish lodge even in 1928. A high percentage of members of the Jewish cooperatives were also members of the Association of Independent Craftsmen of the Jewish Faith or similar organizations.197 It can therefore be safely assumed that Jewish cooperative banks were more popular among Jewish businesspeople already bonded to Jewish organizations prior to 1933 than those who were not. This also explains why Jewish cooperative banks did not enjoy greater success. On the one hand, customers tended to see switching banks as a risk, especially during times of crisis, and were concerned that existing conditions and borrowing limits might not be continued. On the other hand, an account with a Jewish private bank had greater kudos than an account with a small cooperative bank. This is one of the reasons why the strata of Jewish businesspeople that met the high standards tended to turn to the private banks they believed would understand their need for commercial credits or even assistance in selling off a business and transferring funds abroad.198 Jewish businesspeople were hard hit by the fact that, by 1938, all these banks and indeed cooperatives had either been taken over by non-Jews or forced into liquidation. Fritz Grünfeld, for example, eventually chose to give up his business because his house bank, taken over by non-Jews, refused to lend him money, while one of the few private banks still owned by the Jewish family that founded it was unwilling to make a commitment since it was also in the midst of takeover negotiations.199

Notes 1. Bauer, Reactions, 29f.; Clemens Vollnhals, “Jüdische Selbsthilfe bis 1938,” in Wolfgang Benz, ed., Juden in Deutschland 1933–1945: Leben unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft (Munich, 1993), 314–412, here 314–316. 2. Avraham Barkai, “Jewish Self-Help in Nazi-Germany 1933–1939,” in Nicosia and Scrase, eds., Jewish Life, 71–88, here 73–78; Esriel Hildesheimer, Jüdische Selbstverwaltung unter dem NS-Regime: Der Existenzkampf der Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Tübingen, 1994), 20f.; Shepherd, Israel, 122f.; Ball-Kaduri, Leben,

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125; Hans Schäffer, “Meine Zusammenarbeit mit Carl Melchior,” in Carl Melchior: Ein Buch des Gedenkens und der Freundschaft (Tübingen 1967), 34–106, here 102; Reissner, Histories, 249f. Cf. Institut für Zeitgeschichte and Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration, eds., Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933. International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945, published under the joint supervision of Werner Röder and Herbert A. Strauss, 3 vols. (Munich, 1980), here vol. 1, 321f. and 638. 3. Nicosia, Zionism, 102–106; Avraham Barkai, ‘Wehr Dich!’ Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (CV) 1893–1938 (Munich, 2002), 302; Zimmermann, Juden, 62f.; Vollnhals, Jüdische Selbsthilfe, 314–316. 4. Report by Kurt Ball-Kaduri, 21 June 1944, CAHJP, P231, 27. 5. Letter from Otto Hirsch to Julius Lippert, 8 March 1935, SWA, A-10453. Cf. Barkai, Boykott, 76f. 6. Kahn, Handwerker, 1f. 7. Esriel Hildesheimer, “Cora Berliner. Ihr Leben und Wirken,” Leo Baeck Institute Bulletin 67 (1984), 41–70, here 50f. Cf. Sibylle Quack, Cora Berliner, Gertrud Colmar, Hannah Ahrendt, Straßen am Denkmal ehren ihr Andenken (Berlin, 2005), 20– 25; Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933, here vol. 1, 1980, 43–45. 8. “Jüdische Wirtschaftshilfe,” Israelitisches Familienblatt, 30 March 1933. Cf. Adler-Rudel, Tätigkeitsbericht, 2f.; idem, Selbsthilfe, 122f.; LBI, AR 1578. 9. Cf. Informationsblätter im Auftrage des Zentralausschusses der deutschen Juden für Hilfe und Aufbau 1 (January 1933), 1, published by the Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden; from May 1935 as Informationsblätter published by Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden 3 (May 1935) 5; from September 1935 as Informationsblätter published by Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland 3 (22 September 1935), 8–9. In September 1938 publication ceased. 10. “Zentralstelle für jüdische Darlehnskassen,” Informationsblätter des Zentralausschusses der deutschen Juden für Hilfe und Aufbau, 1 August 1933; “Zentralstelle für jüdische Darlehnskassen e. V.,” Informationsblätter der Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland, January—March 1937. See. Bauer, Reactions, 31f.; Adler-Rudel, Selbsthilfe, 124–128. 11. “Zentralstelle für jüdische Darlehnskassen,” Informationsblätter der Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland, April–May 1937. Cf. Adler-Rudel, Selbsthilfe, 126. 12. Ibid, 128. 13. Hildesheimer, Berliner, 56f. 14. Beate Meyer, “Between Self-Assertion and Forced Collaboration: The Reich Association of Jews in Germany 1939–1945,” in Nicosia and Scrase, eds., Jewish Life, 149–169, here 157–163; Raul Hilberg, Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden: Die Gesamtgeschichte des Holocaust, German translation, revised and expanded edition, 3 vols. (Frankfurt, 1990), here vol. 1, 193–196. 15. Barkai, Wehr Dich; Paucker, Abwehrkampf, 45–62. 16. Arnold Paucker, “Der jüdische Abwehrkampf,” in Paucker and Werner E. Mosse, eds., Entscheidungsjahr 1932: Zur Judenfrage in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen, 1966), 458f.

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17. Letter from Eugen Panfosky to his son Alfred, 20 June 1920, LAB, E. Rep. 400–12, 1. Cf Kreutzmüller and Weihe, Panofsky, 41. 18. Haltung, in CV-Zeitung, 4 April 1933. Cf. Barkai, Entjudung, 50. 19. CV circular, 16 June 1933, CAHJP, HM 2/8693 (RGVA 721/1/18). 20. Zwischen Himmel and Erde, in CV-Zeitung, 1 June 1933. 21. Nietzel, Handeln, 100; Barkai, Wehr Dich, 309–311. 22. Ulrich Dunker, Der Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten 1919–1938: Geschichte eines jüdischen Abwehrvereins (Düsseldorf, 1977), 132f. 23. CV petition to the Prussian Trade and Business Ministry, 12 June 1933, GStA, PK, HA I, Rep 120 BB XVI, Fach 1, no. 1, vol. 11. 24. Alfred Wiener, Wirtschaftsboykott (Amsterdam, 1934). 25. CV petition to the Prussian Trade and Business Ministry, 12 June 1933, GStA, PK, HA I, Re120 BB XVI, Fach 1, no. 1, vol. 11. 26. Reich Economics Ministry circular, 25 September 1933, GStA, PK, HA I, Rep 120 BB XVI, Fach 1, no. 1, vol. 12. Cf. “Der Wille der Reichsregierung einzige Quelle des Wirtschaftsrechts,” CV-Zeitung, 11 October 1933, Adler-Rudel, Tätigkeitsbericht, Genschel, Verdrängung, 80f. 27. Prussian Minister for the Economy and Labor circular, 13 October 1933, GStA, PK HA I, Rep 120 BB XVI, Fach 1, no. 1, vol. 12. Cf. Nietzel, Handeln, 83. 28. CV petition to the RWM, 17 October 1933, GStA, PK, HA I, Rep 120 BB XVI, Fach 1, no. 1, vol. 12. 29. Memo of the Prussian Economy and Labor Ministry, 24 November 1933, GStA, PK, HA I, Rep 120 BB XVI, Fach 1, no. 1, vol. 12. 30. Cf. memo of the Prussian Economy and Labor Ministry, 5 December 1933; letter from the CV Landesverband Brandenburg to the Prussian Economy and Labor Ministry, 16 February 1934, both in GStA, PK, HA I, Rep 120 BB XVI, Fach 1, no. 1, vol. 12. 31. Adler-Rudel, Tätigkeitsbericht, 2. 32. Cf. undated memo (12 July 1935); letter to the Reich economics minister, 3 July 1935, both in CAHJP, HM 2/8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161); CV petition to the Reich economics minister, 12 September 1935; CV petition to the Reichsbank president, 26 October 1935, both in LBI, AR 1578. Cf. Ahlheim, Deutsche, 367f.; Barkai, Wehr Dich, 311–317. 33. CV memo, 31 October 1935, CAHJP, HM 2/8815 (RGVA 721/1/3269). 34. Letter from Marta Siedner to the CV, undated; letter from Lieba Hauser to the CV, 11 December 1935; letter from Samuel Binstock to the CV, undated (December 1935), all in CAHJP, HM 2/8815 (RGVA 721/1/3269). 35. Memo by CV, 13 January 1936, CAHJP, HM 2/8815 (RGVA 721/1/3269). 36. Letter from the CV to the Central Market Office for the City of Berlin, 5 February 1936, CAHJP, HM 2/8815 (RGVA 721/1/3269). 37. Letter from the district mayor to the CV, 18 February 1936, ibid. 38. Letter from the CV to the mayor of Berlin, 12 March 1936, ibid. 39. Letter from Maretzky to the CV, 21 April 1936, ibid. 40. Letter from the CV to S. Binstock, 28 April 1936, ibid. 41. Francis R. Nicosia, “German Zionism and Jewish Life in Nazi-Berlin,” in Nicosia and Scrase, eds., Jewish Life, 89–116, here 103.

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42. Reichmann, Bürger, 52. 43. Ibid., 112–116, citation 113. 44. “Official notice” in Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, July 1933. “Wirtschaftshilfe: Ergebnis und Ziel der Arbeit,” in Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, 10 March 1934; Adler-Rudel, Selbsthilfe, 123. Cf. Fred Field (Manfred Fackenheim), Bericht über meine Zeit in Berlin 1930–1943, 9 May 1960, 3 and 8, JMB, Fred Field, 2000/321/0. Mendelsohn was taken hostage in November 1942 and shot in the barracks of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler in Lichterfelde, ibid. Cf . also Vollnhals, Selbsthilfe, 370–391. 45. Adler-Rudel, Tätigkeitsbericht, 4. Cf. idem, Selbsthilfe, 121f. 46. Szanto, Dienste, 119. Alexander Szanto (born 1899) fled at the beginning of 1940 to Hungary and managed to avoid the mass deportations in summer 1944. In 1956 he emigrated to Great Britain, where, four years before his death in 1972, he composed this manuscript. Cf. ibid., 231–241. 47. In the Berlin Memorial Book (Berliner Gedenkbuch) there are listings for five persons with the name Hans Rosenthal. Since the person in the photograph is clearly between 20 and 30 years old, this is probably the Hans Rosenthal born in 1914 in Berlin and transported, on 2 March 1943 in the “factory operation,” to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. 48. Lotte Auerbach (born 1895) was deported to Riga on 26 October 1942 and murdered there on 29 October 1942. Cf. Lotte Auerbach, born 23 September 1895 in Berlin, Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv. 49. Manfred Fackenheim (born 1901) moved, after an apprenticeship at the Deutsche Bank, to the construction company Richter & Schädel. After pressure from the NSBO, he was dismissed, in April 1933, he worked for the “Wirtschaftshilfe.” Cf. Manfred Fackenheim (Fred Field). Report to the Jewish Community, 9 May 1960, JMB, 200/321. Fackenheim emigrated to the United States and was still living in Chicago in the mid-1990s. 50. Elsa Juda (born 1903) remained in Germany, despite having obtained a visa to enter Great Britain, and was deported to Theresienstadt in 1943 and from there to Auschwitz, where she was murdered on 28 October 1944. Cf. Szanto, Dienste, 140; Juda, Else, born 26 September 1903, Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv. 51. The lawyer Martin Brasch became, after the pogrom, the head of the Community-Gestapo Liaison Office in Berlin and was transported from there to a concentration camp, where he died soon after. See Szanto, Dienste, 131f. Fred Field recorded on the caption to the photo of Brasch “Murdered, Septicaemia,” JMB, 200/321. Brasch is, however, mentioned in neither the Berliner Gedenkbuch, in the Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv, nor the Yad Vashem Databank. 52. No clear information as to the fate of the woman named as “Frl. Dahlmann” in the caption to the photograph could be found. 53. Heinrich Grunwald (born 1888), who because of his expertise specialized in overseeing cost calculations in the “Wirtschaftshilfe,” was deported to Auschwitz on 12 March 1943 and murdered there on arrival. Cf. Szanto, Dienste, 140; Berliner Gedenkbuch; Grunwald, Heinrich, born 9 October 1888, Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv. 54. Bruno Mendelsohn (born 1888), was, from 1933, head of the Commercial Department in the Wirtschaftshilfe. He was transported in 1942 to Sachsenhausen,

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where he was murdered. Cf. Szanto, Dienste, 140; Mendelsohn, Bruno, born 13 November 1888, Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv. 55. No clear information as to the fate of the woman named as “Frl. Herzog” in the caption to the photograph could be found. 56. No information as to the fate of Boto Horwitz could be found. 57. Szanto, Dienste, 125. 58. Adler-Rudel, Tätigkeitsbericht, 4. 59. Ibid., 21. 60. Data from Adler-Rudel, Tätigkeitsbericht der Wirtschaftshilfe, October 1933– March 1935. 61. Ibid., January–February 1934, 1. 62. Ibid., January–March 1935, 5. 63. Cf. Vollnhals, Selbsthilfe, 319. 64. Alexander Szanto, “Economic Aid in the Nazi Era: The work of the Berlin Wirtschaftshilfe,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 4 (1959), 208–219, here 210. 65. Adler-Rudel, Tätigkeitsbericht der Wirtschaftshilfe, May 1934, 1f. Cf. Barkai, Entjudung, 52f. 66. Letter from Gebrüder Havenaar to Salomon Wagner, 23 July 1936, LAB, Rep A Pr Br 057, 517. 67. Letter from the Hauptmarkthallenverwaltung to the Oberbürgermeister, 22 July 1936; letter from the Wirtschaftshilfe to Salomon Wagner, 13 July 1936, both in LAB, Rep A Pr Br 057, 517. 68. Cf. DjGB. 69. Adler-Rudel, Tätigkeitsbericht, Januar, Februar und März 1935, 1f. 70. Szanto, Dienste, p 137. 71. “Wirtschaftshilfe der Gemeinde,” Jüdische Rundschau, 27 April 1934; Genschel, Verdrängung, 94f.; Szanto, Aid, 211. 72. In the “first year of its existence the Wirtschaftshilfe seldom handed out more than 10,000 RM per month in credit.” See Adler-Rudel, Tätigkeitsbericht, September 1933, Annex II. Cf. Also Bajohr, Arisierung, 148; Vollnhals, Selbsthilfe, 317f. 73. Letter from Kareski to Stahl, 4 October 1935, CAHJP, P 82, 21. 74. Adler-Rudel, Tätigkeitsbericht der Wirtschaftshilfe, October–December 1933, 3. 75. Ibid., September 1933, 2. Cf. Szanto, Aid, 212. 76. Zentralstelle für jüdische Wirtschaftshilfe circular, 14 June 1933, CAHJP, HM 2/8693 (RGVA 721/1/18). Cf. Barkai, Entjudung, 59. 77. Szanto, Aid, 212; idem, Dienste, 218. Cf. Report of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland for November 1938, n.d. (December 1938), BArch, R 8150, 47. 78. SD-Oberabschnitt Ost, Annual Report for 1938 of 13 January 1939, in Kulka and Jäckel, eds., NS-Stimmungsberichte, Dok. 408, 347–351, here 348. Cf. Mehr als tausend jüdische Vereine in Berlin, Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, 17 February 1934. Cf. Karin Voelker, “The B’nai B’rith Order (U. O. B. B.) in the Third Reich,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 32 (1987), 269–295, passim. 79. Membership Directory of the Verein selbständiger Handwerker jüdischen Glaubens e. V. zu Berlin (Berlin, n.d. [1929]; Handwerkerverzeichnis [1929]), 5. The dating is based on the fact that there were already adverts for the Jüdische Kreditverein in the register and among the membership there were some, such as

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Markus & Kochmann, Mitteldeutsche Spiegelfabrik, which as early as 1930 were no longer entered in the Berlin commercial registers. Cf. Membership Directory of the Verein selbständiger Handwerker, 18. 80. “Das jüdische Handwerk,” CV-Zeitung, 19 October 1933. 81. Handwerkerverzeichnis (1929), 6f. Cf. “Louis Wolff 60 Jahre,” Der jüdische Handwerker, February 1936. 82. Verein selbständiger Handwerker jüdischen Glaubens, ed., Mitgliederverzeichnis mit Kalender für das Jahr 1925 (Berlin, 1925). 83. “Vorwort,” ibid., 3f., here 4. 84. “Das jüdische Handwerk,” CV-Zeitung, 19 October 1933. 85. The figures are based on an overall estimate of those listed under the heading “New Members” in Der jüdische Handwerker, 1930–1937. 86. Handwerkerverzeichnis [1929], 12–48; Mitgliederverzeichnis des Vereins selbstständiger Handwerker jüdischen Glaubens und Reichsverband des jüdischen Mittelstands (Berlin, n.d. [1936]); Handwerkerverzeichnis (1936), 23–108. Bajohr, Arisierung, 145f. 87. Wilhelm Marcus, “Open letter,” Der jüdische Handwerker, September 1938. 88. “Der Reichsverband jüdischen Mittelstandes gegründet,” Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, July 1933. Cf. “Vermischtes,” Jüdische Rundschau, 30 June 1933. 89. Handwerkerverzeichnis (1936), 139–197. 90. Marion A. Kaplan, Die jüdische Frauenbewegung in Deutschland. Organisation und Ziele des Jüdischen Frauenbundes 1904–1938 (Hamburg, 1981), 308–323. 91. Letter from Hedwig Cohn to the Jüdischer Frauenbund, n.d. (1936); letter from the Correspondence Office M. Freudenberg to Käthe Mendes, 5 June 1936, both in CJA, 1, 75 C, Fr 1, 27, 9831. 92. Letter from Marthe Landsberger to Käthe Mendes, n.d. (1935–1936), CJA, 1, 75 C, Fr 1, 9, 9813. 93. Voelker, Order, 270f. 94. Unabhängiger Orden B’nai B’rith, Adreßbuch 1928/29 (Kassel, n.d. [1928]); Handbuch des Kartell-Convents der Verbindungen deutscher Studenten jüdischen Glaubens (Berlin, 1937). See letter from Hans Cohn to the CV, 29 April 1933, CAHJP, HM 2/8774 (RGVA 721/1/2586). 95. Small ad in Kartell-Convent Blätter, no. 2, February 1933. 96. Voelker, Order, 291–295; Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 95. 97. Lagebericht des SD-Hauptamtes for May/June 1934, n.d. (July 1934), in Kulka and Jäckel, eds., NS-Stimmungsberichte, Dok. 408, 72–78, here 74. 98. SD-Oberabschnitt Ost, Jahresbericht für 1938 vom 13 January 1939, in Kulka and Jäckel, eds. NS-Stimmungsberichte, Dok. 408, 347–351, here 349. See Szanto, Dienste, 111f. 99. Cf. Genschel, Verdrängung, 43. 100. These figures are based on a count of the small ads and Bezugsquelle in the Gemeindeblatt for the first editions in May and October in 1933, 1934, 1936, and 1937. 101. “Im Spiegel des Anzeigenteils,” Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, 22 May 1938. 102. “Da hilft nur … ,” Das Schwarze Korps, 12 May 1938.

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103. Kreutzmüller, Druck. 104. The price of a small ad was calculated per word in the CV-Zeitung. One word cost 10 Pfennig per line and 20 Pfennig for a display ad. Cf “Mitteilung,” CV- Zeitung, 16 November 1933. 105. Shepherd, Israel, 71. 106. “10 Jahre jüdische Darlehnskasse in Berlin,” Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, 16 June 1934. 107. Panwitz, Gesellschaft, 314. 108. Contract, 13 June 1924, AGC, HR B, 54854, 1940 (Jüdische Darlehnskasse). 109. “Die jüdische Darlehnskasse,” Der Jüdische Handwerker, October 1925; “10 Jahre jüdische Darlehnskasse in Berlin,” Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, 16 June 1934. 110. Cf. Peter Schubert, “Zwischen Nachtrag und Liquidation: Im Labyrinth des Jakob Michael,” in Gesellschaft Hackesche Höfe, ed., Die Hackeschen Höfe, Geschichte und Geschichten einer Lebenswelt in der Mitte Berlins (Berlin, 1993), 59–67. 111. Tables, AGC, HR B, 54854 (Jüdische Darlehnskasse). Cf. “Wilhelm Marcus, 50 Jahre,” Der jüdische Handwerker, April 1933. 112. Contract, 13 June 1924, AGC, HR B, 54854, 1940 (Jüdische Darlehnskasse). 113. Letter from Eugen Caspary to Georg Kareski, 5 September 1928, CAHJP, D/Be4, 325. 114. “10 Jahre jüdische Darlehnskasse in Berlin,” Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, 16 June 1934. 115. Ibid. 116. Minutes of Board Meeting, 21 July 1938, AGC, HR B, 54854. Cf. Szanto, Dienste, 135. 117. Adler-Rudel, Tätigkeitsbericht der Wirtschaftshilfe, September 1933, annex II. 118. Reich Deputation Report for November 1938, n.d. (December 1938), BArch, R 8150, 47; letter from the Loan Kassa to the District Court, 25 January 1939, AGC, HR B, 54854. 119. Letter from the head of the Security Police and the SD to the Jüdische Darlehnskasse, 26 January 1940, AGC, HR B, 54854, 1940. 120. Table, AGC, GR, 1741. 121. Volksbank Iwria open letter, 9 January 1928, ibid. 122. Cf. minutes of the setting up of Volksbank Iwria, 22 December 1927, AGC, GR, 1741. 123. Moshe Zimmermann, Die Deutschen Juden 1914–1945 (Munich, 1997), 30. 124. On Kareski, see Barkai, Wehr Dich, 301; Francis R. Nicosia, “Revisionist Zionism in Germany (II). Georg Kareski and the Staatszionistische Organisation, 1933–1938,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 32 (1987), 231–267, here 248f.; Herbert S. Levine, “A Jewish Collaborator in Nazi Germany. The strange career of Georg Kareski, 1933–1937,” Central-European History 8 (September 1975), 251–281, passim. 125. Minutes of the meeting setting up the Volksbank Iwria eGmbH, 22 December 1927, AGC, GR, 1741. 126. Letter from the Iwria Bank to the District Court, 8 November 1935, ibid. 127. Letter from the Iwria Bank to the District Court, 5 April 1929, AGC, GR, 1741a.

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128. Letter from the Iwria Bank to the District Court, 10 April 1929; accounts of the Iwria Bank at 31 December 1928, both in AGC, GR, 1741. 129. Accounts of the Iwria Bank at 31 December 1931, ibid. 130. Report of the Board for the financial year 1933, ibid. 131. Ibid. 132. “Jüdische Genossenschaftsbanken,” CV-Zeitung, 11 June 1936. 133. Report of the Volksbank Iwria for the financial year 1934, AGC, GR, 1741. 134. Report of the Volksbank Iwria for the financial year 1935, ibid. 135. Letter from the Financial Auditor Hermann Berlak to the Reich commissioner for credit institutions, 9 November 1937, BArch, R 3101, 10520. Cf. “Jüdische Genossenschaftsbanken,” CV-Zeitung, 11 June 1936; Albert Fischer, “Verfolgung, Selbsthilfe, Liquidation: Jüdische Genossenschaftsbanken im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933–1938,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 54 (2006), 3, 417–432, here 420. 136. Letter from the president of the Berlin Tax Office to the Reich Economics Ministry, 23 December 1933, BArch, R 3101, 11528. 137. Letter from the Reich Interior Ministry to the Reich Economics Ministry, 11 December 1936, BArch, R 3101, 10520. 138. Report of the Volksbank Iwria for the financial year 1935, AGC, GR, 1741. Cf. Fischer, Verfolgung, 418. 139. Report of the Volksbank Iwria for the financial year 1935, AGC, GR, 1741. 140. Volksbank Iwria / Iwria Bank Accounts for the years 1933 and 1936, ibid. 141. Report of the Volksbank Iwria for the financial year 1936, ibid. 142. “The situation of the Iwria-Bank,” Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, 3 October 1937. Cf. Information sheet of the Hitach-duth Olej Germania, October 1937, Cental Zionist Archive, Jerusalem, A 339/138. I am grateful to Ivonne Meybohm, Berlin, for this information. Cf. letter from the Jewish Community to Kareski, 2 September 1937, CAHJP, P 82, 21. Cf. also Levine, Collaborator, 277. 143. “General meeting of the Iwria-Bank,” Das Jüdische Volk, 3 September 1937. 144. “Neuordnung bei der Iwria-Bank,” Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, 5 September 1937. 145. Letter from the Berlin Mens’ Overcoats Manufacturer Migol to the District Court, 30 September 1937, AGC, GR, 1741. 146. “Die Iwria-Bank Berlin schließt,” Das jüdische Volk, 24 September 1937. 147. Letter from Reich commissioner for credit institutions to Economics Ministry, 2 December 1937, BArch R 3101, 10520; Berliner Chefbesprechungen, Minutes, 18 September 1937, SWA, IV. 1.4, 4-8-3. 148. Table, AGC, GR, 1741. 149. Minutes of the Founding Meeting of 16 January 1928; Annual Report of the Credit Association for 1928, both in AGC, Genossenschaftsregister (GR), 1735c. 150. Annual Report of the Credit Association for 1933, ibid. 151. Kopper, Markwirtschaft, 221. 152. “Gemeindeabende,” Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, January 1932. 153. Minutes of the first meeting of the Supervisory Board, 16 January 1928, AGC, GR, 1735c. Other board members were the lawyer Dr. Max Wollenstein, the

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sculptor Eugen Caspary, the decorator Louis Wolff, businessmen Adolf Schoyer and Gustav Zamory, as well as the banker Alfred Jaulus; ibid. 154. “Die erste jüdische Genossenschaftsbank Deutschlands,” Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, 6 January 1928. 155. Annual Report of the Credit Association for 1928, AGC, GR, 1735c. 156. Ibid. 157. Membership list of the Jüdischer Kreditverein für Handel und Gewerbe, nos. 452 and 510, AGC, GR, 1735. 158. Letter from the Jewish Credit Association to the District Court, 6 July 1931, AGC, GR, 1735c. 159. Ibid., 19 August 1931, AGC, GR, 1735c. 160. Letter from Felix Salomonis to the Jewish Credit Association, 31 August 1931, AGC, GR, 1735b. 161. Letter from the Jewish Credit Association to the District Court, 29 December 1931, AGC, GR, 1735c. 162. Annual Reports of the Credit Association for 1932 and 1933, AGC, GR, 1735c. 163. Annual Report of the Credit Association for 1933, ibid. 164. Kleemann later emigrated via the Netherlands to the United States, where he died in 1969. Cf. Bähr, Dresdner Bank, 606; Thomas Weihe, Die Personalpolitik der Filialgroßbanken 1919–1945. Interventionen, Anpassung, Ausweichbewegungen (Stuttgart, 2006), 106. 165. Annual Report of the Credit Association for 1934, AGC, GR, 1735c. 166. Annual Report of the Credit Association for 1936, ibid. 167. Annex 5 to the Report on the Audit of the Credit Association accounts, 20 February 1937, CJA, 75 C, vol. 1. 168. Annual Report of the Bank des jüdischen Mittelstandes for 1937, AGC, GR, 1735c. 169. List of members of the Jüdischer Kreditverein für Handel und Gewerbe, no. 916, AGC, GR, 1735. 170. Letter from the Credit Association to the District Court, 14 July 1937; Copy of the Meeting of the General Meeting, 14 April 1937, both in AGC, GR, 1735c. 171. Minutes of the Board Meeting of 9 November 1938, AGC, GR, 1735b. 172. Copy of the minutes of a meeting of the Supervisory Board, 14 November 1938, AGC, GR, 1735c. Alfred Jaulus apparently emigrated to Belgium. After that country was occupied, he was deported and perished in March 1945 in Buchenwald. Memorial sheet for Alfred Jaulus by Charlotte Fernley, n.d. Cf. Yad Vashem, The Central Database of Shoa Victim’s Names, entry for Alfred Jaulus, http:// db.yadvashem.org/names/nameDetails.html?itemId=1658897&language=en (accessed 5 June 2014). 173. Letter from the Bank des jüdischen Mittelstandes to the District Court, 31 December 1938, ibid.; “Kreditverein für Handel und Gewerbe,” Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, 3 January 1939. Bruno Gerson was deported to Auschwitz on 29 November 1942 and murdered there in January 1943. Cf. Gedenkbuch Berlins, Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv, Entry, Gerson, Bruno, born 24 February 1885 in Lissewo. Max Gronemann was deported to Auschwitz on 29 January 1943 and murdered there.

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Cf. Gedenkbuch Berlins; Gronemann, Max, born 3 June 1886 in Groß-Wittfelde, Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv. 174. Table of the Jüdischer Kreditverein für Handel und Gewerbe, AGC, GR, 1735a. 175. Annual Report of the Jewish Credit Association for 1932, AGC, GR, 1735c. “Others” included, for example, the actor Alexander Granach. Cf. List of Members of the Jüdischer Kreditverein für Handel und Gewerbe, no. 192, AGC, GR, 1735. 176. List of Members of the Jüdischer Kreditverein für Handel und Gewerbe, no. 94, ibid. 177. List of Members of the Jüdischer Kreditverein für Handel und Gewerbe, no. 13, ibid. 178. List of Members of the Jüdischer Kreditverein für Handel und Gewerbe, ibid. 179. Accounts of the Kreditverein für Handel und Gewerbe for 1933 and 1936, ibid. 180. Letter from the IHK to the District Court, 21 June 1932, AGC, GR, 2159a. 181. Minutes of the General Meeting, 10 September 1935, ibid. 182. List of the members of Leih- und Sparverein Esra, AGC, GR, 2159. 183. Ibid. 184. Letter from the IHK to the District Court, 21 June 1932, AGC, GR, 2159a. 185. Esra accounts at 31 December 1932, ibid. 186. Report of Esra’s Supervisory Board for the financial year 1936, ibid. 187. Report of Esra’s Supervisory Board for the financial year 1937, ibid. 188. Letter from the District Court to police headquarters, 31 October 1940, ibid. 189. Letter from the Deutscher Genossenschaftsverband to the Economics Ministry, 14 July 1936, BArch, R 3101, 10520. 190. Fischer, “Verfolgung,” 431. 191. Letter from the Dresdner Bank to the Reich Economics Ministry, 8 July 1932, BArch, R 3101, 11528. 192. Letter from the Dresdner Bank to the Reich Economics Ministry, 10 August 1932, ibid. 193. Annual Report of the Kreditverein for 1935, AGC, GR, 1735c. 194. Annual Report of the Kreditverein for 1936, ibid. 195. Annual Report of the Kreditverein for 1937, ibid. 196. Annual Report of the Kreditverein for 1936, ibid.; accounts of the Iwria Bank for 1936, AGC, GR, 1741. 197. My own conclusions on the basis of the DjGB. 198. Cf. Berlin Chief Meeting Protocol Files 1 to 7, SWA, A-10027–10033. 199. Grünfeld, Geschichte, 124f.

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Chapter 9

Individual Counter-Strategies



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Disobedience Despite the grave dangers they faced, Jewish businesspeople took bold individual measures to resist the increasingly threatening and humiliating sanctions against them. Only a few examples of this resistance are documented, since only fragments of police files have survived, and the information in those files, of course, relates merely to cases brought to police attention. Examples of resistance that were never uncovered are obviously not to be found in official reports. But certain information that survived clearly shows that when traders disobeyed laws they were not only seeking to protect their economic livelihoods but also to preserve their dignity under challenging and painful circumstances. As Wilfrid Israel, co-owner of the N. Israel department store, founded in 1815, observed in spring 1937: “It is by no means easy to undertake oneself the task of liquidating the legacy of five generations without despairing.”1 Another Jewish businessman who sought to keep his integrity intact was Dagobert Tischauer, the proprietor of the Kakadu wine tavern at Joachimsthaler Straße 10, which advertised in the Jüdische Rundschau as “Berlin’s loveliest and largest bar, on the Kurfürstendamm.”2 On 15 July 1935 it was visited by two police officers from outside Berlin (officers from the Gestapo and the Bavarian Political Police). Upon leaving the Kakadu at 2 am, they gave a Hitler salute. Since they were not local, they were probably unaware that Tischauer was Jewish. Either way, Tischauer was not willing to let them get away with it. Anti-Jewish skirmishes had been taking place all day

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long, with one person beaten up very close to the bar. Tischauer ordered the two policemen to leave immediately.3 This courageous move had repercussions. Just months later, Tischauer had to transfer the possession of his business to a certain Georg Jahns.4 In August 1935 Selma and Georg Cohn also decided they had had enough. The couple ran an unlicensed retail business in Schöneberg. After a lengthy investigation, police moved in to close it down on 25 July 1935,5 resulting in an angry fracas. Selma Cohn called the Nazis who had gathered at the store “damned bastards.” Shortly thereafter, she began telling her neighbors that she had been “appallingly treated.”6 When Georg Cohn began to investigate the identity of the Nazi party members present when his store was closed down, a baker named Fritz Wachsmuth reported him to the police on the grounds that the Cohns were spreading “hostile propaganda.”7 The couple was promptly detained for several days. After their release Selma Cohn set about organizing a protest boycott of Wachsmuth’s bakery.8 This only came to an end when Selma and Georg Cohn, along with their daughter Hanni, were once again arrested on 10 August 1935.9 Even three years later Jewish tradespeople were still protesting against persecution measures. On 19 June 1938 Lippmann Treitel ignored police orders and kept open his bakery at Tilsiter Straße 34. The local police deemed this act of defiance subversive and a breach of the public peace. The baker was arrested “to prevent further disturbances to the public peace” but released just hours later.10 Kurt Rosenberg, a 35-year-old proprietor of a ceramics store at Beusselstraße 3, also ignored a police order. He had been instructed to remove the clay vases that stood in the entrance to his basement store because they “impeded traffic.”11 After he had been summoned to the local police station and commanded to follow police orders, he said to a resident of the house—who dutifully reported the conversation—in a “partially ironic manner” that a police superintendant in the Third Reich was a “smalltime Hitler” running his precinct like a dictator and harassing people just because they were Jews. “There’s virtually nothing the German state wouldn’t stoop to when it comes to harassing Jews,” he reportedly said.12 Even though Jewish traders were strictly forbidden from plying their trade after the pogrom, a few continued to try selling their wares. Some of them even reopened their shops while others continued to do business by inviting customers into their homes.13 Others attempted to make a living as hawkers, despite this being fraught with risk. On 29 December 1938 Erna Oppler was reported to the police by four people when she was sighted trying to sell a few glasses, jugs, and a small vase.14 Two days later Jews were forced to use the names Israel and Sara. The commercial register files reveal how much it pained many to sign their name with – 260 –

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Individual Counter-Strategies

these compulsory names. Older businesspeople in particular often had to be admonished by clerks and reluctantly signed the names in abbreviated forms. Some, like Max Hamel, the proprietor of the Kristeller Bros. furriers, insisted on their real names and refused to sign with the compulsory “Israel.”15 As late as 1942 Jews were still attempting to earn a living or a few extra pennies on the flourishing black market, even though they were risking their lives doing so.16

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Closing Ranks Persecution also prompted Jewish businesspeople to join forces outside official organizations. A number of well-known Jewish retailers, including the owners of N. Israel’s, F. V. Grünfeld, and Kersten & Tuteur, held regular meetings to discuss the situation.17 Signed by over two hundred garment retailers, a petition submitted in March 1934 to Julius Lippert, the state commissioner of Berlin, attests to the existence of another relatively broad informal network. The petition was an appeal to Lippert to allow them to accept the cities welfare coupons, on the grounds that the consequences would otherwise be “disastrous on a scale that cannot possibly be intended by the government.”18 The embargo of Jewish businesses by the city, they argued, would result in a wave of defunct businesses that would in turn give rise to higher unemployment in Berlin. They also cited the statement made by the Reich economics minister that there should be no discrimination against Jewish business.19 Although the petition was rejected,20 the fact that over two hundred businesspeople scattered across the city added their signatures is evidence of substantial organizational structures. The business proprietors involved would first have been approached and consulted about the formulation of the petition. The letter would then have been circulated among the businesspeople concerned so that they could sign it. The endeavor appears to have been coordinated by Heinrich Haber, a joint partner with his father-in-law Isaak Baer of the business J. Baer, a boys and menswear shop at Badstraße 26 that was entered in the commercial register in 1927. It is worth noting that Haber was a member not only of the Reich Federation of Jewish Front Soldiers but also of the Reichsverbands des jüdischen Mittelstands (Reich Association of Medium-Size Business).21 This illustrates how the people organizing such initiatives were often members of Jewish associations and bodies. Similarly, those who set up assistance programs and organizations—such as cooperative banks— tended to be members of the Jewish community, Jewish lodges, and federations. Those who were active in these groups were also more likely to – 261 –

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pitch their businesses at a Jewish clientele than those who were simply members, let alone those who were not even members.22 Some obviously did so for purely pragmatic reasons. In his autobiography Peter Gay described how his father, a salesman for a glass and porcelain company, not only had himself listed in a directory of Jewish businesses in Berlin even though he was not a practicing Jew,23 but would demonstratively carry a Jewish newspaper in his coat pocket when he visited customers he knew to be of Jewish faith in the belief that this would help him selling his goods to them.24 With Jews turning to other Jews for support, whether out of habit, defiance, solidarity, or necessity, the number of Jewish institutions offering economic assistance also began to rise. It is nonetheless doubtful that the phenomenon resulted in what can accurately be described as a “Jewish economic sector,” as Avraham Barkai did. While an economy revolves around the primary sector, the focus here is on a large, clearly distinct subcategory of production. And alliances most certainly did not extend beyond clearly distinct sectors of the economy, not least because Jewish businesses were dispersed too unequally across the various sectors. Supply and customer relationships between Jews and non-Jews continued. Moreover, the area of commerce did not encompass all the Jews in the city. To refer to a “Jewish market,” as Saul Friedländer did, is also not entirely accurate because the conditions of access were by no means free.25 In this respect, it seems most fitting to classify the result of the move toward concentration as a Jewish economic segment. An economic segment might have a solid core but it has no fixed parameters. The fact that many Jewish businesspeople were unwilling to reach out publicly to a Jewish clientele and declined, for example, to place adverts in Jewish newspapers was partly because they were aware that these newspapers were perused and analyzed by the Nazis. Moreover, such advertisements did not necessarily solve retailers’ every problem since hardly any business could get by with Jewish customers alone. The Jewish population’s earnings had been so adversely affected that their spending dropped and demand shrunk. Jewish customers were therefore unable to compensate for the reduced demand that went hand in hand with persecution. Looking back, the daughter of Elias Feuerstein, a wine dealer killed in the pogrom, told the Compensation Office that her parents’ business began to decline dramatically as of 1933. “Whenever I visited Berlin … my father would complain that the boycott had brought his wholesale business in particular to a virtual standstill. He also told me that Jewish customers had lost their spending power and that demand for sparkling wine had dried up almost completely. Economically, my parents suffered greatly between 1933 and the events of November 1938. They had to let – 262 –

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Individual Counter-Strategies

employees go and cut back private spending to a minimum. They refrained from purchasing anything for their household or personal needs, such as clothes and suits and, as of 1933, stopped going on holiday.”26 With its reference to family support, her statement reveals a further inevitable, important mainstay of Jewish businesses. Since many small- and medium-sized businesses were family owned, family support was relied on. As of 1933 this support became increasingly vital, with husbands or wives having to step in for employees who had either emigrated or were dismissed because their wages could no longer be paid. Sons, daughter, nephews, and nieces were frequently given work, sometimes after they had lost outside jobs or trainee positions. As the pressures of persecution grew, traditional gender roles disappeared, as Marion Kaplan has shown.27 Prior to 1939 women faced fewer threats than men, and frequently took over the running of the business when their husbands got caught in the crosshairs of persecution. When Pesach Wagner, proprietor of the P. Wagner menswear factory founded in 1924, was accused of committing “racial defilement” (i.e., engaging in sexual relations with a non-Jew) in late October 1935, he transferred the company to his wife, who managed to keep it afloat until July 1940.28 A similar fate befell Ascher (Arnold) Meisner. Born in Lemberg (present-day Lviv) in 1883, he was described by a Jewish business partner as a “very hardworking and upstanding” gentleman and had owned a shop for new and used menswear at Skalitzer Straße 117 since 1911, which he entered in the commercial register in 1929 under his own name.29 When he was deported to Poland in October 1938, his wife Rosa (Rachela) took over the business. Even though both the store and its extensive warehouse had been pillaged, Rosa Meisner succeeded not only in persuading the shop’s suppliers to deliver new wares on credit but also to prevent the Registry Court from dissolving the company.30 Since Rosa Meisner was Polish, she was able to keep the business going even after the pogrom—when it was once again pillaged—and in June 1939 she placed an advertisement in the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt.31 When the Kreuzberg District Office instructed Meisner to close her business, she organized a final sale of her wares before it was officially deleted from the commercial register on 3 October 1939.32

Structural and Profile Adaption Changes to Business Name and Legal Form Since businesses were often the target of anti-Semitic harassment and attacks simply because the company name included a family name considered Jewish, many chose company names that did not have such a connotation – 263 –

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for the general public. The strategy predated 1933 and was already widespread enough to have garnered a mention in Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel The Oppermanns, published in exile in Amsterdam in 1933.33 The trend was consolidated after 1933, with a growing number of existing companies changing their names despite the difficulties the process entailed.34 Not only did it incur legal fees, but business partners, banks, post offices, tax offices, and the IHK had to be informed of the change, new company stationery had to be printed, and the company rebranded. According to commercial law, in the event of a takeover of a company, the new proprietors were not obliged to change the company name, even though this undermined the principle that a company name could not be misleading insofar as a company name could then imply a limited or general partnership when it fact it had a sole proprietor. The fact that so many companies were renamed despite the expenses this entailed shows just how much pressure Jewish businesspeople were under. But there could be no mention of this in written communications with the Registry Court. In November 1935 Silbermann & Co. GmbH, a millinery listed in the commercial register since 1922, justified an application for a name change on the grounds that: for ten years, our wares have been listed in the trademark registry of the Reich Patent Office under the trademark Silco. We also label the wares we sell with this name. In order to increase consumer awareness of the trademark, we began years ago to use the name Silco Herren-Hüte in our headed stationery etc, rather than Fa. Silbermann & Co. GmbH. Consequently, our customers are now familiar with this name and we would like to retain it when we convert our company into a general partnership, which we plan to do in the foreseeable future. We are therefore hereby submitting a request to change the name of our company from Silbermann & Co. G. m. b. H. to Silco-Herren-Hüte GmbH.35

Since the business in question was a limited-liability company, the Registry Court could not refuse the request. In contrast, the members of private partnerships were required to include at least one family name in the company name when registering it. Nevertheless, as of 1933 a growing trend could be observed in Department A of the commercial register to replace names that sounded Jewish with abbreviations or to dispense with them entirely whenever possible. Between 1933 and 1938 four of the eleven businesses whose company name included “Levy” and nine of the eighteen businesses with “Cohn” applied to change their name in the commercial register.36 For example, Walter Cohn, age 39, who left the blouse factory Klopstock & Co. to set up his own women’s clothing business, first entered it under his own name in the commercial register in February 1935. But – 264 –

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in November 1935 he submitted a request to the Registry Court to change it to Waco-Kleider Walter Cohn on the grounds that the trademark of the women’s dresses he manufactured and sold was Waco and that, moreover, a company with the same name as his was also housed at Mohrenstraße 40, which often led to confusion.37 The furniture company Möbel-Cohn Louis Cohn, owned by Louis Cohn and listed in the commercial register since 1901, set about changing its business structure in September 1933. The main store of this company, which, as the son of its founder recalled, had a Berlin-wide reputation for being a Jewish business,38 was converted into the newly registered company Großberliner Möbel-Vertrieb GmbH, founded by Louis Cohn and his son Julius and run by a non-Jewish manager.39 After Louis Cohn was made to submit an affidavit of means and the IHK launched an investigation into misleading use of a company name, Julius Cohn assumed sole proprietorship and in February 1935 renamed it Großberliner Möbelvertrieb Möbel-Cohn Julius Cohn.40 The photograph of the storefront at Große Frankfurter Straße 59, taken during the riots of June 1938 (figure 9.1), clearly shows that apart from the dot of the “i” and two umlauts, the company legend on the façade of the building had been removed, even though the company was still in business at this point. Since the building was owned by the family, it was presumably Julius Cohn himself who had the company’s nameplate removed,41 with the remaining fragments suggesting it was done hastily.42 Even though it obviously did not achieve its goal of preventing the rampant and infantile desecration of the storefront, the photograph encapsulates how confrontations over the identification and visibility of Jewish businesses were carried out in the public arena. Many Jewish businesses abbreviated or dispensed with names that had Jewish connotations in an attempt to avoid persecution in their daily dealings as illustrated by the volume of complaints and accusations of “misuse of a company name” submitted to the commercial register. Among the more prosaic results of this was that many Jewish businesspeople began to make their deliveries in vehicles that were either unmarked or bore the name of the company in an inconspicuous form—not least to protect their customers. As of 1933 many also ceased to add their name and address when they dispatched wares.43 As well as changing the company name, many business proprietors resorted to changing their form of business. As the Cohn family’s case illustrates, converting a business into a private limited-liability company (GmbH) was an opportunity to register it without including a family name and to limit liability. Nonetheless, few Jewish businesses went down this route. One factor was that in 1934 the Nazi regime introduced un– 265 –

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Figure 9.1. Photo by Klaus Mirbach of the Groß-Berliner Möbel-Vertrieb Cohn, Berlin, 1938. Stiftung Neue Synagogue Berlin—Centrum Judaicum, 7.82,10.

favorable tax treatment of private limited-liability companies and many smaller businesses were unable to find the 20,000 reichsmarks required to set up a private limited-liability company. The palpable loss of liquidity after the Great Depression, coupled with the effects of persecution and the embargo, prompted many Jewish businesspeople to join forces. Sole proprietors, for example, increasingly found Jewish partners, with the parent company then becoming a general partnership or a limited partnership. Another strategy—albeit one that required a relatively high investment—was to establish a subsidiary, not obviously identifiable as Jewish. In May 1932 Heinrich Noher and Erich Piket, partners in the women’s wear company Piket & Noher, entered in the commercial register in 1922, joined forces with Julius Tauber to found a business they named Jul. Tauber GmbH with partnership capital totaling 30,000 reichsmark. Renamed Julius Tauber GmbH in May 1933, the company also manufactured and – 266 –

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sold women’s wear and was housed, like its parent company, at Kronenstraße 28.44 Julius Tauber GmbH occupied the ground floor, while Piket & Noher used rooms on the third floor. Further adding to the confusion, Julius Tauber served as a managing director of Tauber & Co. GmbH, which set up business just down the street in 1936. It was only when Noher and Piket emigrated in 1938 that an auditor made the connection between the companies and deemed that their existence had served to “disguise” Piket & Noher’s business activities.45

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Incorporation of Non-Jews Yet another adaption strategy was to find a non-Jewish partner or general manager in order to shake off the stigma of being a Jewish business. The almost paranoid newspaper coverage of what were dubbed “scams” attests to the high number of appointments of non-Jews.46 However, smaller companies were not generally in a position to appoint a new general manager—simply because that position was filled by the owner(s). The appointment of a new general manager could therefore only take place in conjunction with the appointment of new partners. It was common practice for business proprietors with non-Jewish spouses to make them partners. Given that there had been a remarkably high number of marriages between Jews and non-Jews in Berlin, this option had a significant effect. Wilhelm Scholem, for example, owner of a workmen’s textiles company called Bekleidung für Werktätige Be Ha We Wilhelm Scholem, transferred proprietorship to his non-Jewish wife Martha shortly after the blockade. Max Markwald followed suit in March 1938. He was the proprietor of S. Bocksch, a wholesaler of women’s blouses entered in the commercial register in 1916 and described by the Dresdner Bank as “one of the most robust companies in the sector.” Initially, he appointed his non-Jewish wife Margarete as a partner.47 She retained her position when Markwald was forced to completely withdraw from the company under duress from the German Labor Front (DAF) in February 1939.48 The same tactic allowed Clara Jaschkowitz, the non-Jewish wife of Max Jaschkowitz, to keep his haulage firm on Rosenthaler Straße in Mitte going until mid-1943, when the whole family was tragically killed in a bomb raid.49 After April 1938, when a regulation was introduced requiring a permit for the sale of a business, the authorities ceased approving such arrangements. The solution also became an increasingly precarious defenseline against persecution, with the newspaper Der Stürmer railing against businesses run by the spouses of Jews. In July 1937 it published a vituperative article about Wilhelm Scholem’s workers’ textiles business, which ultimately resulted in its sale to a non-Jew.50 – 267 –

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According to the Third Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law, a company could be persecuted if it were “under the controlling influence of Jews.”51 In late 1938 staff at district tax offices compiling lists of local Jewish businesses frequently came to the conclusion that non-Jewish proprietors of businesses were indeed “under the controlling influence” of their Jewish spouses and therefore forced these businesses either to go into liquidation or to sell up. In the district of Schöneberg alone, two businesses were retrospectively deemed Jewish.52 Gertrud Wulf and Anton Beer were partners in the insurance brokers Anton Wulf, entered in the commercial register in 1903. In January 1937 Beer’s non-Jewish wife Nataly took over the agency. But in the opinion of the district tax office, she was “under the controlling influence of her Jewish husband.” The company was therefore categorized as Jewish on 21 December 1938. In early 1941 it was struck off the commercial register.53 The appointment of non-Jews as partners was frequently reflected in the renaming of a company, as illustrated by the example of the Arthur Leyser Herren Confection menswear business, entered in the commercial register in 1918 and housed at Kottbusser Damm 16/17. After the emigration of the Jewish partner, appointed just days after the start of the blockade in April 1933, Erna Leske joined the company as a partner in January 1934, turning it from a sole proprietorship into a general partnership. Tellingly, this change in its business form happened in conjunction with its renaming. The company was henceforth known as Leske & Leyser. This was at odds with the standard commercial practice of placing the name of the company’s founder first.54 But integrating non-Jewish partners into the business did not always prove successful. Georg Bing, proprietor of the Gustav Hamel & Co. silk wholesaler’s business, listed in the commercial register since 1902, reported that his profits had risen markedly after his “Aryan partner” left and opted not to transfer his business to a non-Jewish proprietor (when presented with the opportunity) in July 1938.55 Amid the increasingly racist atmosphere of the late 1930s, other new proprietors buckled under the pressures they faced. The Klein & Hodin sack factory and wholesale business at Brunnenstraße 181, entered in the commercial register by Adolf Klein and Leopold Hodin in 1933, was joined in April 1936 by Hedwig Ritter, a non-Jewish seamstress. In September 1938 she became company proprietor but told the Registry Court in April 1939 that she had suffered a nervous breakdown and could no longer keep the business going. She requested its removal from the commercial register.56 Her case exemplifies yet another widespread strategy. Jewish business proprietors often attempted to install friends who had held positions of responsibility in the company in their place. When the Leo Falken– 268 –

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stein upholstery fabric dealership was to be transferred to non-Jewish proprietorship in March 1938 “in light of the situation,” he attempted to install Karl Severin, the company’s longtime manager, as his successor.57 Although Severin had his boss’s trust, he lacked capital. Falkenstein was even willing to sell his business at cut-price, doing his best to help Mr Severin raise 100,000 reichsmarks, as a clerk at their bank noted.58 Against this backdrop, it was not uncommon for Jewish businesspeople who had handed over the possession of their companies to become its representative overseas, as was the case with the Loeb & Sutheim fur garments and fur dealers, which had been listed in the commercial register since 1916. “During a visit to the company, [partners] Josef and Ludwig Loeb … declared their intention to Aryanize their business,” noted a clerk at the Dresdner Bank. “The company also employs two longtime members of staff, one of whom makes garments and one of whom is a sales representative. In the opinion of the Loebs, these two employees are most certainly in possession of the skills and competence required to run the company. They themselves intend to assume responsibility for overseas buying and selling, thereby guaranteeing sound merchandise purchasing.”59

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Adaptation of Supply With economic considerations in mind, businesses generally stuck to imported products and services. From 1933 onward there was little change to the broad outline of business sectors, as the Database of Jewish Businesses in Berlin shows, although it should also be noted that not all businesspeople registered every change of sector, with the exception of companies active in sectors from which Jews were excluded. Faced with the choice of either going into liquidation or switching to another sector from which they were not excluded, many companies opted for the latter. There was a clear tendency in sectors subject to greater state control, such as food wholesalers, to switch to other lines of work. In June 1938 Jews were officially banned from working in the wholesale food business and after the pogrom, from the retail sector as well. In January 1939 the forage trader Julius Gensler wrote an illuminating letter to the District Court: “As the proprietor of a registered business I used to operate both a grain supply and a sample bag wholesaler’s. In the light of the economic measures taken against Jews I suspended my grain supply business in June last year in accordance with the law, and am therefore deregistering this line of business. However, my wholesaler’s company is still in business.”60 The former forage trader was able to keep it afloat until the summer of 1939. In August 1939, however, the Registry Court decided that the company was to be removed from the commercial register, which duly happened on 8 September 1939,61despite Gensler’s protests. – 269 –

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Despite a reluctance to reposition themselves completely anew, most companies did adapt their range of services and products to the changing circumstances. In May 1933 the highly renowned Jewish textiles store Hermann Gerson at Werderscher Markt went so far as to advertise that it stocked SA and SS uniforms.62 Although the garments trade indirectly benefited from the gradual economic upturn in 1933/34, the attempt to profit from the increased demand for uniforms proved in the medium term as unsuccessful as the attempt to profit from the burgeoning armaments industry.63 On the contrary, the large companies known to be Jewish specialized in armamentsrelated areas, such as Orenstein & Koppel, the Auergesellschaft, and Simson & Co., were persecuted most forcefully. Nevertheless, even in 1938 companies such as the electrical heating manufacturer Wechsler & Henning remained in business supplying the armaments industry.64 In a further bid to adapt goods and services, many companies stepped up efforts to boost their overseas ties and generate foreign currency. Since this was in short supply, these companies were relatively protected for some time.65 The N. Israel department store built up its export department and founded a branch in London in partnership with Francis & Co.66 Even when companies were threatened with closure, their proprietors and shareholders often attempted to protect themselves by pointing to their exports. Faced with a Registry Court order to remove his business from the commercial register, stock exchange trader Paul Loewe told the Registry Court in December 1933 that he “worked in an international industry, providing the Reichsbank with foreign currency every month. It is extremely doubtful that I would continue to enjoy the trust of foreign companies, were my business to be removed from the commercial register.”67 Even though the IHK established that the 66-year-old banker’s earnings amounted to just 120 pounds sterling a year, Loewe was able to postpone the liquidation of his business until 1938.68 An examination of the files of the foreign exchange board at the Brandenburg State Archive revealed that, until 1937, companies engaged in foreign trade enjoyed a relatively high turnover that occasionally even exceeded yields in the years prior to 1933, when the banking crisis struck.69 Overseas business therefore compensated for the decline of domestic business.70 With the permission of the Reich Office for Foreign Exchange Control, which was convinced that it would help boost foreign currency takings, fifteen ladies’ garments manufacturers based in Berlin acted as mutual guarantors and set up branches in Britain in March 1934.71 They all survived until 1938. The extent to which foreign currency earnings served as protection is illustrated by the fact that the best-known companies in the ladies’ garments sector, which was heavily geared to export, remained nearly exclusively in Jewish hands until 1937/38.72 It is evidence of the popularity and significance of Berlin’s garment business that in November – 270 –

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1938 only eight of the 140 Jewish businesses active in this sector, which took advantage of the aforementioned additional export procedure, did not come from Berlin.73

Relocation

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. . . to the City A considerable number of Jewish businesspeople opted to move from smaller towns and villages to Berlin, even though such a step entailed substantial costs and was also potentially problematic for sole proprietors who risked losing their core customers. But the city appeared to offer a degree of protection against persecution.74 As early as the nineteenth century a high number of businesses moved from Silesia and Posen (present-day Poznan) to the new capital of the new German empire, such as the M. Kempinski & Co. wine dealership.75 The trend gathered momentum after the First World War, when many companies from regions that now belonged to Poland according to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles relocated to Berlin. As Moritz Loeb stressed in the 1930 election campaign for its Assembly of Representatives, the Jewish Community’s relatively stable finances were due “not least to the arrival of affluent persons who have moved their businesses here.”76 The growing trend apparent as of 1933 was therefore anything but a new one. Many individual cases attest to this exodus from the countryside, triggered by racist persecution. In 1928 Moritz (Moszek) Wellner, whose family came from East Upper Silesia, moved from Finow to Berlin in 1928, and opened a tailor’s. In 1934 Simon (Szymon Lajb) Wellner followed his brother’s example. With the tailor’s he had owned in Finow since 1919 facing ongoing harassment, he relocated to Berlin.77 One year later the Samuel family, which had owned a department store in the town of Arnswalde (present-day Choszczno) for three generations, sold it under duress from local anti-Semites and moved to Berlin. Ernst Samuel then tried earning his living as a tobacco goods dealer.78 In 1937 Martin Bum, the proprietor of a yarn factory, moved his export company Textila Textil Ausfuhrgesellschaft mbH from Cottbus to Berlin in search of less-endangered business opportunities.79 The last Jew to relocate his registered business to Berlin was Casper Jacobsohn, who had to sell the shoestore in Guben he had owned the since 1903 to a non-Jew and opened a shoe wholesalers in the capital in February 1938.80 In 1935/36 an increasing number of businesses from other cities with large Jewish communities also moved to Berlin.81 Harry Breitbarth, a merchant from Breslau (present-day Wrocław) who represented the – 271 –

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Czarnowanz (present-day Czarnowąsy) glassworks, founded a branch office in Berlin in August 1935,82 which by late 1936 had to be declared as the company’s main headquarters. In the process the Registry Court in Breslau made a telling error. The court’s officials mistakenly assumed that the company was moving its headquarters to Oppeln (present-day Opole),83 the provincial capital of Upper Silesia. At this point, Jewish businesses could rely on protection because the town was still under the supervision of the League of Nations.84 The mistake was corrected in December 1936 and the Breslau branch was removed from the commercial register in October 1938.85 Shortly thereafter, Harry Breitbarth emigrated to the Netherlands. There, he liquidated his business, although the Frankfurt am Main Association of German Glassworks took over day-to-day operation.86 In January 1938 R. F. Waechter & Co. GmbH jewellery wholesalers moved from Frankfurt to Berlin, where the company was turned into a sole proprietorship and remained listed in the commercial register until 1942.87 In order to establish themselves in Berlin, many new arrivals took over businesses—apparently with the help of the Wirtschaftshilfe—that had shut down because their proprietors’ emigration. Thus, after selling his department store in Loetzen (present-day Giżycko) in East Prussia to a non-Jew because of “unceasing, personal persecution and harassment,” Alfred Lewin took over the aforementioned confectioner’s Hansa Konditorei GmbH.88 It was against this backdrop that the Berlin Gestapo, in May 1938, considered curbing the “exceptionally high influx of Jews to Berlin” by imposing a ban on their gainful employment.”89

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. . . within the City As well as the pronounced migration of Jews to Berlin, many others relocated within the city.90 This was often a reaction to the arrival of Nazi organizations in the neighborhood, which left business proprietors with a choice of either steeling themselves for frequent attacks and riots or moving away. Many opted for the latter. With this segregation setting in even before the Nazis seized power, there were virtually no Jewish businesses left in the vicinity of SA haunts by 1933. The database includes only one Jewish business in Petersburger Straße, home to one of the SA’s oldest hangouts, the Kegler Heim bowling alley—at the opposite end of the street. By 1933 not a single Jewish business was left on Hebbelstraße in the district of Charlottenburg, because it was home to the clubhouse of the notorious storm troopers.91 By now, the number of Nazi organizations was rising rapidly, and with them, the number of troublespots. In March 1933 a memorial site was established at the former Karl-Liebknecht-House on Bülowplatz to – 272 –

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Horst Wessel, a son of a vicar and SA stormtrooper who posthumously became a leading martyr of the Nazi movement, prompting the discount department store Jonass & Co. to move away from Prenzlauer Tor. The stylish premises it had opened only three years previously were now directly on the route taken by Nazi parades proceeding from the memorial site to Wessel’s grave.92 Another business that had to move was the Etablissement Mayer (Etam), a retail chain of stocking sellers, which quickly relocated in 1933 after the Gestapo set up their headquarters next door, making the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße one of the most dreaded addresses in Germany.93 For manufacturing companies a move within the city was an ambitious undertaking, and many opted simply to move their administrative office, leaving the actual operation in the original location. This was the path chosen by the widow of Georg Eppenstein, who was first noticed by the Nazis because his factory was close to an SA clubhouse and was then murdered during the “Köpenick Week of Blood” in June 1933. In 1934 his widow moved the administration of Eppenstein’s garlic products factory to the Tiergarten district and then to Charlottenburg, while production remained in Köpenick.94 While keeping at a distance from the Nazis was one strategy, another was to move closer to potential (Jewish) customers in order to improve business opportunities—as illustrated by the move of retailers to particular spots. For example, there was a notable concentration of Jewish businesses close to Meineckestraße, where there were also many offices providing services related to the process of emigration and estate transfers. Businesses in this street could therefore rely on the custom from Jews both near and far who were running errands in the area.

Complaints and Petitions … in Court In the early years of the Nazi regime, victims of persecution measures pursued by legal means lodged appeals with some degree of success.95 In late 1933 Leo and Julius Katz, partners since 1927 in the Deutsche Kolonialhaus Bruno Antelmann Nachf., were informed by the Registry Court that their company was to be removed from the commercial register because its name contained the word “deutsch.” They appealed, with their lawyer Richard Salomon arguing that the company was founded in 1896 as a colonial goods store and enjoyed international standing. It would therefore be unreasonable, he proposed, to demand a name change, since the motives behind the demand—as evidenced by the sheer number of such cases—had nothing whatsoever to do with the business but rather – 273 –

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with “political considerations.”96 Surprisingly, Salomon won the case. On 12 April 1933 the Court of Appeals repealed the Registry Court decision on the grounds that the description “deutsch” was a beneficial addition. After some hesitation the IHK then also decided that it had no objection to the company name.97 It was only in the wake of the Reich Citizenship Law and—as they explicitly told the Registry Court—a Gestapo order, that the partners had to change the name of their company to Kolonialwarenhaus Bruno Antelmann Nachf.98 In fact, it remained possible to take legal action against torts even after the proclamation of the Reich Citizenship Law. Until the summer of 1938 Jews regularly brought before the administrative court cases such as the police refusal to issue them with itinerant trading licences on the grounds that they were enemies of the state.99 Bureaucratic norms, registered trademarks, and patents also offered a degree of legal protection.100 It is worth noting that a high number of businesses entered in Berlin’s commercial register had existed for decades, presumably because their proprietor hoped this would provide them with some security and decrease the likelihood that the companies would simply disappear without a trace. One of the last to attempt this approach was Heinrich Busse, who in late August 1938 entered his carpentry tools wholesaler’s—a business founded in Friedenau in 1920—in the commercial register. The news of its official opening was published in the state gazette, the Reichsanzeiger, on 9 November 1938—the day the pogrom started.101 Once a company was registered, Jewish businesspeople did their utmost to keep it in the commercial register as long as possible. Unlike the name of the proprietors, the company name did not necessarily indicate whether or not it was a Jewish business, even after the introduction of compulsory names in January 1939. Of Adolf Hanau’s banking business, which moved from Düsseldorf to Berlin in 1938, an official at the IHK observed in February 1942 that “Adolf Israel Hanau was only keen to retain the company in the commercial register so he did not have to close it down under his Jewish name.”102

. . . to the Authorities Jewish businesspeople not only took legal steps but also petitioned against the destruction of their livelihoods, following the example of the CV, using similar arguments and citing economic considerations. In July 1933 Max Warburg, whose Hamburg bank also had a sizeable branch in Berlin, wrote to Berlin’s mayor Heinrich Sahm, who had told US municipal officers that Jews were free to go about their business “unimpeded,” saying that – 274 –

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it is true that Jews in Germany are not facing pogrom-like circumstances in the conventional sense. … But there is no disguising the fact that Jews in Germany are currently suffering institutional and personal treatment amounting to nothing less than a civic deprivation of rights that will result in systematic economic uprooting. I will refrain from going into further details since I simply cannot believe that you have not been informed of the nature and extent of measures being taken against German Jews; quite apart from the unconscionable emotional distress felt by the unfortunate victims of these developments, they will ultimately bring about the economic ruin of the majority of Jews living in Germany.103

In September 1933 Arthur Niclas and Alfred and Walter Sternberg, partners in the renowned underwear wholesalers Sternberg & Salomon, entered in the commercial register in 1900, submitted a letter to the Reich Economics Ministry in which they pointed out that the embargo did not only affect Jewish retailer traders but also wholesalers and therefore the entire economy.104 Such petitions underscored the efforts of the CV, which were often successful, and were sent not only to the Reich president and the Reich Economics Ministry, but—until its dissolution in 1934—also to the Prussian Economics Ministry. In the spring of 1933 some petitions were even submitted to Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Göring.105 In 1934 the subject of the petitions was mainly the ongoing embargo and the ban on Jews accepting goods vouchers distributed to cover household requirements as part of matrimonial loans. In January 1934 Franz Gutmann submitted a petition to the Reich Finance Ministry, which was in charge of marriage loans. In early 1934 he relocated his wool and silk dealership, entered in the commercial register in 1931 as Gutmann’s-Etage Franz Gutmann, from Leipziger Straße to Tauentzienstraße 18. Addressing his letter to State Secretary for Finance Fritz Reinhardt, Gutmann explained that although he was “non-Aryan,” he could prove that his family had lived in Germany for hundreds of years and that he had always conducted himself patriotically.106 He also pointed out that, while serving as a soldier between 1914 and 1918, he had been promoted to lieutenant, been wounded several times, and in 1919 had taken part, as squadron leader, in the “crushing of the Munich Soviet Republic.”107 Gutmann also enclosed a letter to Reinhardt signed by some of his non-Jewish employees pointing out that, were he to be refused a marriage loan, the business might have to close and they would therefore lose their jobs.108 A few weeks later the furniture dealer Ludwig Rogasner appealed to the state commissioner. Rogasner was a partner in Leiser & Rogasner, a furniture sales company in the district of Neukölln entered in the commercial register in 1921. Despite his Jewish background, the businessman requested permission to take out a marriage loan and referred to the fact that he had been seriously wounded in the First – 275 –

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World War but had never claimed a pension since his financial situation rendered it unnecessary. However, he wrote, he could no longer afford to lose any customers given the current economic difficulties.109 Even though both requests were turned down, they serve as evidence that—of course— some Jewish businesspeople held nationalist and conservative beliefs and—like many others—failed to grasp that the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitism did not allow for any compromise of the profoundly racist definition of Jewishness.110 What is also striking about the petitions of Gutmann and Rogasner is that neither shied away from enlisting support within the SA. While Rogasner explicitly proposed that the authorities apply to the SA’s Host Wessel division, squadron 13/3,111 Gutmann went so far as to submit a letter from his employees signed by a low-ranking SA leader.112 When attacks against Jews began to turn increasingly violent in the spring of 1935, many businesspeople appealed to the police for protection. Officers succeeded in clamping down on the violence only temporarily. In July 1935 the manager of the Hansa Konditorei confectionery, which had suffered a spate of SA attacks, sent two petitions to the chief of police requesting that his coffeehouse be put under round-the-clock police protection on the grounds that the riots were likely to ruin the business completely, leaving “not only myself and my family but also the families of my employees without livelihoods.”113 Tellingly, this petition went unanswered by Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, the recently appointed chief of police, under whose leadership the police would eventually become an integral part of the Nazis’ persecution apparatus. In March 1935 Siegfried Schragenheim, who owned a photography studio at Schönhauser Allee 117, wrote to the Reich Economics Minister Schacht to complain that attacks and blockades had brought his business to a standstill: “I see this sort of boycott of my business, for which I am not aware of the slightest reason, as a serious intervention in the free economy and above all as a breach of the directives publically announced by you. … The fact that this sort of thing can happen in Berlin attests to the greater significance of this particular case. To the best of my knowledge, it came to the attention of a wider public that a poster calling for a boycott prompted a crowd made up of thousands to march in front of a Jewish store and that boycott posts were positioned outside the store for several days.”114Although Schragenheim stressed the symbolism of the blockade in the Reich capital and the CV backed up his petition by sending a copy of a letter of complaint to the Gestapo, no reply appears to have been sent by Schacht.115 There is, however, evidence to indicate that shortly after submitting his petition, Schragenheim was taken into “protective custody.”116 Jewish businesspeople eventually came to the realization that petitions were unlikely to prove effective and moreover drew attention to the – 276 –

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petitioner, potentially attracting further persecution. For this reason few petitions can be found in the files after the introduction of the Reich Citizenship Law. One of the few to submit a petition at this stage was Theodor Liedtke, the proprietor of an apron store entered in the commercial register in 1921. In 1938, after the death of his non-Jewish wife, Liedtke submitted a series of petitions showing that, since he only had two Jewish grandparents, he was not Jewish according to the terms of the First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law. In August 1940, after each of these petitions had been rejected, Liedtke attempted to secure his property by transferring it to his daughter. But the notary tasked with the transfer reported him for failing to mention that he was officially categorized as Jewish, and a case was brought against him in the spring of 1941.117 Describing him as a thoroughly “incorrigible” person, the court sentenced Liedtke to eighteen months in jail in September 1942. Upon completion of his sentence, he was deported and murdered.118

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. . . at the Consulate Almost a quarter of Jews living in the capital were not German citizens. With Berlin home to embassies and consulates, many of them sought diplomatic help from persecution. As most Jews with non-German nationality were Polish citizens, the Polish consulate was especially busy—until the number of petitions dropped in 1936/37 when the Polish government began implementing its own anti-Semitic policies. Nevertheless, complaints lodged during this period today fill nine bulging files in the Political Archive of the Foreign Ministry.119 A fairly typical example was set by a number of Polish market traders who turned to the consulate general in April 1933, complaining that they had been barred from plying their trade at certain markets in the southeastern district of Treptow. The consulate general promptly called upon the Foreign Ministry to confirm or deny the Polish nationals’ claims and demanded to know whether it was true that nationals of Poland and elsewhere were being impeded from plying their trade at markets as a result of any laws.120 The consulate made no mention of the fact that the market traders in question were Jewish, but the mayor’s response to the petition was more direct. Sahm attempted to placate the embassy by pointing out that the ban “did not apply to Polish nationals but rather to citizens of Germany and elsewhere belonging to the Jewish race.”121 As a result of “the many hundreds of complaints … submitted partly by diplomatic representations to the Foreign Ministry but mainly by foreign consulates to the relevant authorities,” a departmental meeting on “the treatment in Germany of foreigners, especially foreign Jews” was – 277 –

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held at the Foreign Ministry on 25 August 1933:122 “The participants agreed that their foreign citizenship afforded foreign Jews operating private enterprises … equal standing with Aryans in legal and administrative terms.”123 In order to avert further complaints, the civil servants decided to inform all the relevant authorities of this principle and also the need to uphold it.124 But in the light of continued aggression, the Reich interior minister sent out a memo in October 1934 reiterating that “everyone with a permit was allowed to attend, buy and sell at trade fairs, fairgrounds and weekly markets … and stressing that it was the responsibility of the police to protect foreign tradespeople going about their business and to hold anyone disturbing the peace to account.125 The case of Chaja Knepel shows just how effective even the threat of a complaint to the consulate could be. In September 1935 Knepel, who owned a butter shop at Reichenberger Straße 90 with her husband Leo, reported to local police in the district of Kreuzberg that a party member had threatened to take photographs of her customers and send them to the newspaper Der Stürmer. When she declared her intention to go to the consulate were it to happen again, the officer on duty promised her police protection and even warned the culprit to desist.126 The fact that no such photographs appeared in the Stürmer suggests that the warning did not fall on deaf ears. Knepel’s butter shop remained in business until 1938.127 On 8 November 1938, one day after Herschel Grynszpan shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath at the German embassy in Paris, Wilfrid Israel, partner of the N. Israel department store and a British citizen, turned to the British embassy, in the name of the Reich Deputation, for protection against the inevitable repercussions.128 But his appeal was in vain. While foreign citizenship offered no protection against aggression and looting anymore, the consulates did at least ensure that Jewish businesspeople— contrary to the original intention of the Reich economics minister—could resume business after the pogrom. Among those affected was Hans Eugen Spiegler. Born in Brno, he owned two cobblers at Motzstraße 41 and Berliner Straße 135 in Wilmersdorf, which were both devastated on 10 November 1938. On 23 November Spiegler was ordered by an officer from the local police station to shut his business for good. The Czechoslovak legation appealed to the Foreign Ministry on his behalf, requesting that Spiegler be allowed to reopen his business and also demanding 25,000 reichsmarks as compensation.129 In early January 1939 the Foreign Ministry let the legation know that the police authority responsible had been informed that Spiegler’s business had closed only temporarily and would be reopening.130 The reprieve, however, also proved only temporary, with Germany invading Czechoslovakia shortly thereafter. In early July 1939, just four months after German troops had marched into Prague, the Reich – 278 –

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economics minister announced that Jews “previously holding Czech citizenship” were also subject to the forced closure of shops and craftsmen workshops.131 At this point, the Jersey Club GmbH, entered in the commercial register in 1922, was still protected by the fact that its partners possessed French citizenship. In July 1940 a trustee in absentia summoned by the Court of Appeals requested that the company be allowed to remain in business. “In terms of the administration of this French asset, closing down this business strikes me as wrong: despite being Jewish-owned, it has existed for years because all relevant bodies acknowledge that the Jersey Club GmbH manufactures excellent dresses and suits and sells them in its store at Kurfürstendamm 230 with great success; the store enjoys a branch-wide reputation and its closure would mark a major loss. … I would also like to point out that bearing in mind ties to Paris, the store has economic potential in the event of a resumption of trade since it has scope for expansion and in the past employed some 180 workers and members of staff.”132 The more countries occupied by the Wehrmacht, the less protection the respective consulates were able to offer Jewish businesspeople. By the end of 1939 businesses owned by Polish Jews were placed under the administration of the Reich’s property trust for the Eastern occupied territories and liquidated. Once the destruction of Jewish commercial activity was underway there too, the next to go as of early 1941 were businesses owned wholly or partly by Jews with Belgian, Dutch, and French citizenship. Thus, possession of the Jersey Club was passed in late 1941 to a factory proprietor from Thüringen.133 However, businesses owned by Jews with British and US citizenship were placed under enemy property administration and liquidated as rarely as businesses owned by Jews with the citizenship of a neutral country.134 In order to make it look as though enemy property administrators were acting in good faith, the Reich Commission for Administering Enemy Property even refused to allow Nazi Gauwirtschaftsberater to participate in the selection of appropriate administrators.135 In this respect, a transfer to foreign proprietorship—i.e., the formal sale of a company to a neutral, British, or US party—arguably offered the best protection for a business. The scope afforded by such a move is well illustrated by the case of Jakob Michael. Upon emigrating to the Netherlands in 1931, he transferred his majority stake in Emil Köster AG, a parent company of the Deutsche-Familien-Kaufhaus-AG (Defaka), to a US holding society. In 1938 the Köster company took over the warehouse of the Jewish ladies’ coat factory Cohn, Walder & Co.136 Later it was not only exempt from the trade ban but even managed to acquire the N. Israel department store in February 1939.137 Founded in March 1815, this had long been a thorn in the side of the Nazis on account of its name and its loca– 279 –

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tion opposite the town hall, but they were unable to force its sale because one of its partners, Wilfrid Israel, held British nationality.138 Even though Köster AG was placed under enemy property administration in 1940, it continued to expand and in 1943 took possession of the famed Jewish department store De Bijenkorf in Amsterdam.139 After the war Michael once again became the main partner in Köster AG and ended up selling the Defaka in 1954 to Merkur Horten & Co.140

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Notes 1. Letter from Wilfrid Israel, spring 1937, cited in Shepherd, Israel, 29. 2. Advert, Jüdische Rundschau, 7 July 1933. 3. Letter from Police Station No. 133 to the Gestapo, 16 July1935, LAB, Rep A Pr Br 030, 21638. 4. DjGB. Cf. “Berliner Brief,” Der Stürmer, no. 23, June 1937. 5. Report from Police Station No. 152, 26 July 1935, LAB, Rep A Pr Br 030, 21617. 6. Report from Police Station No. 152, 25 July 1935, ibid. 7. Witness statement of baker Fritz Wachsmuth, 26 July 1935, ibid. 8. Letter from the NS Group Olivia to Police Station No. 152, 9 August 1935, ibid. 9. Police Station No. 152 Reports, 10 August 1935, ibid. Georg and Selma Cohn were deported on 17 November 1941 to Kowno, where they were murdered. Cf., Cohn, Georg, born 25 April 1887 in Landsberg (Warthe), and Cohn, Selma, née Jacubowski, born 15 May 1891 in Powidz, Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv. Their daughter, Hanni Cohn (born 8 April 1916 in Breslau), was apparently not deported. 10. Police Station No. 8 Report of 19 June 1938, LAB, A Rep Br Pr 030, 21619. Treitel was deported to Riga on 5 September 1942, where he was murdered on 9 September 1942. Cf. Treitel, Lippmann, born 7 June 1880 in Filehne, Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs; Berliner Gedenkbuch, 1287. 11. Witness statement, 26 September 1938, LAB, Rep A Pr Br 030, 21619. 12. Police Station No. 113 Report, 26 September 1938, ibid. On the basis of Fritz Kilian’s report, which in addition claimed that Rosenberg had been “exploring every avenue to emigrate and warding off the take-over of his business for ages,” Rosenberg was arrested as a “communist” and handed over to the Gestapo early in the morning of 27 September 1938. Cf. Police Station No. 113 Report, 26 September 1938, ibid. The businesssman did, it seems, manage to emigrate eventually. In any event he is not mentioned in the Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv. See Rosenberg, Kurt, born 26 December 1903 in Berlin, Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv. 13. State Presidents’ Special Report on the De-Jewification of Retail Trade in Berlin, 5 January 1939, BArch R 3101, 32170. 14. Police Station No. 141 Report, 29 December 1938, LAB, Rep A Pr Br 030, 21620. Erna Oppler was deported to Auschwitz on 29 January 1943 and murdered there. Cf. Oppler, Erna, née Troplowitz, born 27 July 1899 in Oppeln, Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv.

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15. Invoice and application for removal from the commercial register, 16 March 1940, AGC, HR A 90, 86463, 1940. 16. Jews as illicit traders, in Der Angriff, 2 June 1942. Cf Zierenberg, Schieber, 163–176. 17. Grünfeld, Heimgesucht, 147f. 18. Letter from J. Baer to Lippert, 20 January 1934, LAB, Rep A Pr Br 057, 1740. 19. Ibid. 20. Letter from the Berliner Beschaffungsamt to Lippert, 16 February 1934, ibid. 21. DjGB. Cf. Heike Stange, “Die Baers: Eine Familien- und Firmengeschichte,” in Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt, ed., Am Wedding haben sie gelebt. Lebenswege jüdischer Bürgerinnen und Bürger (Berlin, 1998), 159–166, here 160f. Haber was prosecuted in 1936 for an alleged foreign exchange offence and found guilty, but nevertheless managed to emigrate to the United States in 1940. Cf. ibid. 22. DjGB. 23. Gerd Herzog, “Fröhlich & Pelz Glas, Crystal, Porcelain,” in Kreutzmüller and Nürnberg, eds., Final Sale, 28–31, here 28. Cf. Gay, Question, 50. 24. Gay, Question, 74f. 25. Friedländer, Germany, 235. 26. Affidavit by Ruth Nüssenfeld, 10 July 1957, EAB, 152501 (Elias Feuerstein). 27. Cf. Marion Kaplan, “Changing Roles in Jewish Families,” in Nicosia and Scrase, eds., Jewish Life, 15–46, passim. 28. DjGB. Cf. Topographie des Terrors, ed., Berlin 1933–1934: Zwischen Propaganda und Terror (Berlin, 2010), 87. Nothing is known of the fates of Pesach and Tauber Wagner, born Hodys. 29. Affidavit by Eron Weihl, EAB, 264265 (Ascher Meisner); letter from Rachela Meiser to the District Court, 18 January 1939, LAB, A Rep 342-02, 39894. 30. Affidavit by Klara (Claire) Haas, 23 November 1955, EAB, 264265. 31. Small ad, Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, 14 June 1939; affidavit by Claire Haas, 23 November 1955, EAB, 264265. Cf. Dietlinder Peters, “Juden in der Skalitzer Straße,” in Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt, ed., Juden in Kreuzberg, Fundstücke, Fragmente, Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1991), 187–208, here 199. 32. District Court order of 3 October 1939, LAB, A Rep 342-02, 39894; affidavit by Klare (Claire) Haas, 9 January 1963, EAB, 264265. Cf. DjGB. Rosa Meissner was deported to Auschwitz on 29 January 1943 and murdered there. Cf. Affidavit by Klara (Claire) Haas, 23 November 1955, EAB, 264 265; Meisner, Rachela, née Schiffmann, born 14 March 1889 in Radymno, Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs. 33. Lion Feuchtwanger, Geschwister Oppermann (Frankfurt, 1987 [Amsterdam, 1933]), 17–32. How common the stereotype still is, is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that Albert Uderzo used it in one of his famous comic strips: Albert Uderzo, L’Odyssée de Astérix (Paris, 1981), 33. 34. Cf. Fürstenberg, Erinnerungen, 236f. 35. Letter from Silbermann & Co. GmbH to the District Court, 18 November 1935, AGC, HR A 91, 93203, 1942 (Silco Herrenhüte Masur & Co.). The business was converted into a general partnership in 1938 and this survived until 1942. Cf. DjGB. 36. Conclusion based on the DjGB.

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37. Letter from Walter Cohn to the District Court, 22 November 1935, AGC, HR A 91, 80621 (Walter Cohn). 38. Letter from Julius Cohn to the Berlin compensation office, n.d. (1959), EAB, 303701 (Bertha Cohn). 39. Letter from the IHK to the District Court, 28 July 1933, LAB, A Rep 342-02, 38054. 40. Letter from the District Court to the IHK, 14 April 1934; letter from the IHK to the District Court, 25 May 1934, both in LAB, A Rep 342-02, 38054. 41. See letter from Julius Cohn to the Berlin Compensation Office, n.d. (1959), EAB, 303701. 42. The business was liquidated after the pogrom and removed from the commercial register in March 1940. Cf. letter from the liquidator, Ferdinand Bender, to the District Court, 11 March 1940, LAB, A Rep 342-02, 38054; DjGB. 43. Cora Berliner, “Report on the Economic Situation of Jews,” n.d. (1935), LBI, AR 1578. Cf. Shepherd, Israel, 149; Reissner, Histories, 247. 44. Cf. DjGB. 45. Memo of Inspector Dobbert, 15 August 1938, BLHA, Rep 36 A, 2256. 46. “Jetzt wird’s ernst,” Das Schwarze Korps, 5 May 1938. 47. Memo of the Dresdner Bank, Depositenkasse 64, 30 July 1938, HAC, DB, 29997–2001.BE, Liste A. 48. Cf. DjGB. Cf. Witness statement of Lina Wolfart, n.d., in Helas, Juden, 61. 49. Christian Dirks, Verschüttet: Leben, Bombentod und Erinnerung an die Berliner Familie Jaschkowitz (Berlin, 2011), 13. 50. “Sonderbare Berliner Geschäfte,” Der Stürmer 15, no. 30, July 1937. Cf. DjGB. 51. Dritte Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz, Reichsgesetzblatt I, 14 June 1938. 52. Index of Jewish Businesses in Schöneberg, Hauptakten, n.d. (December 1938), LAB, A Rep 005-03-02, 1. 53. Index of Jewish Businesses in Schöneberg, Hauptakten, entry 466, n.d. (December 1938), LAB, A Rep 005-03-02, 1. Cf. DjGB. 54. DjGB. Cf. Harald Ramm, “Jüdische Betriebe und Gewerbetreibende. Entstehung, Entwicklung, Arisierung,” in Kolland, ed., Brüder, 290–297. The business continued for three years before possession passed wholly to a non-Jew: DjGB. 55. Memo of the Dresdner Bank, Depositenkasse 64, n.d. (July 1938), HAC, DB, 29997–2001. BE, List A. 56. Letter from Klein & Hodin to the District Court, 27 April 1939, AGC, HR A 90, 99182, 1939 (Klein & Hodin). 57. Memo of the Reichskreditgesellschaft, 24 June 1938, 18 May 1938, BArch, R 8136, 3409. 58. Ibid. 59. Letter from the Depositenkasse No. 35 to Dresdner Bank Central Office, HAC, DB 29997-2001. BE, List A. 60. Letter from Julius Gensler to the District Court, 19 January 1939, AGC, HR A 90, 94066, 1939 (Julius Gensler). 61. Letter from Julius Gensler to the District Court, 14 August 1939; letter from the IHK to the District Court, 26 August 1939, both in ibid. Cf. DjGB. Even in 1939 Gensler consistently signed his letters without the compulsory first name; cf. ibid.

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62. Advert in Der Angriff, 20 May 1933. Cf. Weigel, Märzgefallene, 101f. The noteworthy advertisement policy goes unnoticed in Kessemeier, Feentempel. 63. Cora Berliner’s Report, 9 December 1934, LBI, AR 1578. 64. Memo of the Dresdner Bank, Depositenkasse 2, n.d. (July 1938), HAC, DB 29997–2001. BE, List A. The business was transferred into the name of Georg Sommerlath. Cf. DjGB. Cf. also Herbst, “Banker,” 94. 65. Herbst, “Banker,” 86f. and 99f. 66. Exchange Control Report, 10 February 1937, BLHA, Rep 036 A, 1565. Cf. Shepherd, Israel, 149. 67. Letter from Paul Loewe to the District Court, 11 November 1933, AGC, HR A 91, 64296, 1938 (Paul Loewe). 68. Medert, Verdrängung, 210–213. After his business was deleted from the register Loewe was left without means in Berlin, and on 23 September 1942 was deported to Theresienstadt, where he died on 1 January 1943. Cf. ibid. 69. Exchange Control Report, BLHA, Rep 36 A, 2252. Cf. Nietzel, Handeln, 138f. 70. Exchange Control Report, 26 July 1941, BLHA, Rep 36 A, 2252. 71. Report on the audit of M. Wolfsky & Co, 22 May 1936, BLHA, Rep 36 A, 2252. 72. Westphal, Konfektion, 199–222. Cf. DjGB. 73. Letter from the clothing industry inspectorate to the Golddiskontbank, 17 November 1938, NAW, T 83, R 101, Bankhaus J. H. Stein. 74. “Umfang und Struktur der jüdischen Binnenwanderung,” in Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege und Sozialpolitik 7 (1937), 122–129. 75. Pracht, Kempinski, 16–19. Cf. also Lembke, Schafe, 27–37 and 73–81. 76. Kurt Wilhelm, “Kleinstadt- und Großstadtgemeinde” Leo Baeck Bulletin 2, 5–8 (1958–1959), 18–24. 77. Evelyn Grollke, “Moszek David Wellner,” in Eberswalder Gedenkbuch für die jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Angermünde, 2008), 171–175; idem, “Szymon Lajb Wellner,” in ibid., 177–180. The businesses of both brothers were damaged in the pogrom. Cf. ibid. 78. Götz Aly, Im Tunnel: Das kurze Leben der Marion Salomon 1931–1943 (Frankfurt, 2004), 55f. 79. DjGB. Cf. Herbst, “Banker,” 98f. 80. Letter from Casper Jacobsohn to the District Court, 22 February 1938; letter from the IHK to the District Court Berlin, 28 March 1938, both in AGC, HR A 90, 94514, 1939 (Casper Jacobsohn). 81. Cf. Interview with Margo Berdass, Videoed Interview via the University of Southern California, in Shoa Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, 35144. 82. Order of the Breslau District Court, 22 August 1935, AGC, HR A 90, 99143, 1939 (Harry Breitbarth). 83. Order of the District Court, Breslau, 24 March 1936, ibid. 84. Conze et al., Amt, 49f. 85. Copy of the commercial register of the District Court, Breslau, 26 October 1937; order of the District Court, Breslau, 11 October 1938, both in AGC, HR A 90, 99143, 1939. 86. Affidavit of the son of the company’s proprietor, 3 November 1950, ibid.

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87. DjGB. The company was deleted from the register after the proprietor Paul David emigrated to the United States. Cf. DjGB. 88. Howard Lewin’s resumé, 17 December 1952, EAB, 65003. 89. Memorandum on the treatment of Jews in the Reich capital in all areas of public life, YVA, 08/17, 15f. 90. Szanto, Dienste, 134. 91. Cf. Engelbrechten, SA-Gruppe, 101 and 114; DjGB. On the Keglerheim, see Eva Reimer, “The Torture Chamber on Petersburger Strasse,” in Moritz van Dülmen, Wolfgang Kühnelt, and Bjoern Weigel, eds., Zerstörte Vielfalt/Diversity Destroyed, Berlin 1933-1938-1945 (Berlin, 2013), 262f. 92. Ulla Jung, “Jonass & Co. Discount Department Store,” in Kreutzmüller and Nürnberg, eds., Final Sale, 40–43, here 41. On Horst Wessel, see Daniel Siemens, Horst Wessel. Tod und Verklärung eines Nationalsozialisten (Munich, 2009). 93. DjGB. 94. Hördler, Ruilos, 55. 95. Cf. also Janetzko, Verdrängung, 280. Cf. also in contrast, Cord Brügmann, Flucht in den Zivilprozess: Antisemitischer Wirtschaftsboykott vor Zivilgerichten der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 2009). 96. Letter from the lawyer, Salomon, to the District Court, 18 December 1933, AGC, HR A, NZ 12138 (Deutsches Kolonialhaus Bruno Antelmann Nachf.) 97. Letter from the IHK to the District Court, 27 November 1934, ibid. 98. Letter from Julius and Leo Katz to the District Court, 21 November 1935, ibid. The business was transferred in 1938 from the partners into the possession of Alfred Adomat and was still in existence in 2013. 99. Memorandum on the treatment of Jews in the Reich capital in all areas of public life, YVA, 08/17, 36. 100. Lida Barnes, Berlin and London, is currently in the process of research into Jewish patents in Nazi Germany. 101. Entry, Zentralhandelsregisterbeilage des Reichsanzeigers, 9 November 1938, 1.Cf. DjGB. 102. Letter from the IHK to the District Court, 14 February 1942, AGC, HR A 90, 91787, 1942 (Adolf Hanau). 103. Letter from Warburg to Sahm, 1 July 1933, LAB, A Rep 001-02, 3662. 104. Letters from Sternberg & Salomon to the Reich Economy Ministry, 29 September 1933, 29 August 1933, BArch, R 3101, 13860. The underwear wholesaler’s was transferred to non-Jews in March 1939. Cf. DjGB. 105. Letter from Margit Ratafia, 10 July 1933, and reply of the Economy Ministry, 18 August 1933, both in GStA, PK, HA I, Rep 120 BB XVI, Fach 1, 1, vol. 11. 106. Letter from Franz Gutmann to the Reich Finance Ministry, 29 January 1934, LAB, Rep A Pr Br 057, 1740. 107. Ibid. 108. Letter from the employees of Gutmann’s Etage to the Reich Finance Ministry, 29 January 1934, ibid. The business was removed from the commercial register in July 1939. Cf. DjGB. It seems that Gutmann did manage to emigrate. There is no entry for him in the Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs.

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109. Letter from Neuköllner Möbel Vertrieb to Lippert, 14 March 1934, LAB, Rep A Pr Br 057, 1740. 110. Memo of the Procurement Office, 15 February 1934; letter from the Procurement Office to Lippert, 24 March 1934, both in LAB, Rep A Pr Br 057, 1740. 111. Letter from Neuköllner Möbel Vertrieb to Lippert, 14 March 1934, LAB, Rep A Pr Br 057, 1740. 112. Letter from the employeees of Gutmann’s Etage to the Reich Finance Ministry, 29 January 1934, ibid. 113. Letter from Max Loewy to the police president, 29 July 1935, CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161). 114. Letter from Siegfried Schragenheim to Reich Economics Minister Schacht, 25 March 1935, CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161). Cf. Wiemers, Personalpolitik, 104. 115. Letter from the CV to the Reich Economics Ministry, 19 March 1935, CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161). 116. Letter from lawyer Kurt Braun to the CV, 5 April 1935, ibid. 117. Public Prosecutor’s indictment before the Regional Court, 7 November 1941, LAB, A Rep 358-02, no. 31474. Cf. Jürgen Matthäus, “Evading Persecution: German-Jewish Behaviour Patterns after 1933,” in Nicosia and Scrase, eds., Jewish Life, 47–70, passim. 118. Regional Court’s judgment, copy of 18 September 1942, LAB, A Rep 358-02, 31474. Liedtke was transported on 17 March 1943 from Berlin-Tegel to Auschwitz. Cf. internal note in Liedtke’s personal file in the Police Station of 26 March 1943, LAB, Rep A Pr Br 030-02-02, no. 81. The business Theodor Liedtke was removed from the commercial register in January 1942. Cf. DjGB. 119. PArch AA, R 100208–100215. 120. Letter from the Polish Consultate General to the mayor of the City of Berlin, 27 April 1933, PArch AA, R 100211. 121. Letter from the mayor to the Polish Consulate General, n.d. (May 1933), ibid. 122. Memo of the Foreign Ministry, 30 September1933, ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Memo of the Foreign Ministry, 30 September 1933, PArch AA, R 100211. 125. Copy of a communication from the Reich interior minister to the State Governments, 31 October 1934, ibid. Cf. also letter from the Reich economics minister to the Reich governor in Bavaria, 17 August 1937, ibid. 126. Police Station No. 110 Report, 9 September 1935, LAB, Rep A Pr Br 030, 21617. 127. The Butterhandlung Leo Knepel was not listed in the commercial register. The dating results from the entry in the 1938 Adressbuch. In 1939 Knepel was no longer listed in the Adressbuch. 128. Kochan, Pogrom, 44f. 129. Verbal note of the Czechoslovak Legation to the Foreign Ministry, 12 December 1938, PArch AA, R 100285. 130. Verbal note of the Foreign Ministry to the Czechoslovak Legation, January 1939, ibid.

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131. Reich Economics Ministry circular, 7 July 1939, ibid. 132. Communication from Dr. Oskar Möhring to the Reich commissar responsible for administering enemy property of 19 July 1940, BArch, R 87, 1457. 133. Communication from the mayor of the Reich Capital Berlin to the Reich commissar responsible for administering enemy property of 16 January 1942, BArch, R 87, 1457. 134. Stefan Lindner, Das Reichskommissariat für die Behandlung feindlichen Vermögens im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1991), 135–143. 135. Cf. Reich commissar responsible for administering enemy property to the NSDAP Gauleitung Berlin, 15 May 1940, BArch, R 87, 148. When “the enemies concerned are Jews in the sense of the German Reichs Laws” the Party was certainly kept informed. Cf. communication from the Reich commissar responsible for administering enemy property to the NSDAP-Reichsleitung of 24 January 1941, ibid. 136. Exchange control report on Cohn, Walder & Co., 24 June 1938, BLHA, Rep 36 A, 2556. 137. Contract between N. Israel and Emil Köster AG, 7 July 1938; announcement of the Haus im Zentrum (N. Israel), 11 February 1939, both in LBI, AR 25110, 1, 10. Cf. memo of Dr. Sieveking concerning N. Israel, 25 January 1939, SWA, IV. A-10026. 138. Letter from the United Kingdom Foreign Office to the lawyers Adler and Perowne, 11 July 1938, LBI, AR 4790, 1, 4. Exchange Control Report on N. Israel, 22 June 1938, BLHA, Rep 36 A, 1565. Cf. Shepherd, Israel, 198–201; Reissner, Histories, 238–244. 139. Kreutzmüller, Händler, 277–288. 140. Institut für Zeitgeschichte and Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration, eds., Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933, vol. 1 (1980), 499.

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Chapter 10

Emigration

 Transfer

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Legal Transfer While some Jewish businesspeople employed strategies to retain their economic livelihoods in Germany, others opted either for liquidation or transfer to non-Jewish ownership followed by emigration. The case of Kurt Manheimer, proprietor of the sewing machine factory James Gutmann, is a typical one. After seeking advice from the Berlin branch of the M. M. Warburg & Co. Bank, Manheimer sold his factory to his rival Singer, but secured a fifteen-year share in sales of a specific sewing machine as well as the right to work as a representative of Singer in Paris,1 thereby averting the need to transfer proceeds from the sale overseas.2 The owner of the aforementioned Etam, Max Lindemann, went a step further by only selling his domestic business to a non-Jew in 1938, holding on to the very successful foreign branches, especially in France and the Netherlands.3 However, official transfer was a time-consuming and costly undertaking. First of all, an application for a clearance certificate had to be lodged with the regional tax office (or with the chief finance president after 1936). This was only approved once it had been confirmed that the applicant had no “unpaid taxes, overheads, fines, dues and expenses,” i.e., that all existing bills and costs incurred in the wake of persecution had been paid.4 Although there was no requirement of proof that a business proprietor had liquidated and deregistered a company, the dues and taxes incurred added up to a vast sum. The Reich Flight Tax alone amounted to 25 per-

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Asserting Jewish Commercial Activity

cent and was initially levied on the entirety of an applicant’s domestic assets in cases when annual income exceeded 20,000 reichsmarks or a total fortune exceeded 200,000 reichsmarks. In 1934 exemption limits were halved.5 Strict rules also applied to Jewish businesspeople with non-German citizenship. After lengthy negotiations, the Dutch embassy felt compelled to approve an agreement whereby so-called returning emigrants would be charged for transferring sums exceeding 40,000 reichsmarks per person to the Netherlands.6 Once the regional tax office or the chief finance president had approved the application, the assets, or at least part of them, were transferred to a “blocked emigrant’s account,” with a levy raised by the Deutsche Golddiskontbank (Dego), a subsidiary of the Reichsbank. In compliance with the principle that emigration should not adversely affect the Reich’s strained foreign exchange situation, the Dego made only a limited amount of foreign currency available.7 In the course of time, Jews exchanging reichsmarks for foreign currency saw the proceeds fall rapidly. After an average of just 20 percent of total assets was available in foreign currency by 1935, it was established at the World Jewish Congress in 1937 that “big business” emigrés were left with an average 5 percent of their assets and “small business” emigrés with around 22 percent.8 Transferring assets to Palestine was a less costly but similarly complicated transaction. According to the 1933 Haavara Agreement, Jews in Germany could pay up to 50,000 reichsmarks into a blocked account. In return, they received Palestinian pounds, work tools, and shares in plantations in the British mandated territory. In return, the Jewish contractual partners in Palestine—the Trust and Transfer Office Haavara Ltd., the Anglo Palestine Bank, and the Bank der Templer Gesellschaft—agreed to spend the reichsmarks accumulated in the blocked accounts exclusively on imported goods from the German Reich.9 By September 1939 some 140 million reichsmarks had been transferred this way, enabling the emigration of around 52,000 Jews to Palestine. An average 2692 reichsmarks was transferred per capita.10 At the same time, there was a steep drop in the prices that businesses could fetch. As a senior manager of Unilever/Lever Brothers told M. M. Warburg & Co., it was incomprehensible that “Jewish industrialists should be handing over their companies at such knockdown prices.”11 For this reason, many business proprietors opted to remain in Germany. Even though their future in the German Reich was uncertain, it was apparent that they forfeited their assets by emigrating and would have to start new lives from scratch.12 Initially, this was a viewpoint encouraged by the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, which was keen to maintain the structures of Jewish life as long as possible and was reliant in doing so on – 288 –

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businesspeople, who were the main financial contributors to the various Jewish institutions and associations. In September 1935, according to a member of staff at the CV, “Professor Berliner suggested bearing in mind the difficulties of transferring assets and warned—as we do too—against over-hasty sales and the fact that one will have to calculate at which point one’s capital is drained.”13 Although the CV changed tack in 1936 and began advising Jews to emigrate, many business proprietors had found themselves in a fraught situation by the spring of 1938, at the latest. At that point two factors were leading to an accelerated loss of their assets. Firstly, Jews were securing ever-lower prices for their businesses and, secondly, the amount of this price they could transfer overseas was also shrinking. Once they had paid all the necessary taxes, dues, and charges, emigrées transferring their assets in 1939 found themselves left with less than 4 pfennigs for every reichsmarks.14 At the same time, the price of smuggled reichsmarks bills in Paris and Amsterdam sank to a record low.15 The fact that Jews were often virtually penniless when they left Germany meant that they simply lacked the funds to pay for their onward journey and were far less likely to be welcomed by countries theoretically willing to accept them. Increasingly, German Jews were seen as an economic burden.16

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Shifting Assets The scarce commercial register’s information on the emigration of Jewish businesspeople prior to 1938 suggests that, for as long as they had a choice, emigrées opted to move to a country where they were optimistic they would be able to set up business again. The preferred countries were therefore Britain and the United States, Germany’s main trade partners. The Netherlands was another key destination, with almost all foreign exchange transactions taking place via the financial hub of Amsterdam. The country was also among the main buyers of Berlin couture.17 Businesspeople with personal ties to a foreign country often took the opportunity to relocate part of their business there as a first step toward emigrating. This, however, was more easily said than done, as illustrated by the statements of Heinz Cohn and Erich Gottfeld, two Berlin-based foreign exchange advisers: “Emigrées wishing to take with them goods, business fixtures and equipment, so long as they are for personal use, must seek a permit from the foreign exchange board. … On no account may items intended for resale be taken.” All they were permitted to take with them was a minimum of inventory and no new machinery.18 Even more complicated than the export of machinery was the export of primary and finished products as well as the control of the resultant – 289 –

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Asserting Jewish Commercial Activity

debt claims and profits that counted as daily business. Just how a partial shifting of a business by means of cautious concealment of overseas holdings could proceed is clearly illustrated by the case of the Treitel & Meyer garments business, entered in the commercial register in 1920. In its early days, the company’s partners were Hans Treitel, Erich Meyer, and Julius Graumann. With some 130 employees Treitel & Meyer manufactured ladies’ blouses and dresses. In the mid-1930s roughly a third of the company’s turnover came from overseas. In 1934 the foreign exchange board approved the founding of a subsidiary of the company in London called Treitel & Meyer Ltd as part of the aforementioned financial consortium.19 Although the foreign exchange board kept a close eye on Treitel & Meyer, as did the dedicated economic panel for the garments industry, not even two audits in 1935 and 1936 revealed anything amiss or suspicious.20 At the end of 1936 both Erich Meyer and Julius Graumann left the company and emigrated to Britain, where they took up senior positions at Treitel & Meyer Ltd. In July 1938 Hans Treitel also moved to Britain, leaving the running of the Berlin company to an authorized signatory. When Treitel submitted an application to the foreign exchange board to transfer to his former partner Graumann, now in London, severance pay totaling 40,000 reichsmarks, the company was audited in August 1938 by Hermann Etter. It was only then that various breaches of exchange regulations came to light, all geared to transferring means of production abroad. Etter’s findings showed that Treitel had hidden over £3250 and therefore well over half of the British subsidiary’s profits from the German authorities.21 According to the official rate of exchange, this amounted to 39,915 reichsmarks. Moreover, the parent company in Berlin had supplied the London subsidiary with goods worth over 105,000 reichsmarks without an equivalent sum ever being transferred to Germany. Here, too, Etter assumed that Treitel would have access to that money. When he unexpectedly emigrated, Treitel even took the company car to Prague to sell it and use the proceeds. This was also seen as a criminal offence.22 Even though Treitel left behind a private fortune and the company he had built up, he and his partners did manage to transfer some 200,000 reichsmarks to Britain, thereby securing themselves a financial base. Despite stringent ongoing control, many Jewish businesspeople succeeded with similar transactions. Bodo Beneke, a lawyer for the new, non-Jewish proprietor of the aforementioned Etam, referred in a written communication with the Reich Economics Ministry in January 1939 to the “notorious” method of “shifting assets abroad under the guise of the promotion of exports.”23 To some extent, overseas branches put auditors in a quandary, as illustrated by the example of the German purchasing office of the well-known US mail-order company Sears, Roebuck & Co., whose manager was Otto – 290 –

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Herstatt, a Jew. Born in Frankfurt in 1877, he was responsible for buying toys, china, linen, and musical instruments in Europe,24 and in 1934 was granted permission by the authorities to open a purchasing office in Brussels.25 But in 1937, when Herstatt sought permission to have a residence in Brussels without having to pay the Reich flight tax, the IHK responded that this was economically “unwelcome” and could result in Herstatt further shifting his business base to Brussels.26 “However, it raises the question as to whether a refusal to grant exemption will prevent this from happening. Just as many other companies have recently given up their German branches, the US company might prefer the applicant to emigrate to Brussels and give up its Berlin office with immediate effect. … On the other hand, it is possible that the application was made in order to avoid paying the Reich flight tax.”27

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Smuggling Illegally shifting assets was one way to retain financial security. Another was to smuggle them out of the country. Martin Friedenberger has demonstrated just how inventive reluctant currency smugglers became in this period.28 Punishments for anyone caught were draconian. In early 1939 the 76-year-old salesman Simon Salzmann was caught buying stamps he intended to send to his children, who had emigrated, and was sentenced to six months in prison and fined 5000 reichsmarks.29 Unlike other Jews, businesspeople benefited from the fact that they had more foreign contacts and these were more likely to be viewed as innocuous. Widower Lucy Memisohn was the proprietor of a cotton wholesaler’s entered into the commercial register as Prinz & Memisohn in 1903. She and her son Fritz took around 180,000 reichsmarks from the company coffers and exchanged it on the black market for foreign currency. She took this money with her on various business trips abroad, leaving Germany on 20 November 1937 for London. From there, she instructed an agent to liquidate her business. Criminal proceedings were launched against Fritz and Lucy Memisohn, with the business consequently liquidated.30 Some businesspeople opted for even riskier strategies. In early 1938 Walter Wachsner set about trying to sell his ladieswear wholesaler’s, entered in the commercial register in 1933 under his own name. But when no acceptable offer was forthcoming, he appointed his non-Jewish wife and her sister as partners in March 1938 and began making plans to move abroad, seizing the opportunity posed by a temporary blind spot in border controls. Everyone was well aware that Adolf Hitler’s birthday was celebrated every year with much pomp (even though the day was only made a national holiday in 1939). Wachsner assumed that border guards would – 291 –

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Asserting Jewish Commercial Activity

be distracted by the official celebrations and radio announcements on 20 April 1938, so he embarked on what an auditor later described in a report as a “jaunt” to Holland with his family—and the contents of his business’s cash register—never to return.31 In the summer of 1938 Reinhold Grün and his family also went on what they claimed was to be a holiday on the Rhine and fled the Reich for Belgium. Grün, who owned a leather waste wholesaler’s at Neue Friedrichstraße 3, entered in the commercial register in 1934, had systematically settled his accounts and emptied his company’s bank account and the till. As prosecutors established, he had also “plundered” his home. In total, he managed to arrive in Belgium with some 72,000 reichsmarks, which he exchanged for Belgian francs.32 Jakob Rosenthal, who owned two garment companies with Norbert Faklier,33 also fled to Belgium. After Faklie emigrated, an employee helped Rosenthal acquire a Finnish passport on the black market that had developed in Berlin for such “goods,” thereby allowing him to escape Nazi Germany.34

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Escape As persecution gathered momentum, to emigrate was effectively to flee, especially in cases of Jewish businesspeople, who had no opportunity to liquidate their business or sell up to non-Jews. They simply left. When Krajndla Goldmann, for example, found out that she was to be investigated for tax evasion, she and husband fled to Palestine in December 1935, leaving behind a leather and rubber coat dealership, entered in the commercial register in 1923 as Goldmann & Kuttner and changed from a private limited company to a partnership in September 1935. In her absence, an IHK investigator established that the premises had been shut down and that no business was in operation, and therefore had the company officially deleted.35 Indeed, hundreds of businesses were officially removed from the commercial register as a result of the extensive checks carried out as of the autumn of 1937, because proprietors or partners had left with no forwarding address or moved abroad. After the November pogrom, the flight became ever more desperate. Examination of commercial register files reveals an increase of far-flung destinations. Of the 490 Jewish businesspeople whose destination was noted in the files in 1939, 53 had left for Shanghai. During the same period, others left for Bangkok, Bombay, and Panama as well as Danzig (present-day Gdansk), Cracow, Riga, and Warsaw. At least 14 business proprietors went to Cuba,36 including 46-year-old Siegfried Hirschfeld, proprietor of a stationery store in Charlottenburg. Unfortunately, he shipped out on the St. Louis.37 Carrying 906 refugees, the vessel was refused entry to Cuba in early June 1939. After a tortuous odyssey, the passengers were brought – 292 –

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Emigration

back to Europe and had to disembark in Antwerp. From there, they were scattered through Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Britain. In June 1939 Hirschfeld was taken in by France but was probably interned there once the war broke out.38 The plight of Jews in Germany worsened with the outbreak of the Second World War, with escape becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous. On 19 November 1939 Martha Adam, a partner in the Adam’s Cigarrenfabriken cigar factory, died on a ship to Cuba that hit a mine and sank.39 Still, the flood of Jewish refugees from Germany continued unabated. Born in 1875, Siegfried Heymann, proprietor of a menswear factory, emigrated to Montevideo on 25 September 1941, one week after the introduction of the Yellow Star and less than one month before Heinrich Himmler outlawed emigration on 23 October 1941.40 And even after Himmler’s ban, some Jews managed to flee—after paying large sums of money and leaving any assets they might have had.41 Nevertheless, in the wake of the aggressive expansion of the German Reich, many Jews from Berlin were caught by German troops. The first victims were those who had fled or been deported to Czechoslovakia or Poland. Not even businesspeople who emigrated to Western Europe were safe. Jakob Rosenthal, a wanted man in Berlin after fleeing with a forged passport, was arrested in Belgium in November 1940 and deported in September 1942 to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.42 Statistics show that Jewish businesspeople who fled to the Netherlands were at particular risk. In August 1940, just three and a half months after the country was occupied, the Gestapo informed the Registry Court that Moses Birenhak, for example, had been admitted to a “camp for Jews.”43 Birenhak was one of the two partners in the men’s and sportswear company Birenhak & Mandel, entered in the commercial register in 1937. In 1944 he was deported from the Netherlands to Bergen-Belsen, dying on 12 May, shortly after the camp had been liberated. He might be on one of the photos or films taken by the British that shocked the world. Birenhak’s partner Hermann Mandel had already been deported to Poland on 28 October 1938. His fate is unknown.44

Specialists and “Zauberer” Given the complexity of the terms and conditions for legally transferring private assets and the stringency of penalties for any breaches thereof, many would-be emigrées sought out professional advice.45 Heavily concentrated in the capital, emigration advice became a boom business. The most obvious thing for businesspeople to do was to contact their bank. But – 293 –

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Asserting Jewish Commercial Activity

even though experts on legal and commercial matters relating to foreign exchange matters could be found at all the main banks, Jews generally felt they were no longer welcome customers and turned instead to Jewish banks for advice.46 Private Jewish banks also took over the negotiation of the Haavara Agreement, founding for this purpose, together with the various groups included in the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, the Palestine Trust Office for Advising German Jews GmbH, known as “Paltreu.” Entered in Berlin’s commercial register on 25 January 1934, it was designed to ease the complicated process of assets transfer. Against the backdrop of successful cross trade but increasingly difficult emigration to Palestine—and of course, the fact that not all German Jews wanted to move to Palestine—the General Trust Office for Jewish Emigration GmbH (Altreu) was founded in April 1937.47 By late February 1939 the fund, set up with the support of wealthy Jews in Germany to assist needy would-be emigrées, had helped almost three thousand Jews to flee, mainly to South America.48 It is striking that although these institutions were established in Berlin, they were, on the whole, not founded by Berlin banks. Rather, the key players were M. M. Warburg & Co. and A. E. Wassermann, both of which had Berlin branches but were headquartered in Hamburg and Bamberg respectively.49 Apart from Gebr. Arnhold und J. Dreyfus & Co., who were forced to give up their main offices in Dresden and Frankfurt in 1936 and therefore made their Berlin branch their headquarters,50 Heyman Brothers (which also oversaw the accounts of the Reich Association) was the only one of Berlin’s better-known Jewish private banks to play an active role. Conspicuously absent from the list of founders was Berlin’s most renowned private bank at the time. In 1934 Mendelssohn & Co. showed signs of willingness to play a role in the Paltreu but it transpired that fear of further stigmatization as a Jewish business prevailed. In November 1936 the bank passed the buck to its admittedly most influential partner, Rudolf Löb, justifying its withdrawal from Paltreu with the argument that “our bank is not solely in Jewish hands.”51 However, it was not only Jewish private banks and their subsidiaries that made the most of a new line of business that called for specialized knowledge and promised relatively high profit margins.52 While there was not even a separate listing for foreign exchange advisers in Berlin’s yellow pages in 1933, by 1938, 22 were listed, 34 by 1939, and 36 by 1940.53 Taking into account that not all foreign exchange advisers had themselves listed in public directories, the increase is significant. 54 One of the advisers not listed was Dr. Ernst Aschner, who had been forced out of his position at the District Court in March 1933.55 Three years later he founded the company Dr. Aschner & Kempner GmbH

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Emigration

together with Robert Kempner, who had been dismissed in the wake of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Its purpose was to aid Jewish emigrants with the administration, liquidation, and transfer of their assets.56 The two partners contributed 50 percent each of the minimum capital required by law.57 In his memoirs, Kempner, who would become assistant US chief counsel in the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, recalled that although the Gestapo was willing to see emigration facilitated, his company was kept under close observation so as to prevent any undeclared transfer of assets and avoidance of dues.58 This supervision, coupled with the fact that there was nothing keeping him in Germany after his mother died, prompted Kempner to leave the company in late 1936. It subsequently went into liquidation and was removed from the commercial register on 27 April 1938.59 However, Aschner remained in business until 1940, and in 1941 was still listed in the yellow pages along with 519 other Jews, until the Reich post office cut off all Jews’ phone lines.60 The offices of Aschner & Kempner GmbH were in Meinekestraße 9, next door to the premises of the Jüdische Rundschau and the Jewish Agency for Palestine. A few doors down were the offices of the Palestine and Orient Lloyd travel agency, founded in 1935,61 and on the corner of Meinekestraße and the Kurfürstendamm was Makkabiah Transport GmbH, whose offices had opened in 1932 and which was renamed Deutschland-Palästina Verkehr GmbH in May 1934. Both businesses advertised in the Jüdische Rundschau.62 Around 1938 Meinekestraße became a hub for services connected with emigration, attracting Jews from all over the Reich. A second hub developed on the periphery of the diplomatic district next to the Tiergarten park. Tiergartenstraße was home to M. M. Warburg & Co., while Paltreu and Altreu were headquartered a few minutes’ walk away in Potsdamer Straße. Several foreign exchange advisers also had offices in the area, including Bruno Loewenberg, who entered a company under his own name in the commercial register in early November 1933.63 As observed by Hans Reichmann, the CV’s lawyer, Berlin was a center not only of foreign exchange advisers but also brokers exploiting for their own financial gain the plight of people who either needed or wanted to emigrate. These were dubbed “Zauberer” (magicians).64 By now, Berlin was home to a thriving black market for forged papers,65 which the Gestapo sought to infiltrate and control with informants.66 But the Reich capital was also bursting with completely legal businesses selling goods that served as investments immune to currency fluctuations and exempt from customs and exchange, which could therefore be taken out of Germany. They included stamp, coin, and carpet dealerships, which were therefore closely monitored by the authorities.67

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Notes 1. Note of 12 July 1933, SWA, A-10029. 2. Cf. Armin Bergmann, Die sozialen und ökonomischen Bedingungen der jüdischen Emigration aus Berlin/Brandenburg 1933 (Berlin, 2009), 191. 3. Memo of the Reich Economics Ministry, March 1944, BArch, R 3101, 34410. 4. Copy of an “Unbedenklichkeitsbescheinigung” from the Charlottenburg-West Tax Office, 21 February 1938, EAB, 52864. Cf. Friedenberger, Ausplünderung, 111–120. 5. Drecoll, Fiskus, 136–158; Kuller, Finanzverwaltung, 18–23; Friedenberger, Ausplünderung, 67–78; Meinl and Zwilling, Raub, 40–48; Dorothee Mußgnug, Die Reichsfluchtsteuer 1931–1953 (Berlin, 1992), 15–20. 6. Letter from the Foreign Office to the Netherlands Envoy, 12 February 1936, BArch, R 43II, 1462. 7. Tooze, Wages, 69–75. 8. Jüdische Weltkongress, ed., Der Wirtschaftliche Vernichtungskampf gegen die Juden im Dritten Reich (Paris, Geneva, and New York, 1937), 82. 9. Adam S. Hofri-Winogrado, “The legal structure of the Haavara Transfer Agreement,” in Christoph Kreutzmüller, Michael Wildt, and Moshe Zimmermann, National Economies, Volks-Wirtschaft, Racism and Economy in Europe between the wars (1918–1939/45) (Newcastle, 2015), 97–107; cf. Werner Feilchenfeld, “Die Durchführung des Haavara-Transfers,” in Feilchenfeld, Dolf Michaelis, and Ludwig Pinner, eds., Haavara-Transfer nach Palästina und Einwanderung deutscher Juden 1933–1939 (Tübingen, 1977), 37–85; Dorothea Hauser, “Zwischen Gehen und Bleiben. Das Sekretariat Warburg und sein Netzwerk des Vertrauens 1938–1941,” in Susanne Heim, Beate Meyer, and Francis R. Nicosia, eds., “Wer bleibt, opfert seine Jahre, vielleicht sein Leben”: Deutsche Juden 1938–1941 (Göttingen, 2010), 115–133, passim. 10. Barkai, Self-Help, 82–85; idem, Boykott, 62f.; Tooze, Wages, 81f. 11. Letter from Spiegelberg to Fritz Warburg, 17 June 1935, SWA, C-14001. 12. Bajohr, Arisierung, 266f. 13. Note on a file of the CV, 6 September 1935, CAHJP, HM 2/8788 (RGVA 721/1/2913). 14. Hannah Ahlheim, “Die Commerzbank und die Einziehung des jüdischen Vermögens,” in Herbst and Weihe, eds., Commerzbank, 114–146, here 130. Cf. Nicosia, Zionism, p 106; Mußgnug, Reichsfluchtsteuer, 38. 15. “De Daling van de Duitse ‘Sperrmark’ Koers,” Allgemeen Handelsblad, 22 January 1938. 16. Fritz Kiefer, Judenverfolgung in Deutschland. Eine innere Angelegenheit? Internationale Reaktionen auf die Flüchtlingsproblematik 1933–1939 (Stuttgart, 2002). 17. Kreutzmüller, Händler, 63–67. Cf. Bob Moore, “Jewish Refugee Entrepreneurs and the Dutch Economy in the 1930s,” Immigrants and Minorities 8 (1990), 46–63, here 52; Westphal, Konfektion, 72. 18. Heinz Cohn and Erich Gottfeld, Auswanderungsvorschriften für Juden in Deutschland (Berlin, 1938), 53. 19. Report on the audit of Treitel & Meyer, 3 November 1938, BLHA, Rep 36 A, 2252.

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20. Report on the audit of Treitel & Meyer, 28 June 1935; report on the audit of Treitel & Meyer, 3 September 1936, both in ibid. 21. Report on the audit of Treitel & Meyer, 3 November 1938, ibid. 22. Annex to the audit report on Treitel & Meyer, 3 November 1938, ibid. 23. Communication from the lawyer Dr. Bodo Beneke to the Reich economics minister, 10 January 1939, BArch, R 8136, 3411. 24. Letter from Sears, Roebuck & Co. to the IHK, 29 May 1934, BLHA, Rep 70, IHK Berlin, submission 2001, 163/55, 2 Sears, Roebuck & Co. 25. Letter from Sears, Roebuck & Co. to the IHK, 28 April 1937, ibid. 26. Memo of the IHK, 5 May 1937, ibid. 27. Ibid. Herstatt’s application was ultimately refused. Following the business manager’s escape after the pogrom, the Berlin business was liquidated and removed from the commercial register in September 1940. Cf. letter from the IHK to the Oberfinanzpräsident, 28 May 1937; letter from the IHK to the police president, 21 November 1938, both in ibid.; DjGB. 28. Friedenberger, Ausplünderung, 129–149. 29. Letter from the lawyer Sally Cheim to the public prosecutor, 13 April 1939, LAB, A Rep 358-02, 94550. Salzmann had to serve the full sentence, because the public prosecutor rejected a plea for leniency. Cf. order, 24 July 1939, ibid. Salzmann was deported on 13 July 1942 to Theresienstadt and from there to Treblinka, where he was murdered. Cf. Salzmann, Simon, born 8 February 1863 in Eylau, Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv. 30. Judgment of the Supreme Restitution Court, 22 May 1956, LAB, B Rep 03901, 2, ORG A 115. 31. Exchange Control Report on the company Walter Wachsner, 26 July 1941, BLHA, Rep 36 A, 2252. 32. Letter from the public prosecutor to the Regional Court, 26 September 1939, LAB, A Rep 358-02, 94915. The business was removed from the commercial register in April 1939. Cf. DjGB. 33. Norbert Faklier was removed from the Berlin commercial register on 15 September 1941, as was Damenconfektion Vertriebsgesellschaft mbH on 10 September 1940. Cf. DjGB. 34. Indictment 15 November 1940, LAB, A Rep 358-02, 18622. 35. Letter from the IHK to the District Court, 8 January 1936, AGC, HR A 90, 81317, 1936 (Goldmann & Kuttner). Cf. DjGB. 36. Own conclusions based on the DjGB. 37. Memorandum from the Residents’ Registration Office in response to a question from the District Court, 13 May 1939; letter from the notary Richard Koch to the District Court, 1 February 1941, both in LAB, A Rep 342-02, 15202. 38. Georg Reinfelder, MS “St Louis”: Frühjahr 1939: Die Irrfahrt nach Kuba: Kapitän Gustav Schroeder rettet 906 deutsche Juden vor dem Zugriff der Nazis (Berlin, 2002), 244. 39. Letter from Martha Friedländer to the Registry Court, 3 January 1940, AGC, HR A 90, 95043, 1940 (Adam’s Cigarrenfabriken). 40. S. Heymann & Co. was removed from the commercial register on 6 October 1942. Cf. order of the District Court, 6 October 1942, AGC, HR A, 90, 94161, 1942 (S. Heymann & Co.).

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41. Cf. Letter from the Fides Treuhand Vereinigung to the Property Administration Office, 25 March 1947, EAB, 56661 (Richard Frank). 42. Indictment, 15 November 1940, LAB, A Rep 358-02, 18622; Yad Vashem, the Central Database of Shoa Victim’s Names, entry Jacob Rosenthal, http://db.yad vashem.org/names/nameDetails.html?itemId=7858080&language=en. 43. Letter from the Gestapo to the District Court, 19 August 1940, AGC, HR A 90, 90580, 1939 (Birenhak & Mandel). The undertaking, which had been registered since the beginning of 1937, was deleted from the register on 4 April 1940. Cf. DjGB. 44. Mandel, Hermann (no birth date), Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv; cf. also Yad Vashem, the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, entry Hermann Mandel, http://db.yadvashem.org/names/nameDetails.html?itemId=634013&language=en. 45. Barkai, Boykott, 61f. 46. Cf. Kopper, Marktwirtschaft, 250f.; Ulrich, Aufstieg, 277f. 47. DjGB. 48. Feilchenfeld, Durchführung, 38; Hauser, Gehen, 115–133; Gabriele Anderl and Dirk Rupnow, Die Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung als Beraubungsinstitution (Vienna, 2004), 42 and 52. 49. Cf. letter from Bolschwing to the Gestapo, 19 January 1937, BArch, R 58, 6356. 50. Cf. DjGB; Köhler, »Arisierung« der Privatbanken, 152–157 and 305–311. 51. Minutes of the partners’ discussions, 19 January 1934, SWA, A-10030. 52. Communication from Mendelssohn & Co. to Warburg & Co., 24 November 1936, SWA, E-10102. Cf. Dorothea Hauser and Christoph Kreutzmüller, “Max Warburg,” in Hans Pohl, ed., Deutsche Bankiers des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 2007), 419–432, here 429. 53. Berliner Adreßbuch 1938, part II, 121; Berliner Adreßbuch 1939, part II, 113; Berliner Adreßbuch 1940, part II, 111. Cf. “Zulassung von Devisenberatern,” Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie und Handelskammer zu Berlin, 5 February 1935. 54. In 1938 and 1940 there were six institutes that were listed in the Berliner Adressbuch under both the headings Banks and Exchange Advisors. Cf. Berliner Adreßbuch 1938, part II, 47f. and 121; Berliner Adreßbuch 1940, 45f. and 111. 55. Hartmut Jäckel and Hermann Simon, Berliner Juden 1941. Namen und Schicksale: Das letzte amtliche Fernsprechbuch der Reichspostdirektion Berlin (Berlin, 2007), 22. The relationship between Ernst Aschner and Fritz E. Aschner, the manager of Makkabiah Transport-GmbH, which in 1933 was renamed Wirtschaftsdienst Deutschland-Palästina GmbH, could not be elucidated. Cf. DjGB; Advertisement, Jüdische Rundschau, 11 August 1933. 56. DjGB. 57. Registration of the business, 16 March 1936; report 3 February 1939, both in AGC, HR B, 49858, 1938 (Dr. Aschner und Kempner, GmbH). 58. Kempner, Ankläger, 124f. 59. DjGB. 60. Jäckel and Simon, Juden, 9f. Aschner escaped to Shanghai and emigrated from there in 1946 to Australia. Cf. ibid., 22. Kempner reached the United States and returned to Germany as deputy chief prosecutor of the United States at the

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International Militäry Court in Nuremberg. In the abortive Bovensiepen Trial against the members of the Berlin Gestapo he appeared in 1970 as one of forty joint plaintiffs. Cf. Esriel Hildesheimer, “Cora Berliner: Ihr Leben und Wirken,” Leo Baeck Institute Bulletin 67 (1984), 41–70, here 61. 61. Cf. DjGB. The company was removed from the commercial register in 1945. Since the commercial register file did not survive, it cannot be determined with certainty whether the company was regarded as Jewish. There are some hints to indicate that it was. The travel agency often advertised in the Jüdische Rundschau, and the manager for many years, Paul Lewinsohn, resigned shortly after the pogrom. Cf. ibid. 62. See advertisement, Jüdische Rundschau, 28 June 1935. 63. Ibid. This company was ordered to be deleted from the commercial register in May 1938 by the Registry Court, but the business continued in existence until the pogrom and was only removed from the List of Jewish trading companies in 1939. Cf. DjGB; List of Jewish businesses, LAB, A Rep 005-03-02, 2. 64. Reichmann, Bürger, 64. Cf. minute of interrogation, 1 April 1940, LAB, A Rep 358-02, 97905. 65. Indictment, 15 November 1940, LAB, A Rep 358-02, 18622. 66. Letter from the SD Stuttgart to SD Berlin, 10 October 1939, RGVA, 500-1-137a. 67. Kreutzmüller and Weigel, Zacouto, 33; report on audit of Robert Ball Nachf., 26 April 1938, BLHA, Rep 36 A, 1565.

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Chapter 11

Case Studies



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Gebr. Weinberger The butter wholesaler owned by the Weinberger brothers grew out of a grocer that Hermann Weinberger married into. When his brothers Adolf, Israel, and Salomon moved to Berlin from Gorlice after the First World War, they immediately joined the grocery wholesaler business originally founded in 1912. Housed in a stately building at Brunnenstraße 188/190 in Mitte, by the mid-1920s it had developed into the largest butter and shortening dealership in Berlin. The business encompassed an in-house butter, lard, and shortening factory as well as a chain of grocery stores named Otto Thürmann. It struggled somewhat during the Great Depression— by which point Hermann Weinberger had left the business—but survived partly thanks to backing from the British-Dutch company Unilever/Lever Brothers.1 In the early 1930s the company Gebr. Weinberger devised a broad strategy to protect itself against growing hostility. Firstly, it advertised in the Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, then, in early 1933, it also had itself listed in the Jewish Community’s index of suppliers.2 Secondly, it operated subsidiaries, such as Otto Thürmann and Müller & Braun AG, which were not obviously linked to the parent company. The involvement of Unilever also offered a degree of protection; however, the British-Dutch company recalled its representative in August 1935, leaving Gebr. Weinberger in a vulnerable position. Persecution got underway on 10 August with the publication of a slanderous article in Der Angriff headlined “Der – 300 –

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Case Studies

getarnte Jude” (The Camouflaged Jew). The gist of the article was that the Weinbergers hid the Jewish “character” of their company from suppliers and customers.3 Some one hundred dairies in East Prussia reacted by canceling their contracts with Gebr. Weinberger. At the same time, the Reich Office For Fat Products ceased supplying the business with lard4 and company turnover fell dramatically.5 In mid-September 1935 Salomon Weinberger turned to the Polish embassy for help.6 He was the only one of the brothers to have retained his Polish nationality, forfeited by the others when they became German citizens in 1933. The Polish embassy immediately brought the matter to the attention of the Foreign Ministry and demanded an explanation. But while the Foreign Ministry began the routine procedure of collecting statements, the crisis within the company escalated. On 26 October 1935 the Polish embassy telephoned the Foreign Ministry stressing that “the German Labor Front (DAF) has taken measures that jeopardize the company’s continued operation.” The embassy secretary requested that the ministry immediately order that “such measures be discontinued until a final decision has been reached.”7 What had happened? After their suppliers began to boycott them, the Weinbergers had felt they had no choice but to let go of some of their employees. At that point the DAF offered the company’s rivals the opportunity to take over its market share in return for hiring its non-Jewish employees. Even though the DAF was not remotely in a position to make such an offer, the non-Jewish butter dealers agreed to it. The DAF could therefore demand that employees at Gebr. Weinberger give up their jobs there.8 Under heavy pressure from the DAF, around two-thirds of the employees left the company. At this point, authorities decided that Gebr. Weinberger would no longer be supplied with butter from abroad,9 leaving the company completely without suppliers. Under duress, the brothers had no choice but to sell Otto Thürmann GmbH. This afforded them liquidity, even though they accepted a price well below the market value.10 The Weinberger brothers gave the main troublemakers immediate notice and also succeeded in defending themselves against the action for reemployment they brought before the labor court,11 but negotiations with the head of the DAF’s trade unit and his assistant were described as disastrous in a letter the brothers wrote to the Polish embassy. “Herr Heimke and Herr Tilitzki treated us like one might treat criminals,” they wrote. “They alternated between threats, insults and careless orders, repeatedly insisting that it was ‘high time that the Jews shut their business.’”12 On 6 February 1936 the Weinberger brothers signed a new partnership agreement, which saw Israel and Adolf transfer their shares to Salomon, the only one with Polish citizenship. Clearly, they believed that the – 301 –

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protection of the Polish embassy could save the business from closure. On 11 February 1936 they reminded the embassy of their plight, writing that “it would be a terrible pity if we were only proffered help at a point when there was nothing left to salvage.”13 Shortly thereafter, a letter from the chief of police sealed the company’s fate. On 6 March 1936 von Helldorf banned Adolf, Israel, and Salomon Weinberger from all trade in foodstuffs, citing the Regulation on Trade Restrictions, and gave them three days to close down their business. Helldorf justified the order on the grounds that the company had “unsettled the entire market during the butter and fat shortage in the summer and autumn of 1935. You were unfair and discretionary in your quotas for resellers and randomly overlooked your customers’ rightful shares.”14 To add insult to injury, Helldorf also accused the company of fraudulently labeling dairy butter as quality brand butter. Charges were brought before the Regional Court against two senior employees and the owners, who were remanded to prevent them from absconding or colluding.15 Once again, the Polish embassy intervened, citing the ongoing lawsuit and pointing out that a Polish citizen owned 75 percent of the partnership capital. It succeeded in staying proceedings.16 The police president was requested to make a statement before the embassy’s petition could be answered. On 18 March Helldorf reiterated his claim that the company had favored its Jewish customers with special allocations and pointed out that the changes to the partnership agreement had not yet been entered in the commercial register, so Salomon Weinberger was not legally the main partner.17 However, the de facto head of trade control, the chief of police, was wrong on this point. In terms of trade law such changes to a business partnership’s agreement did not have to be entered into the commercial register to be legally valid. The Polish embassy now concentrated on freeing Salomon Weinberger from detention. At a meeting in the Foreign Ministry in mid-June 1936 the embassy secretary argued that the brothers planned to liquidate their business and that Salomon Weinberger should be released so that no further obstacles to doing so stood in their way, especially given that his offences were only “minor.”18 Adolf was released on 9 July, on the grounds that he was indispensable to the liquidation process, which was by now underway. 19 The criminal proceedings, which saw the brothers charged with breaching the food law, came to an end in August 1936. After a closed trial, judgements on the Weinberger case were delivered, with Salomon Weinberger fined 6000 reichsmarks, a penalty that was deemed to have been paid by reason of the time he had spent in custody.20 This relatively mild judgment, coupled with the fact that the trial was closed to the public, attests to the lack of substance to the chief of police’s claims, even though – 302 –

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Case Studies

Die Morgenpost and, a short time later, Der Stürmer seized on the opportunity presented by the ruling to report on the “butter robbers.”21 Upon their release the brothers discovered that the company offices had been raided. The storerooms had been emptied, with much of their machinery gone as well as all of their vehicles. The butter wholesaler was, in effect, no more. After the Reich Economics Ministry rejected the Weinbergers’ appeal against the withdrawal of their trade permit in February 1937,22 Salomon Weinberger—thanks to the protection of the Polish embassy— managed to liquidate the company before emigrating to the United States in September 1938.23 The Gebr. Weinberger case illustrates the extent to which persecution entailed attacking and undermining Jewish companies’ reputations, as well as the complexity of their strategies for self-preservation. It also elucidates how futile these strategies were once a company had become the target of a concerted persecution campaign. The way in which Gebr. Weinberger was scapegoated seems almost archetypal. The butter shortage blamed on the business was of course not of its own making, but was a result of the Nazis’ foreign policy. In this respect, Gebr. Weinberger was one of the first victims of the Nazis’ rearmament and autarchy policy, promoted by their propaganda machine with the slogan “Butter oder Kanonen” (butter or canons). Not even the Polish embassy’s efforts to intervene were enough to help them, although it did at least ensure that Salomon Weinberger was given a somewhat fair trial and the company could be liquidated in accordance with commercial rules.

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Kopp & Joseph In June 1893 the pharmacist Emil Joseph and the merchant Emil Kopp founded a drugstore, entered in the commercial register in 1901 as Kopp & Joseph.24 The company produced and sold fragrance, bath products, bandages, and other toiletries, including a popular nail buffer marketed as the “Philosopher’s Stone.” Its headquarters were on Potsdamer Straße 122, which, incidentally, hosted one of the legendary art exhibitions of the Neue Secession art movement, while its factories where in Lützowstraße. Business flourished, with two authorized representatives appointed prior to the First World War and stores opening at Tauentzienstraße 12a and Kurfürstendamm 35.25 In 1927 the renovation of the Kurfürstendamm store in the Neue Sachlichkeit style created quite a stir, with full-length windows onto the street and a glass display cabinet positioned on the sidewalk in front of the store.26 After the deaths of the company’s founders Emil Joseph (1913) and Emil Kopp (1922), Emil’s widow Marie Joseph – 303 –

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took the helm.27 Her second-in-command was her eldest son Curt, who had been granted power of attorney by his father shortly before he died and was therefore legally entitled to represent the business.28 When his mother passed away in August 1929, Curt Joseph inherited the business, appointing his younger brother authorized signatory and silent partner.29 Thanks to his “tireless efforts and expertise,” Joseph managed to turn the company into a market leader in Berlin, as Kopp & Joseph’s bank manager recalled.30 Born in 1899, Joseph had been awarded a number of medals as a soldier in the First World War and also in the Freikorps. To him, the call in late March 1933 for a blockade of Jewish businesses was a personal affront, not least in the light of the regime’s pledge to honor soldiers who had fought on the front. As he recounted in an essay for Harvard University written after he emigrated, on the morning of 1 April 1933 Joseph donned his various medals and announced to his employees that in his opinion, the so-called Nazi victory marked the beginning of the end for Germany and that he would not “voluntarily dismiss any his Jewish employees.”31 Joseph also had copies of his medal bestowal documents made, which he then exhibited in the windows of his shop fronts, directly beneath the posters put up by the Nazis. His reaction was typical of the members of the Reich Federation of Jewish Front Soldiers. As documented in the Israelitisches Familienblatt on 30 March 1933, a merchant from Wesel chose the same approach.32 One picture taken by an unknown photographer— which would be reproduced many times—shows the poster in the smeared windows of Kopp & Joseph in Tauentzienstraße (figure 11.1, next page), while the owner’s documents have been removed. Traces of glue beneath the poster and the scrawled word “Jew” as well as the Star of David indicate that something had been covered up, while the disorder shows, that someone carelessly stepped into the shop window. The photograph was presumably taken on the afternoon of 1 April. Around midday, the SA had stormed the store and torn down the documents. Joseph was not prepared to give up without a fight, and charged into the SA’s nearby tavern, arguing that the storm troopers had no right to enter his store and demanding the local leader return his papers. He actually got them back, but on the same day some of his staff outed themselves as Nazis and threatened Joseph with violence unless he dismissed the company’s Jewish employees, which he duly did. But since he did so by issuing authorization that was deliberately informal and therefore invalid, he was able to rehire them shortly thereafter.33 The company was hard hit by the Berlin hospitals’ unofficial embargo.34 Nevertheless, this period was “without major incidents,” as Joseph recalled, “although the struggle to survive became harder.”35 He sought to make up for the slackening in business by cutting back on staff, – 304 –

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Figure 11.1. Picture taken by an unknown photographer, Berlin 1933. bpk Picture No. 30013837.

even letting go of his longstanding authorized representative.36 Joseph also shifted part of his business to companies with names that could not be linked to their high-profile Jewish parent company. In November 1932 he founded Ultrazell GmbH, which specialized in red lights, UV lamps, and sunray lamps, and in September 1936 he set up the Adriane Fabrika– 305 –

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tion chemischer und kosmetischer Artikel GmbH, which took over Kopp & Joseph’s factory sector. He left Adriane’s management in October and sold it to Walter Unger, a Jewish colleague who then sold it under duress in November 1939 to a non-Jew. Ultrazell GmbH remained in business until March 1940.37 By selling the Kopp & Joseph premises, Joseph managed to keep the core business afloat, which was clearly close to his heart.38 In late 1938 the company was registered in the new directory of Jewish businesses, along with the information that it had a staff of thirteen, five of which were Jewish.39 During the pogrom the premises of the flagship store were wrecked and pillaged. Joseph was deported to Sachsenhausen and sold his business far below price upon his release.40 In July 1939 Kopp & Joseph was removed from the commercial register by Hans Rosenberg, who was an appointed consultant on tax issues.41 By then, Curt Joseph had emigrated to Britain, where he remained working as a pharmacist until his death in 1963.42 His plan to bring over his family “was made impossible by the war” and in the wake of the “Factory Action” in early 1943, his wife and two children were deported to Auschwitz and murdered.43 Kopp & Joseph was a typical medium-sized business that combined production and sales under one roof. As of 1913 it was run by the Joseph family. Owner Curt Joseph demonstrated great courage, confronting the SA in April 1933 and at least partly succeeding in keeping his company afloat. His attempt to separate the two strands of his business by setting up new companies that specialized in production also proved constructive. Thanks to its reputation, excellent location, and reserve funds, Kopp & Joseph was able to remain in business until the autumn of 1938 despite sustained economic ostracization. However, after Joseph was rounded up during the pogrom and forced to sell his business, he no longer had the means to bring his family to safety. In retrospect, Curt Joseph’s dogged determination to hold on to his company and home in Berlin resulted in personal tragedy. But the case study also shows that the photographs of the “boycott” that feature in various publications and exhibitions are usually employed as illustrations and not treated as what they are: prime sources.44 In so doing, the simplistic notion that Jewish businesspeople were passive victims is (unvoluntarily) underscored.

Emil Birkholz Nachf. In 1904 Emil Birkholz entered his textiles business in Kaiser-WilhelmStraße in the district of Pankow-Niederschönhausen in the commercial registrer, transferring ownership to Siegfried Jacobsohn in 1911. Born in Wronke (present-day Wronki in Poznań) in 1884, Jacobsohn fought on the – 306 –

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front in the First World War and originally hoped to become a teacher. However, the Emil Birkholz Nachf. store was his wife Cäcilie’s dowry, and so he joined the business in 1911.45 He lived above it with his wife and his three children, and the family managed to turn it into a typical suburban department store46 that flourished in the 1920s but was hard hit by the subsequent picketing and harassment in the early 1930s.47 By late 1933 the Jacobsohns were no longer in a position to provide their daughter with a dowry befitting her social standing. An old comrade helped him get a second job as a representative for a cardboard packaging factory, which gave him an additional income, while his wife continued to run the shop.48 In the summer of 1935, despite his heavy schedule, Jacobsohn took the time to travel across town to Emser Straße in Wilmersdorf to enlist the support of the CV on behalf of Benno Falk, who was threatened by a mob and had been reported to the police for engaging in “racial defilement,” i.e., sexual relations with a non-Jew.49 Despite ongoing picketing the Jacobsohns were able to maintain steady, albeit low-level business until 1938. In January 1938, in the course of revising the commercial register, the IHK concluded that Emil Birkholz Nachf. had not undergone any changes and was still going.50 The department store was wiped out—along with thousands of others—in the pogrom. Siegfried Jacobsohn’s sister recalled that the shop was completely ransacked on 10 November and that he himself was “led through the streets to the police as crowds jeered and swore at him, and was a broken man when he returned home after a few days in so-called protective custody.”51 A few weeks later, on 29 December 1938, Jacobsohn submitted an unofficial request to the Court to have his business removed from the commercial register.52 But when the Registry Court informed him that the request was insufficient and threatened to fine him, he visited the Registry Court in person on 20 January 1939 to make an official statement, signed with the compulsory name “Israel,” that his family’s business Emil Birkholz Nachf. no longer existed.53 Despite many setbacks, Jacobsohn continued his efforts to provide for his family. In early 1939 he took over the Café Bavaria on Barbarossaplatz in Schöneberg from his sister Bertha Engländer and her husband Ignatz.54 He secured a special licence to operate an exclusively Jewish business and employed his wife Cäcilie and his son Arno. As his niece later recalled, “everyone earned well because the café was always busy.”55 But Jacobsohn was picked up by the Gestapo on 22 December 1939 for a supposed breach against the War Economy Decree. It is impossible to glean from the files what exactly Jacobsohn was accused of. The files do reveal, however, that once he had finished his sentence in jail in Brandenburg, he was abducted to Buchenwald and murdered shortly after his arrival in July 1941.56 Cäcilie Jacobsohn was deported to – 307 –

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Asserting Jewish Commercial Activity

Riga in September 1942 and murdered the same year. Her children Arno and Ruth followed her there in October 1942 and met the same fate.57 The Jacobsohns’ case is also an emblematic one. Since they worked in retail and were therefore bound to their customers, they could not simply relocate—or at least not without incurring considerable losses. Instead, the couple adopted a strategy of diversification, with Cäcilie keeping the shop going while Siegfried earned a living elsewhere. In order to find outside work, he sought to leverage friendships dating back to his time as a soldier in the First World War. Jacobsohn was also active within the CV, not least because he hoped membership would guarantee a degree of support. Why the family did not emigrate after the pogrom remains a mystery. Years of sustained picketing and the pillaging of their store, the cornerstone of their livelihood, may well have left them without the financial means to leave Germany. And perhaps they did not want to be separated. After all, the family was clearly a close-knit one. Be this as it may, their—initially successful—attempt to rebuild their lives attests to great resilience, even though it cannot be ruled out that his new business drew attention to Jacobsohn, ultimately bringing about his arrest, which, in turn, led to his murder.

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Gebr. Friedländer & Maaß The linen and woven goods factory Gebr. Friedländer & Maaß in Bischofstraße 6/8 was entered in the commercial register in 1901. Max Rosenthal became its owner in 1918. Born in 1875 in Nikolaiken (present-day Mikolajki) in East Prussia, in 1916 he joined the Deutsche Reichsloge, a Jewish lodge popular with many Berlin merchants,58 and had his own “lifelong” place in the New Synagogue.59 Rosenthal clearly enjoyed an excellent reputation among Berlin’s merchants and was appointed to the Berlin Commerical Court as a judge in August 1930,60 one year after setting up the Deutsche Leinen- und Webwaren GmbH with the minimum capital of 20,000 reichsmarks required by law. The new company, managed by Paul Lesser and Alfred Rothkugel,61 was also based in the business’s headquarters in the former commercial center and took over the production of linen and woven goods, which were then sold by the established company. Shortly after the blockade the company underwent a fundamental overhaul. The two managing directors resigned in late April 1933. Judging by the timing, this was presumably an attempt at structural assimilation. The names of both the managing directors were listed in the Jüdisches Adreßbuch directory and may have been replaced to avoid the company becoming known as Jewish. They were replaced by Ernst Schubbert, – 308 –

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Case Studies

Rosenthal’s long-standing accountant. Around the same time, Rosenthal changed the core company’s business form and founded a limited partnership. According to the partnership agreement backdated to 1 January 1933, he himself was a limited partner, investing 100,000 reichsmarks, with Paul Meyer acting as general partner.62 The advantage of this restructuring was that Meyer, as the personally liable shareholder, fronted the company and it was therefore not seen as Jewish.63 The agreement granted Rosenthal the right “to play a discretionary role in the business.” However, this arrangement was officially brought to an end in September 1933—apparently by mutual agreement—after the Berlin procurement office expressed disapproval.64 The company went on to turn high enough profits to allow Rosenthal to reduce his limited partnership contribution to 20,000 reichsmarks. After the death of Paul Meyer on 12 September 1938, his widow Emilie Meyer joined the business as general partner and co-ran the company together with Rosenthal. It was only in the autumn of 1940 that Meyer canceled the partnership agreement, while contractually agreeing to pay back Rosenthal’s contribution, including his share of profits.65 This new agreement was approved by the chief of police on 27 August 1941,66 by which time dramatic changes had occurred. Firstly, Rosenthal had been ordered to pay 160,000 reichsmarks of Jewish property tax, forcing him to sell his grand townhouse in the affluent Rauchstraße and move to a far more modest apartment in the Blumeshof (known today as Schöneberger Ufer).67 Moreover, the Gau economic advisor had instructed Meyer in the course of the authorization process to seek a new partner. She dismissed the agreement with Rosenthal and was eager to cancel it without even paying the Jewish partner his rightful share. In September 1941 Emilie Meyer applied to have Gebr. Friedländer & Maaß struck off the commercial register, with business transferred to Deutsche Leinen- und Webwaren GmbH. The Registry Court demanded that Rosenthal provide a statement on his departure from the company. City councilor Fritz Wege objected on Rosenthal’s behalf and pointed out that his partners had not paid Rosenthal back his investment or his share of profits.68 Their lawyer, Dr. Uellenberg, deemed this objection invalid: These remarks are ridiculous. You completely misunderstand the circumstances and the legal position. As a Jew, Max Israel Rosenthal may no longer be a partner in a German business. Moreover, his departure from the business was agreed, as the petition acknowledges. The terms of his departure are irrelevant: the Jew has left the business, the business has been dissolved. If he believes he has a claim, then he should assert it. But this does not give him the right to refuse registration. It remains to be seen if the Jew is still required to register the company under the circumstances or if he is even allowed to register a German company.69 – 309 –

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However, Uellenberg failed to recognize that the Registry Court was still keen to keep up appearances. With Uellenberg reiterating his surprise that “the Registry Court still allows the Jew Rosenthal to cause such trouble,”70 oral proceedings began in spring 1942. Rosenthal was represented by lawyer Fritz Arnold, who had to wear a yellow star. In August 1942 after hearing the evidence, the Regional Court not only rejected Meyer’s complaint71 but allowed Rosenthal’s countercharge, ordering Meyer to begin with “the registration of the defendant’s stepping down as limited partner from the limited partnership Gebr. Friedländer & Maass and to pay 20,000 reichsmarks and 4 vH [per cent, CK] annual interest, starting on 1.7.1940, to the restricted-access secure account of Max Israel Rosenthal.”72 Meyer appealed against the judgment. In the course of proceedings Rosenthal’s wife Cecilie was deported to Auschwitz and murdered, and the couple’s apartment in the Blumeshof was confiscated and given to the submarine commander Otto Adalbert Schnee.73 Max Rosenthal was initially spared the same fate as his wife because he was in the Jewish hospital, but was deported as soon as he recovered in June 1943.74 The case was therefore closed in September 1943 due to “the migration of the defendant.”75 After Rosenthal’s assets were confiscated by the state upon his deportation, the Asset Reclamation Office intervened in the ensuing legal battle and reached an agreement on 15 January 1945: “As the legal successor to the deportee, the Reich fiscal authority, represented by the chief finance president of Berlin-Brandenburg, herewith approves and applies to register the departure of the limited partner Rosenthal from the aforementioned business.”76 However, the warden of the late general partner also had to sign the agreement, and the case was therefore still open in April 1945.77 Despite his advanced years, Rosenthal survived the Theresienstadt ghetto and returned to Berlin in September 1945.78 With the help of his former accountant, he launched a bid for the restitution of his assets. In March 1948 he traveled to New York to see his daughter, who had fled Germany in 1939, and died shortly thereafter.79 After the German Trust Agency for the Administration of Sequestered and Confiscated Assets in the Soviet Sector of Berlin established in 1948 that the business was not in operation because the partners had not made themselves known, Gebr. Friedländer & Maaß was removed from the commercial register on 2 March 1951.80 Max Rosenthal adopted the strategy of structural assimilation in the late 1920s, more or less protecting himself against the embargo and persecution prior to 1939 by founding a “neutral” subsidiary company and converting Gebr. Friedländer & Maaß into a limited partnership and then formally resigning. Rosenthal also enjoyed the support of non-Jewish colleagues who upheld contracts and verbal agreements. Even after his – 310 –

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Case Studies

non-Jewish partners reneged on their tacit agreement, Rosenthal was able to use his expertise in trade law to launch a successful defense. But none of this was enough to stave off the persecution he faced as of 1941, which led to his own deportation and the murder of his wife. Even though Rosenthal himself survived, the success of his defense strategies was marred by personal tragedy, too.

Max Kulies In the autumn of 1937 the IHK set about removing Max Kulies’s feather wholesaler from the commercial register.81 As already mentioned, 84-yearold Kulies dug in his heels:

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Before the Great War, mine was one of the most influential companies in the untreated feathers and feather plume wholesale business. … I had import and export partners in New York, London, Paris, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Copenhagen, European Russia, Siberia and other foreign lands. After the War, confiscation in Russia, the inflation of 1922/23, a slowdown in hat feather fashion, an greater number of foreigners in the business (who put homegrown businesses under pressure), I believed I had no choice but to give up my company in 1927. … I have the strength and capability to build up my company anew, especially now that a warehouse worth approximately 5000 Mark has been put at my disposal so that I can keep my business going. … I am firmly of the opinion that I can turn my established and reputable company … into a success and once again export my wares.82

In a response to a query from the Registry Court, the IHK took into account the warehouse and decided in December 1937 that the company could remain in the commercial register for another year.83 Once the deadline had passed and Kulies was instructed to apply to have his business removed from the register, he once again filed an objection. By this point he had moved his business to his private apartment. On 21 January 1939 Kulies put his compulsory name to a letter stating that his heart condition had taken a turn for the worse as a result of “personal distress” and that he was unable to undertake the long journey to the court, and therefore requested an extension of the deadline.84 Presumably this was a reference to the pogrom. His health failed to improve and in February 1939 he sent the court another handwritten letter requesting that his company’s removal from the commercial register be delayed until the end of 1939, so that he could at least mark its sixty-fifth anniversary. “It is a personal tragedy to see my entire life’s work to found a company for coming generations undone,” he wrote,85 adding that “the existence of my business harms nei– 311 –

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ther the state, the city nor any Aryans.”86 The court delayed the process by another six months. When the authorities insisted on the closure of the business in October 1939, he once again objected, citing his advanced years and arguing that it would destroy his livelihood.87 However, this time his plea fell on deaf ears, and the Registry Court fined him 150 reichsmarks in February 1940.88 Kulies responded with another letter explaining that cold weather prevented him from leaving his apartment; that he was therefore behind schedule and hoped he would be able to appear at the court soon.89 This resulted in a brief suspension of the bureaucratic process.90 When Kulies failed to appear at the court, the court sent bailiffs to his home on 24 May 1940. The move proved ineffectual, however, with the authorities merely able to ascertain that Kulies had no assets to speak of, lived in a one-room apartment, and was behind in his rent payments.91 The feather dealer remained recalcitrant. On 31 August 1940 he pointed out the economic potential of the German Reich’s growing ties to the USSR, stressing that he was “the sole expert in Soviet decorative plumes not only in Berlin but across Germany.”92 But by this point the IHK had embarked on its policy of “de-Jewifying” sales representations and decided that Kulies had to close his business by the end of the year: “There is not the slightest reason to delay the removal of the company from the commercial register.”93 Because Kulies maintained his objection and promised to concur, the Registry Court’s chief inspector in charge of his case granted him one last extension of the deadline, setting the date for 31 December 1940.94 In January 1941 Kulies had his 66-year-old company removed from the commercial register.95 Even though he explained that he was unable to make the downpayment of the fee, Kulies managed to produce the requisite 11.60 reichsmarks by the end of the month.96 Eighteen months later, on 31 August 1942, 88-year-old Max Kulies was deported to Theresienstadt. He perished five weeks later on 3 October 1942.97 In an evaluation of his remaining assets, an official from the dedicated economic panel for the retail sector wrote on 6 November 1942 that the contents of Kulies’s apartment were worth 68 reichsmarks, including 50 marks worth of “feathers in sacks and other bits and bobs.”98 All of Max Kulies’s worldly goods were then bought sight unseen by the furniture dealer Anna Demmer, who nevertheless went on to protest that the feathers were in no condition to sell and tried to get a refund on the price she had paid.99 Her application was turned down on 3 April 1943, exactly six months after Kulies’s death.100 The case of Max Kulies vividly illustrates that the destruction of Jewish commercial activity often amounted to the destruction of a life’s work. In February 1939 Kulies stressed in a letter to the Registry Court in February 1939 how difficult and sad it was form him to delete his company – 312 –

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Case Studies

he saw as his life’s achievement.101 He resisted the closure of his business with all the means available to him, with some success. Ultimately, however, the old man was unable to assert himself against the ruthless dictates of the officials in the IHK and the Court.

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Notes 1. Polish embassy notes, 14 October 1935, in PArch AA, R 100215. 2. Announcement in Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin. 20. Jg. No. 1 (January 1930); Bezugsquellen-Verzeichnis, in Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, May 1933. 3. “Der getarnte Jude,” Der Angriff, 10 August 1935. 4. Letter from the Weinberger brothers to the Polish Embassy, 12 February 1936, in PArch AA, R 100215. 5. Polish Embassy notes, 14 October 1935, in ibid. 6. Jerzy Tomaszewski, Auftakt zur Vernichtung: Die Vertreibung polnischer Juden aus Deutschland im Jahre 1938 (Osnabrück, 2002). 7. Foreign Ministry file note, 28 October 1935, in PArch AA, R 100215. See letter from the DAF Central Office to the DAF Economics Office, 15 April 1936, in online database; Nationalsozialismus, Holocaust, Widerstand und Exil, Regest 11362. 8. Letter from the Weinberger brothers to the Polish Embassy, n.d. (January 1936) in PArch AA, R 100215. The process is also documented in online database; Nationalsozialismus, Holocaust, Widerstand und Exil, Regesten 11362, 21367 and 21625. 9. Letter from the Weinberger brothers to the Polish Embassy, 12 February 1936, in PArch AA, R 100215. 10. Letter from the Weinberger brothers to the Polish Embassy, 11 February 1936, in ibid. 11. Letter from the Weinberger brothers to the Polish Embassy, n.d. (January 1936), in ibid. 12. Letter from the Weinberger brothers to the Polish Embassy, 12 February 1936, in ibid. 13. Ibid. A Foreign Ministry clerk wrote “NO” on the letter, in ibid. 14. Letter from the police president to Salomon Weinberger, 6 March 1936, in ibid. 15. Letter from the police president to the Reich Interior Ministry, 18 April 1936, in ibid. 16. Letter from the Reich Interior Ministry to the Foreign Ministry, 26 March 1936, in ibid. 17. Letter from the police president to the Reich Interior Ministry, 18 March 1936, in ibid. 18. Foreign Ministry file note, 15 June 1936, in ibid. 19. Letter from the Reich Justice Ministry to the Foreign Ministry, 24 August 1936, in ibid. 20. Letter from the Reichsführer SS (RFSS) to the Foreign Office, 14 February 1938, in ibid.

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21. “Der Jude als Butterwucherer,” Der Stürmer 14/34, August 1936; “Scharfe Maßnahmen gegen die jüdische Butterhandlung,” Berliner Morgenpost, 12 March 1936. 22. Letter from the Reich economics minister to the Weinberger brothers, 7 February 1937, in online database; Nationalsozialismus, Holocaust, Widerstand und Exil, Regest 21625. 23. Letter from the RFSS to the Foreign Ministry, 14 February 1938, in PArch AA, R 100215. 24. District Court order, 28 September 1901, in LAB, A Rep 342-02, 37844. 25. Stiftung Brandenburger Tor and Stiftung Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesmuseen Schloss Gottorf, eds., Liebermanns Gegner: Neue Secession und Expressionismus in Berlin (Cologne, 2011), 55. 26. Berlin und seine Bauten, vol. VIII, Teil A, S. 195f. Many thanks to Sonja Miltenberger, Berlin, for this reference. 27. Letter from Marie Joseph to the District Court, 12 June 1922, in LAB, A Rep 342-02, 37844. 28. Letter from Kopp & Joseph to the District Court, 30 January 1922, in ibid. 29. Letter from Curt Joseph to the District Court, 21 May 1930, in ibid. 30. Affidavit by Max Lippmann, 26 July 1957, in EAB, 62928 (Curt Joseph). 31. Curt Joseph, “NS-Betriebszellen in Aktion”, in Limberg and Rübsaat, Jüdischer Alltag, 95. Curt Joseph’s report was omitted from later editions: see Limberg and Rübsaat, Jüdischer Alltag (Berlin, 2003). 32. “Selbsthilfe eines jüdischen Frontkämpfers,” Israelitisches Familienblatt, 30 March 1933. See Dieter Corbach, “Ich kann nicht schweigen!”: Richard Stern, Köln Marsilsteig 20 (Cologne, 1988), 9–16; Klaus Hesse and Philipp Springer, Vor aller Augen. Fotodokumente des nationalsozialistischen Terrors in der Provinz (Essen, 2002), 71. 33. Joseph, NS-Betriebszellen, 96. 34. Affidavit by Max Jaffe, 19 November 1954, in EAB, 62928. 35. Ibid. 36. Letter from Curt Joseph, 23 November 1936, in LAB, A Rep 342-02, 37844. 37. DjGB. 38. Affidavit by Curt Joseph, 12 January 1952, in EAB 62928. 39. Index of Jewish businesspeople in the Tiergarten administrative district, no. 91, o. D. (1938–1939), in LAB, A Rep 005-03-02, 2. 40. Margarete Limberg and Hubert Rübsaat, biographical information about the authors, in idem, Jüdischer Alltag, 364. 41. District Court order, 24 July 1939; authorization issued by Curt Joseph, 5 April 1939, both in LAB, A Rep 342-02, 37844. 42. Limberg and Rübsaat, Angaben, 364. See also letter from Curt Joseph to the Berlin Office for Compensation, 4 June 1955, in EAB, 62928 (Curt Joseph). 43. Letter from Curt Joseph to Joachim Lipschitz, the Berlin senator of the interior, 19 April 1957, in EAB, 62928. 44. The photo is reproduced, inter alia, in Barkai, Boykott, 29, and Geisel, Scheunenviertel, 142, and also features prominently for instance in the exhibition of Yad Vashem Memorial Site.

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45. Affidavit by Bertha Engländer, 18 July 1957, in EAB, 67313 (Siegfried Jacobsohn). 46. Hans Jacobson, “Extern im Waisenhaus,” in Lammel, Pankow, 322. 47. Affidavit by Lucie Wellner, 7 August 1952, in EAB, 67313. 48. Affidavit by Bertha Engländer, 18 July 1957, in ibid. 49. Central Association file note, 5 June 1935, in CAHJP, HM2 8806 (RGVA 721/1/3161). 50. Letter from the IHK to the District Court, 25 January 1938, in LAB, A Rep 342-02, 37855. 51. Affidavit by Bertha Engländer, 18 July 1957, in EAB, 67313. 52. Letter from Siegfried Jacobsohn to the District Court, 29 December 1938, in LAB, A Rep 342-02, 37855. 53. Statement by Siegfried Jacobsohn, 20 January 1939, in ibid. 54. Affidavit by Gerda Rosenstrauch, 18 July 1957, EAB, 67313 (Siegfried Jacobsohn). 55. Affidavit by Ruth Ehrlich, 7 February 1958, in ibid. 56. Letter from the United Restitution Office to the Compensation Office, 28 December 1954, in ibid. 57. Arno, Cäcilie, and Ruth Jacobsohn were deported and murdered. See Ruth Ehrlich’s affidavit, 7 February 1958, in EAB, 67313. See also Ruth Israelski, “Jüdische Familien in Niederschönhausen. Erinnerungen einer Vierundachtzigjährigen,” in Lammel, Pankow, 177f. See also Arno Jacobsohn, born 15 July 1923 in Berlin; Cäcilie Jacobsohn, née Ehrlich, born 9 April 1884 in Vandsburg; Ruth Jacobsohn, born 20 August 1912 in Berlin, Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs. 58. UOBB Handbuch, 1928/29, 19. 59. Application regarding damage to property Margot Steinmetz, 10 September 1952, in EAB, 78232 (Max Rosenthal). 60. Prussian Ministry of Justice certificate of appointment, 5 May 1930, in ibid. 61. DjGB. 62. Handelsregistertabelle, entry on 16 May 1933, in LAB, C Rep 304, 54632. 63. Affidavit by Margot Steinmetz, 23 September 1952, in EAB, 78232 (Max Rosenthal). 64. Letter from Kurt Sachs to the Berlin Superior Court, 21 January 1943, in BLHA, Rep 36 A, 32068. 65. Letter from the Deutsche Leinen- und Webwaren KG to the chief finance president, 24 October 1944, in BLHA, Rep 36 A, 32068. 66. Letter from the IHK to the District Court, 27 August1941, in LAB, C Rep 304, 54632. 67. Application regarding damage to property Margot Steinmetz, 10 September 1952, in EAB, 78232. 68. Letter from Fritz Wege to the District Court, 19 February 1942, in LAB, C Rep 304, 54632. 69. Letter from Dr. Uellenberg (Wuppertal) to the District Court, 26 February 1942, in ibid. 70. Letter from Dr. Uellenberg to the District Court, 25 April 1942, in ibid. 71. Born in Charlottenburg in 1894, Fritz Arnold fled to Switzerland in 1942 and

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returned to Germany after a long sojourn in the United States. He died in Lemgo in 1980. See Ladwig-Winters, Anwalt, 94. 72. Regional Court judgement, 18 August 1942, BLHA, Rep 36 A, 32068 73. Declaration of assets by Cecilie Rosenthal, 9 March 1943; letter from the chief finance president to the mayor of Berlin, 26 March 1943, both in BLHA, 36 II, 31911. See Rosenthal, Cecilie, née Sina, born 30 April 1884 in Guttau, Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs. 74. Declaration of assets by Max Rosenthal, 8 June 1943, in BLHA, Rep 36 II, 32068. 75. Letter from the Berlin Superior Court to the District Court, 15 September 1943, in LAB, C Rep 304, 54632; letter from Kurt Sachse to the Berlin Superior Court, 29 June 1943, in BLHA, Rep 36 A, 32068. 76. Letter from the chief finance president, Property Transactions Office, 23 January 1945, in LAB, C Rep 304, 54632. 77. Letter from the Property Transactions Office to the Berlin Superior Court, 12 April 1945, in BLHA, Rep 36 A, 32068. 78. Affidavit by Margot Steinmetz, 3 October 1956, in EAB, 78232. 79. Application based on the law on compensation for injustice committed in the National Socialist era, 10 January 1951, EAB, 78232. 80. District Court file note, 2 March 1951, LAB, C Rep 304, 54632 81. Letter from the IHK to the District Court, 10 September 1937, in AGC, HR A 90, 38139, 1941 (Max Kulies). 82. Letter from Kulies to the District Court, 4 December 1937, in ibid. 83. Letter from the IHK to the District Court, 18 December 1937, in ibid. 84. Letter from Kulies to the District Court, 21 January 1939, in ibid. 85. Letter from Kulies to the District Court, 25 February 1939, in ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Letter from Max Kulies to the District Court, 26 October 1939, in ibid. 88. District Court order, 12 December 1940, in ibid. 89. Letter from Kulies to the District Court, 20 Feburary 1940, in ibid. 90. District Court order, 15 March 1940, ibid. 91. Enforcement officer’s minute, 24 May 1940, in AGC, HR A 90, 38139, 1941. 92. Letter from Max Kulies to the District Court, 31 August 1940, in ibid. 93. Minute of the IHK board meeting, 15 August 1939, in BLHA, Rep 70, IHK Berlin, Abgabe 2001, 171/56/7, vol. 1. 94. Annotation to a letter from the IHK to the District Court, 7 October 1940, in AGC, HR A 90, 38139, 1941. 95. Statement by Max Kulies, 3 January 1941, in ibid. 96. District Court costs account, 9 January 1941, in ibid. 97. Gedenkbuch Bundesarchiv; Gedenkbuch Berlins, 691. 98. Accomodation list, 12 January 1943, in BLHA, Rep 36 A II, 20738. 99. Letter from Anna Demmer to the chief finance president, 27 March 1943, in BLHA, Rep 36 II, 20738. 100. Directive, 3 April 1943, in ibid. 101. Letter from Kulies to the District Court, 25 February 1939, in AGC, HR A 90, 38139, 1941.

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Part IV

Deportation

 “With regard to the Jews, we are not waging a paper war here.”1

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I

have chosen to describe this last phase of the destruction of Jewish commercial activity in a separate section. Confronted with aggression on an unprecedented scale, Jewish businesspeople were left with so little room to maneuver that it makes no sense to continue with an analysis of their strategies for (economic) survival. My aim in this section is therefore to outline the fates of those people who lacked the economic and social means, strength, or will to leave Germany, or who were simply unwilling to give up their businesses.

Notes 1. Letter from commander of the security police in Latvia to the District Court, 25 April 1942, in AGC, HR A 90, 38139, 1941.

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Chapter 12

The Deportation of Jewish Businesspeople

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 The pogrom left many businesspeople in a precarious economic situation. In many cases, the contents of their devastated warehouses represented their last remaining assets, as attested to by the numerous requests that “the legal costs of closing down a business be waived or reduced as much as possible.”1 The Registry Court did not comply. One registry clerk remained unmoved by a request for leniency submitted by the ageing proprietress of the fruit and vegetable retailer Joseph Schäfer, which had been operating in the central covered market since 1893, on the grounds that her son, who was registered as a partner, had returned from the First World War with a lung infection and died in the military hospital in Potsdam in 1933.2 The officials were equally impervious to the pleas of Rudolf Golzen, who in August 1939 requested an exemption from the costs incurred by shutting down his business on the grounds that he had no assets whatsoever and needed the 30 reichsmarks he earned per week as a construction worker just to make ends meet.3 It was only when the court sent round the bailiffs, who found nothing of value, that his fee of 10.07 reichsmarks was waived.4 Once a company had been struck off the commercial register, it no longer appeared in the directory of merchants and was effectively cast out of the market. That humiliation, along with the surrounding circumstances, drove some Jewish businesspeople to end their lives. One of them was the 68-year-old realtor Hans Fürstenwalde, whose business had been listed in the commercial register since 1912. In early 1939 he asked the District Court if he could postpone the removal of his company from the commercial register, stressing that this could only be done once he had – 319 –

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Deportation

settled his accounts.5 As soon as this task was completed and his business struck off the commercial register, he took his own life on 3 August.6 Josef Juliusburger chose to do the same. Born in 1871, he entered his upholstery fabrics business into the commercial register under his own name in 1903. The business was well managed and well positioned to flourish, given that textiles and furniture were two of the mainstays of Jewish commercial activity in Berlin. It survived the First World War, inflation, the Great Depression, and the early days of Nazi persecution, but in October 1938 Juliusburger had to apply for the removal of his company from the commercial register.7 On 21 January 1942, one day after the Wannsee Conference, the Jewish businessman received notice that he was to be deported and opted instead for ending his life, “the only choice left.”8 He left two notes, both written on his business stationery—proof, surely, that he remained a businessman till the last. In one of them, addressed to a former employee, Juliusburger explained that it went against his honor to sign a statement to the effect that he had demonstrated hostility to the state and was therefore to be expatriated, “as a result of which my entire remaining fortune, built up by 36 years of honest work, would be confiscated.”9 As already mentioned, as of September 1939, emigration became considerably harder, and Jews still living in Berlin were at growing risk of being apprehended as part of the Nazis’ increasingly radical campaign. After Germany invaded Poland in September, some four hundred Polish Jews were taken from Berlin to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.10 Among them was Arnold (Ascher) Meissner, who had been deported to Poland in October 1938. In August 1939 he was allowed to return to Berlin in order to prepare for his emigration. No sooner had he arrived, however, than he was transported to Sachsenhausen “without warning” and murdered there on 27 September 1939.11 Although he too had been deported to the concentration camp, a partner in the menswear factory Feld & Weihl, of which Meissner was a customer, survived the war and later said he had heard that Meissner had been “beaten to death.”12 Eduard Wassermann had moved to Berlin from Tarnow in Galicia at the turn of the century and attained a degree of wealth with a poultry, game, and shortening wholesale business. In December 1936 he formally sold that business to a non-Jew but retained 48 percent as a silent partner—enough for a livelihood. He, too, was deported to Sachsenhausen on 13 September 1939. Chronically diabetic, he died there in early 1940. His brother Max Moses perished there soon after.13 In December 1939 the newspaper Der Aufbau, published in New York, estimated that at least thirty-eight Jews had already perished in the concentration camp in the north of Berlin.14 After the so-called euthanasia program—the murder of people regarded as ill or handicapped—had been forced to slow down, the Nazis – 320 –

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The Deportation of Jewish Businesspeople

started killing the weakest of the Jewish concentration camp inmates in extermination centers in Bernburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Pirna-Sonnenstein. Among the victims of the so-called Action 14f13 was Heinz Aronheim. Born in 1909, he had been a partner in the ladieswear factory Aronheim & Horwitz since 1937. Aronheim was sentenced in June 1938 to twenty months in prison, apparently in connection with his plans to emigrate.15 At the behest of the Registry Court, he removed his business from the commercial register while still in jail, but noted that it had been liquidated in his absence.16 As Himmler had ruled that Jewish prison inmates were not to be released, but to be sent immediately to concentration camps after completing their sentence, Aronheim was deported to Sachsenhausen. From there, he was transferred to Dachau in September 1940 and to Neuengamme in 1941. In April 1942 all the Jewish inmates of Neuengamme were deported to the Bernburg and murdered,17 even though the facts were later covered up.18 By 1941 a growing number of people were being deported to concentration camps for reasons that remain unknown. One of them was Siegfried Engel. Born in 1893, he owned an animal-feed wholesaler entered in the commercial register in 1923. Engel was deported to Sachsenhausen on 5 April 1941.19 After suffering four months of torture in Block 38, one of the blocks reserved for Jews, Engel submitted an application using a concentration camp letter form to have his company removed from the commercial register in August 1941 (figure 12.1., next page). It is unclear why Engel did this. Did he realize he would never leave the camp alive and was such a conscientious businessman that he wanted to settle his accounts before meeting his death? All we know for sure is that his letter did not satisfy the Registry Court’s exacting standards. Clerks at the District Court in Oranienburg— of which Sachsenhausen was a suburb—insisted on an official minute of the process.20 On 8 September 1941 a judicial inspector from Oranienburg therefore visited the concentration camp and, with camp commander Hans Loritz21 serving as a witness, duly minuted Engel’s application to have his animal-feed business removed from the commercial register, which took effect three days later.22 On 17 September 1941 Engel received a bill for 15.68 reichsmarks, which he duly paid on 1 October 1941.23 Siegfried Engel perished in Sachsenhausen four months later, on 30 January 1942. The cause of death given in the death register was “a weak heart.”24 Only weeks beforehand, on 31 December 1941, a minute was taken in Moabit prison of the removal of an apron wholesale business called Theodor Liedtke from the commercial register. In this case the Court has assumed that its owner was in the Dachau concentration camp but was then informed by its commander that Theodor Liedtke had been “handed – 321 –

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Figure 12.1. Letter from Siegfried Engel to the District Court, 26 August 1941. District Court, Berlin-Charlottenburg, HR A 90, 99908, 1941 (Siegfried Engel). – 322 –

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The Deportation of Jewish Businesspeople

over” to Moabit prison, where he was awaiting trial.25 When the court tracked him down, Liedtke had minutes taken during his recreation time confirming that his company had been struck off the commercial register.26 By this point, mass deportations from Berlin were reaching a first, murderous climax. With many victims not even given time to shut down their companies, these deportations were not necessarily reflected in the commercial register files. However, the IHK was kept informed of the deportation of business owners and partners and would then notify the Registry Court when a business had shut down and was to be removed from the register. The registry clerks would get in touch with the residents’ registration office, which was overseen by the police president, in order to clarify the whereabouts of the person in question. The information required would generally arrive within a week. If the Registry Court then knew where the person in question had been deported to, it would attempt to get in touch so that the business could be formally shut down, otherwise the process would be begun ex officio. The Registry Court would publish an announcement in the Börsenzeitung, Reichsanzeiger, and Völkischer Beobachter that the business was to be removed from the commercial register in three months’ time, unless anyone objected.27 Quite apart from the fact that the court knew full well that the addressee had been deported, the whole procedure was senseless because Jews were barred from reading these publications. Once the IHK informed the Registry Court that the cotton wool factory L. Tockan had ceased operations, the court began investigating the whereabouts of its shareholders. After referring unsuccessfully to the residents’ registration office, it tracked down the mother of Walter Lomnitz, the general partner, in the town of Beuth. On 2 February 1942 she told the court that her son had been “evacuated.”28 The residents’ registration office confirmed that Lomnitz, a forced laborer who had been earning an hourly wage of 0.77 reichsmarks as a transport worker at Siemens Schuckert,29 had been deregistered to Litzmannstadt (present-day Łódź) on 18 October—i.e., he had been on the very first deportation train to this ghetto from Berlin.30 The court’s attempts to locate him proved futile and it eventually began the process of removing the company from the commercial register ex officio. On 11 May 1942, before this had been completed, Lomnitz was transported to Chelmno and murdered at this killing site.31 After Litzmannstadt, the next destination of the deportation trains was Minsk. Among the thousand-odd Jews from Berlin transported there on 14 November 1941 was Lea Fränkel, to whom this book is dedicated. Born in Przemysl in 1893, she took over the Hermann Fränkel company for fancy goods and smoking accessories at Landsberger Straße 35 after the death of her husband, Hermann (Hirsch), in March 1935.32 In February – 323 –

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and March 1938 she ignored the IHK’s demands for a report on developments and changes in the business.33 The Registry Court therefore began proceedings to remove the company from the commercial register. Fränkel appealed on the grounds that her business was still operating and that she was still paying her fees to the IHK.34 This was not of course unusual, but was still a valid point. After all, Jewish businesses were indeed paying contributions to the Chamber, despite its increasingly concerted efforts to have them removed from the commercial register and to destroy Jewish commercial activity. Fränkel was also able to prove that her company turnover had risen from approximately 14,800 to 18,200 reichsmarks between 1935 and 1938.35 Confronted with proof that the business was thriving, the IHK proposed that the Registry Court delay the company’s removal from the register for another year.36 But, when turnover plummeted in early 1939, the IHK proposed in June that the court resume proceedings.37 Even the court felt that this was unacceptable.38 In February 1940 the IHK had to acknowledge that Hermann Fränkel had “developed favorably in the past year.”39 Company turnover reached 29,300 reichsmarks in 1939, and was up to 40,000 in 1940.40 However, in December 1940 the “Haupttreuhandstelle Ost” or HTO (Main Trusteeship Office for the East), which answered to Hermann Göring as commissioner for the Four Year Plan, launched proceedings to seize Lea Fränkel’s assets on the basis of the Decree on the Disposition of the Assets of Citizens of the Former Polish State.41 Fränkel’s protest was to no avail and her assets were seized in October 1941.42 Shortly before this happened, the chief of police had rejected a complaint filed by the Gau chairman of the DAF that “the Jew Fränkel … continues to operate a smoking accessories wholesaler’s,” referring to HTO’s ongoing proceedings.43 The register clerks only returned to the case in May 1942 when the police president reported that the business had shut down on 14 November 1941 and had been removed from the directory of Jewish businesses on 10 April 1942.44 When the court’s officials then set in motion the standard procedure to remove the business from the commercial register, they were informed by the police headquarters’ residents’ registration office that the owner had been “transferred” to Minsk on 14 November 1941.45 Conditions were so horrific in the Minsk ghetto that only about thirty of the roughly seven thousand Jews deported there from Germany survived.46 It is here that Lea Fränkel’s trail runs cold. It is not known whether the hardship of the ghetto killed her, or whether she perished with the vast majority of German Jews in March 1943 or was murdered when the ghetto was liquidated in September 1943.47 In the wake of the Minsk deportations, a further 1006 Jews from Berlin were deported to Kovno on 22 November 1941 and murdered on arrival.48 Among them was Georg Czapski, born in 1893, the owner of a wholesale – 324 –

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business for advertising balloons and carnival articles. After he had been taken to Sachsenhausen in November 1938,49 he was living in what the Nazis termed a “Jewish house” in Prager Straße, earning 0.70 reichsmarks an hour as a forced laborer.50 In response to a query, the residents’ registration office informed the District Court that Czapski had been deported to Kovno in Lithuania. When the court clerks contacted the local police in an attempt to locate him, they were informed on 27 March 1942 that Czapski was not registered with the police in “Kaunas” and that the local police were unaware of his whereabouts. This response confused the court clerk, who did not even know that Kovno and Kaunas were one and the same place.51 With no mail from there reaching Berlin, the deportations to Kovno fueled rumors in the capital and were followed in the winter of 1941/42 by four deportation operations to Riga. One of those deported on 25 January 1942 was 59-year-old Davisco Jochanan Asriel, who had owned the renowned fur dealership D. J. Asriel on the corner of Friedrichstraße and Jägerstraße. As a Turkish citizen, Asriel had not fallen victim to the Decree on the Elimination of the Jews from Economic Life of Germany and had enjoyed turnover of 100,000 reichsmarks in 1939. With the protective power of his Turkish citizenship diminishing, Asriel made a futile attempt to instate his experienced, non-Jewish colleague Karl Rettner as a partner.52 When the chief of police refused permission, Asriel resorted instead to appointing Ernst Nobis as a partner in December 1941. The change was never entered into the commercial register because only a few days later Asriel was arrested by the Gestapo on charges of passport forgery, and his business was shut down.53 After the IHK informed the Registry Court of its closure, the court clerks began an investigation and established that Asriel had been “transferred” to Riga on 25 January 1942.54 After the war, Rettner expressed the belief that Asriel was probably arrested and deported because the Nazis were keen to get their hands on his warehouse, recalling that the caretaker had told him that the Gestapo made daily appearances there between December 1941 and May 1942, armed with large suitcases, spent hours behind closed doors, and disappeared with them bulging. He also said that the business was completely destroyed by pillaging. As Rettner recalled in 1947, when he visited the premises in May 1942 during sick leave from the Wehrmacht, he found it in ruins: “Sodom and Gomorrah could not have been worse. … The office furniture had been strewn around, the books were in tatters and smeared with faeces and urine, the files were in disarray, the fur and smoking accessories that had been left were scattered about, the lamps torn down, the safe broken into and the machinery demolished.”55 After an unsuccessful attempt had been made to contact Asriel through the ghetto authorities so he could be instructed – 325 –

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to remove his company from the commercial register, the register court began the procedure ex officio.56 The company’s remaining assets were seized by the state.57 On the same deportation train as Asriel on 25 January 1942, was 68year-old Moses Manne, the proprietor of Nathan Manne, a well-established business for linen that went into liquidation in September 1938. Still, in 1940 it was valued at over 90,000 reichsmarks by the tax office.58 When the company had not been officially stroked of in early 1942, the Registry Court tried to get in touch with its partners and inquired as to the whereabouts of Moses Manne at the residents’ registration office. When it emerged that Manne had been “transferred” to Riga,59 the court clerks turned in late March 1942 to the commander of the security police (KdS), Rudolf Lange, the man who ordered the first systematic mass executions of German Jews in January 1942 and for this reason took part in the Wannsee Conference. In his predictably curt response, Lange confirmed that no postal mail was delivered to the ghetto and that, moreover, “with regard to the Jews, we are not waging a paper war here.”60 The trails of both Manne and Asrielare lost in the ghetto. Did they die in the train’s open cars on the journey? Were they shot on arrival? But of the 1044 Jews deported from Berlin to Riga—most of whom were elderly—only 13 survived.61 Lange’s remark about a “paper war” was apposite. The officials may or may not have understood or even wanted to understand the unambiguous instruction not to wage paper war but “real” war against Jews, but be that as it may, the norms of society—and therefore also of bureaucracy— had been reduced to a ghastly waste of paper, given the mass murders being carried out. The authorities insisted, nonetheless, on their red tape. In time, however, they made fewer efforts to trace the deportees. For example, the register court immediately began the usual procedure upon being informed by the residents’ registration office that the 84-year-old proprietor of the wine dealership Felix Schleier, entered in the commercial register in 1901, had been deported to Theresienstadt on 14 September 1942, in the second wave of deportations that also included the residents of a Jewish retirement home as well as the Berlin home for the deaf, dumb, and blind.62 The business was removed from the register on 1 July 1943,63 therefore surviving its owner by several months. Felix Schleier died in Theresienstadt on 13 January 1943. On 1 September 1942, shortly before he was deported, Schleier had compiled—as part of an assets declaration— an inventory of his business, which at that point, he ran out of his kitchen. After Schleier was deported, a clerk from the office supervising the retail trade deemed the contents of his home to be worth 10 reichsmarks, his two office chairs 50 reichsmarks.64

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Figure 12.2. Felix Schleier’s inventory, 1 September 1942. Brandenburg Main State Archive, Rep 36 A II, 33905.

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In September 1942, the same month that Schleier was deported to Theresienstadt, Himmler decreed that German Jews were to be taken to Auschwitz, including all the Jewish inmates of German concentration camps. Even this new policy is reflected in the commercial register files. For example, once the IHK informed the Registry Court of the closure of the Leo Libowski soap wholesaler, based in Berlin since 1921,65 the office in charge of retail began making the usual inquiries into the whereabouts of the 49-year-old proprietor.66 A letter sent to his address elicited a response on 19 November 1942, from his 46-year-old wife Jenny Libowski, who explained that Leo Libowski was in Sachsenhausen and that she had “heard nothing from him for several weeks.”67 A forced laborer working as a seamstress, Jenny Libowski clearly hoped that the court could help find out how her husband was doing.68 Two weeks later she wrote to the court again, suggesting that it get in touch directly with the concentration camp and asking to be kept apprised of any new information.69 On 18 January 1943 the Jewish lawyer Dr. Kurt Sachs, who at that point was only allowed to describe himself as a consultant, took up Libowski’s case and asked the court if it had received any reply from her husband.70 By this stage the clerks’ investigation was well underway. On 25 January 1943 Sachsenhausen’s headquarters reported that Libowski had been sent to Auschwitz three months previously.71 In response to a further query, it stated that Libowski had died in there on 5 November.72 Although the Registry Court clerks could not have failed to grasp the thinly veiled purpose of the letters sent by Libowski’s widow and her lawyer—and despite the fact that Sachs had even enclosed a stamped, addressed envelope in his missive—they omitted to pass on this information. It was only when Sachs sent another request to the court, dated 26 January, asking again that the camp commander of Sachsenhausen be questioned as to the whereabouts of Libowski, that the court informed him that he had been transferred to Auschwitz—but not that he was dead.73 At the same time, the clerks issued the lawyer with an order for the liquidation of the business unless objection was raised within three months. Sachs responded by pointing out that he only represented Jenny Libowski, who was not the proprietor of the business.74 The Registry Court therefore sent the order directly to Jenny Libowski, who responded on 2 February 1943: “I hereby wish to bring to your attention the fact that I am not the owner of this business and that I am unable to reach my husband, who is the owner. He is currently in the Auschwitz concentration camp.”75 The court’s response cannot be found in the files. A month later, on 4 March 1943, Jenny Libowski was herself deported to Auschwitz during the “factory operation” and murdered.76 The soap wholesaler, valued by the tax office in 1940 at

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10,100 reichsmarks, was struck off the commercial register in the summer of 1943.77 The “factory operation” marked the horrific culmination of the deportations.78 Afterward, only a few Jews were left in Berlin and Jewish commercial activity with only a few exceptions had been completely destroyed. The very last deportation operation took place in March 1945 and the destination was Ravensbrück, which had become a center of the murderous campaign waged by the SS, in the light of inevitable forthcoming military defeat and the clearing of the extermination camps in “the East,” for the purposes of expediency rather than on racist grounds.79 The Berlin commercial register does not, however, reflect these events. Nor does it reflect the fate of Jews who survived in Berlin either because they were married to non-Jews or because they managed to avoid deportation. The files of the Berlin Compensation Office nevertheless reveal that at least one Jewish businessman survived by going underground. Founded in 1920, the carpentry tools wholesaler’s owned by Heinrich Busse was entered in the commercial register on 9 November 1938. The 69-year-old was supposed to be deported on 6 March 1943 in the “factory action.” However, despite his advanced years, he managed to evade the SS and hide in the Grunewald, a forest-like park in southwest Berlin. Years later, he told a doctor in in New York what had happened: “I survived 2 and a half years living underground in Berlin, despite constant privation, in perpetual fear of arrest, without food stamps. … Although I was an athletic man, I suffered greatly, both mentally and physically. I lost 30 pounds, and by 1945 I weighed 100 pounds, despite being 165 cm tall.”80 The gaps in the surviving records are an obstacle to any conclusive analysis of the deportation of Jewish businesspeople from Berlin. However, this short sketch shows that in Berlin the process of the destruction of Jewish commercial activity overlapped with the process of deportation to concentration camps and mass murder in a way that otherwise only occurred in the parts of Europe occupied after 1939 and not in Germany.

Notes 1. Letter from Albert Blumenthal to the District Court, 6 March 1939, in AGC, HR A 90, 91977, 1939 (Albert Blumenthal). 2. District Court order, 21 December 1938, in AGC, HR A 91, 96061, 1938 (Joseph Schäfer). Fanny Schäfer was deported via Theresienstadt to the Treblinka extermination camp and murdered on 29 September 1942. See Schäfer, Fanny, born 29 August 1861 in Loslau, Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs.

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3. Letter from Rudolf Golzen to the District Court on 24 August 1939, in AGC, HR A, 90, 89074, 1939 (Rudolf Gerhard Golzen). 4. District Court order, 13 September 1940, in AGC, HR A, 90, 89074, 1939. Golzen died on 27 October 1942, place of death unknown. See the Gedenkbuch Berlins, 405. Golzen is not listed in the Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs. 5. Letter from Hans Fürstenwalde to the District Court, 9 February 1939, with a certification stamp dated 10 February 1939, in AGC, HR A 90, 93885, 1939 (Hans Fürstenwalde). 6. Letter from the IHK to the central public prosecutor’s office, 15 February 1940, in LAB, A Re 358-02, 112509. See Fürstenwalde, Hans, born 9 September 1871 in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad), Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs. 7. Entry, Zentralhandelsregisterbeilage des Reichsanzeigers, 27 October 1938, 1. 8. Facsimile of letter from Josef Juliusburger to the Köhler family, 20 January, 1942, in Fischer, Freitod, 57 9. Ibid. See Josef Juliusburger’s letter to his nephew Oscar, 21 January 1942, private estate. Juliusburger was to have been deported to Riga on 25 November 1942. Only 13 of the 1044 Jews deported on this day survived. See Alfred Gottwald and Diana Schulle, Die “Judendeportationen” aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945. Eine kommentierte Chronologie (Wiesbaden, 2005), 134. 10. Naujoks, Leben, 146f. See Jürgen Matthäus, “Verfolgung, Ausbeutung, Vernichtung. Jüdische Häftlinge im System der Konzentrationslager,” in Günter Morsch and Susanne zur Nieden, eds., Jüdische Häftlinge im Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen 1936–1945 (Berlin, 2004), 64–90, here 78; Rainer Potratz, “Die Geschichte des Ortes. Entstehung und Nutzung des ‚kleinen Lagers’ und der Barakken 38 und 39,” in ibid., 119–139, here 129. 11. Affidavit by Claire Haas, 23 November.1955, in EAB, 264265 (Ascher Meissner). 12. Affidavit by Eron Weihl, 7 November 1956, in ibid. 13. Jonas Kreienbaum, “Eduard and Max Moses Wassermann,” in Kreutzmüller and Nürnberg, eds., Final Sale, 60–63, here 62f.; Bernt Roder, “Illegal nach Holland. Bernhard Wassermann, Wisbyer Str. 65,” in Kulturamt Prenzlauer Berg, ed., Leben mit der Erinnerung. Jüdische Geschichte in Prenzlauer Berg (Berlin, 1997), 177–188. 14. “Woran sie starben,” Der Aufbau, 15 December 1939. 15. Note in response to a question from the District Court, 13 November 1939, in AGC, HR A 90, 78552 (Aronheim & Horwitz); letter from the Reich Association to the chief finance president, 23 May 1942, in BLHA, Re 36 A II, 1107. 16. Letter from Heinz Aronheim to the District Court, 12 December, 1939, in AGC, HR A 90, 78552. 17. Dietmar Schulze, “Euthanasie” in Bernburg: Die Landes-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Bernburg/Anhaltinische Nervenklinik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Essen, 1999), 133. 18. See Aronheim, Heinz, born 12 February 1861 in Reetz, Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs. 19. Notification of change, 5 April 1941, in AS, JSU 1/97 (FSB-Archiv, N-19092/ Tom 97)

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20. Letter from the Berlin District Court to the Oranienburg District Court, 29 August 1941, in ibid. 21. The foundations for the mass killings in the Sachsenhausen were laid under the direction of Hans Loritz (1895–1946). They included the so-called Aktion 14f13 and the murder of Soviet prisoners of war. See Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Eine politische Organisationsgeschichte (Hamburg, 1999), 113–131. See also Dirk Riedel, Ordnungshüter und Massenmörder im Dienst der Volksgemeinschaft. Der KZ-Kommandant Hans Loritz (Berlin, 2010). 22. Declaration by Siegfried Engel, 8 September 1941, in AGC, HR A 90, 99908, 1941. 23. Accounts, 17 September 1941, in AGC, HR A 90, 99908, 1941. 24. Sachsenhausen death notices, 2 February 1942, in AS, Oranienburg registry office, no. 172/1942 (I). 25. Letter from the Dachau concentration camp to the District Court, 16 December 1941, in AGC, HR A, 91, 97938, 1942 (Theodor Liedtke). A Pr. Br. Rep 030-02-02, 81, A Rep 358-02, 31474 and 31475. 26. Notarial deed of the administrative office of the District Court in the Berlin prison, Alt-Moabit, 31 December 1941 in AGC, HR A, 91, 97938. In March 1943 Liedtke was deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Cf. Gedenkbuch Berlins, 784; see also Liedtke, Theodor, born 10 June 1885 in Christburg, Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs. 27. District Court order, 9 August 1944, in AGC, HR A, 90, 92023. 28. Letter from Helene Lomnitz to the District Court, 4 February 1942, in AGC, HR A 91, 99478, 1942. On 27 July 1942 Helene Lomnitz was deported to Theresienstadt and on 23 September transferred from there to Treblinka, where she was murdered. See Helene Lomnitz, born Lehrer on 26 May 1871 in Neudorf, Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs. 29. Declaration of assets by Walter Lomnitz, 13 October 1942, in BLHA, Rep 36 A II, 24501. 30. Note dated 27 January 1942 on a letter from the register court to the residents’ registration office, 24 January 1942, AGC, HR A 91, 99478, 1942 (L. Tockan). 31. Ingo Loose, ed., Juden, 249. Lomnitz’s property was directly sold to his neighbors on 25 October 1941. See the minute of sale of 25 September 1941, in BLHA, Rep 36 A II, 24501. 32. Letter from the chief of police to the HTO, 25 March 1942, BAZD, HTO, 14226. I am grateful to Amelie Döge, Berlin, for informations concerning the Fränkel family. 33. Letter from the IHK to the register court, 28 March 1938, in AGC, HR A 90, 38022, 1943 (Hermann Fränkel & Co). 34. Letter from Lea Fränkel to the court, 2 May 1938, in ibid. 35. Letter from Hermann Fränkel & Co to the court, 13 May 1938, in ibid. 36. Letter from the IHK to the court, 31 May 1938, in ibid. 37. Letter from the IHK to the court, 23 June 1939, in ibid. 38. Register clerk’s note on the file dated 26 June 1939 regarding a letter from the IHK to the court, 23 June 1939, in ibid.

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39. Letter from the IHK to the court, 14 February 1940, in ibid. 40. Copy of a letter from the IHK to the chief of police, 23 June 1941, in ibid. 41. On the HTO: Ingo Loose, Kredite für NS-Verbrechen. Die deutschen Kreditinstitute in Polen und die Ausraubung der polnischen und jüdischen Bevölkerung (Munich, 2007), 111. 42. Trusteeship Office for the East order, 21 October 1941, in BAZD, HTO, 14226. 43. Letter from the DAF to police headquarters, 16 October 1941; see also letter from police headquarters to the DAF, 21 October 1941, both in BAZD, HTO, 14226. 44. Letter from police president to the court, 6 May 1942, in ibid. 45. Police headquarters note dated 26 August 1942 on a letter from the court to the police president, 21 August 1942, in AGC, HR A 90, 38022, 1943. 46. Clara Hecker, “Deutsche Juden im Minsker Ghetto,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 56 (2008), 823–843, here 822f. Cf. Berlin—Minsk. Unvergessene Lebensgeschichten, www.berlin-minsk.de. 47. See Lea Fränkel, neé Rosen, born 14 October 1893 in Przemysl, Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs. See also Gedenkbuch Berlins, 104 and 323. According to the International Tracing Service, Lea Fränkel was deported to Kowno on 17 November 1941 and murdered there. See International Tracing Service Bad Arolsen, central name index, Fraenkel, Lea, née Rosen, born 14 October 1893 in Przemysl. 48. Gottwaldt and Schulle, Judendeportationen, 103f. 49. Political department directive, 2 December 1938, in AS, D 1 A/1022 (RGVA, 1367/1/22). See Czapski, Georg, born 23 May 1893 in Berlin, Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs. 50. Declaration of assets by Georg Czapski, 12 November 1941, in BLHA, Rep 36 A II, 6777. 51. Letter commander of the security police to the Court, 27 March 1942, in AGC, HR A, 90, 86256, 1941 (Nathan Manne). 52. Letter from the IHK to the District Court, 22 January 1940, in LAB, A Rep 342-02, 23430. 53. Gestapo interrogation protocol, 20 January 1942, in BLHA, Rep 36 A II, 1296. 54. Residents’ registration office annotation on a letter from the District Court, 20 February 1942, in LAB, A Rep 342-02, 23430. 55. Letter from Karl Rettner to the District Court, 30 November 1947, in ibid. See also the letter from Irmgard Bergmann to the chief finance president, 21 May 1942, in BLHA, Rep 36 A, 1296. 56. Note on a letter from the District Court, 20 February 1942, in LAB, A Rep 342-02, 23430. 57. Letter from Mückenberger’s lawyer to the Court, 14 August 1942, in ibid. 58. Letter from the tax office at Hallesches Tor to the chief finance president, 26 September 1942, in BLHA, Rep 36 II, 25121. 59. Letter from KdS Latvia to the District Court, 25 April 1942, in AGC, HR A 90, 38139, 1941. 60. Gottwaldt and Schulle, Judendeportationen, 134. Davisco Asriel’s wife Helene was deported to Auschwitz on 17 May 1943 and murdered. The couple’s two children managed to escape to safety. See Jochanan Asriel, in Vom Bosporus an die

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Spree. Türkische Juden in Berlin, an exhibition at the Centrum Judaicum Berlin from 4 February–4 July 2010. 61. District Court order, 1 July 1943, in AGC, HR A, 91, 89261, 1943 (Felix Schleier). 62 . Akim Jah, Die Deportation der Juden aus Berlin. Die nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik und das Sammellager Große Hamburger Straße, (Berlin, 2013), 317–356. 63. Entry for Schleier, Feleg (Felix), born 14 April 1858 in Kreuzburg, Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs; Gedenkbuch Berlins, 1134. Only 57 of 1000 deportees survived. See Gottwaldt and Schulle, Judendeportationen, 327f. 64. Residents’ list, 8 March 1943, in ibid. 65. Letter from the IHK to the court, 23 October 1942, in AGC, HR A 91, 98027, 1943 (Leo Libowski). 66. Letter from the court to the residents’ registration office, 2 November 1942, in ibid. 67. Letter from Jenny Libowski to the court, 19 November 1942, in ibid. 68. Assets declaration made by Jenny Libowski, 28 February 1943, in BLHA, Rep 36 A II, 23144. 69. Letter from Jenny Libowski to the court, 3 December 1942, in AGC, HR A 91, 98027, 1943. 70. Letter from Dr. Kurt Sachs to the court, 18 January 1943, in ibid. The fate of Kurt Sachs is unknown. See Ladwig-Winters, Anwälte, 198. 71. Letter from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to the District Court, 25 January 1943, in ibid. 72. Letter from the Auschwitz concentration camp to the District Court, 18 January 1943, in ibid. See Libowski, Leo, born 12 November 1893 in Schirwindt, Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs. 73. Order in response to a letter from Dr. Kurt Sachs to the court, 26 January 1943, in AGC, HR A 91, 98027, 1943. 74. Letter from Dr. Kurt Sachs to the court, 30 January 1943, in AGC, HR A 91, 98027, 1943. 75. Letter from Jenny Libowski to the court, 2 February 1943, in ibid. 76 . See Libowski, Jenny, neé Teckel, born 24 March 1896 in Wongrowitz (present-day Wagrowiec), Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs. See also Gedenkbuch Berlins, 776. 77. Letter from the tax office Rosenthaler Tor to the chief finance president, 17 September 1943, in BLHA, Rep 36 A II, 23144. 78. Gottwald and Schulle, Judendeportationen, 444–467. See Gruner, Judenverfolgung, 176–179. 79. Stefan Hördler, “Die Schlussphase des Konzentrationslagers Ravensbrück. Personalpolitik und Vernichtung,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 56 (2008), 222–248. 80. Medical certificate by Walter Grossmann, 19 June 1951, in EAB, 50697 (Heinrich Busse). See also Jäckel and Simon, eds., Berliner Juden 1941, 115.

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Overview Jewish business in Germany crystalized in Berlin, the capital of the Reich and a hub of industry and trade. In 1933 it was home to some fifty thousand companies that were Jewish, according to the definition used in this book, and therefore affected by the destruction of Jewish commercial activity. When sociologist Alfred Marcus wrote in 1931 that “the fate of German Jews is proving, to a considerable degree, to be the fate of Berlin Jews,” the remark might have been emotionally laden but it was not untrue.1 If Barkai’s estimate that Germany was home to some one hundred thousand Jewish businesses in 1933 was correct, then around half of them were in Berlin. Between 20 and 25 percent of all the businesses in the city were owned or run by Jews. But even though the statistics reflect the significant role played by Jews in Berlin’s economy, they should be interpreted with caution. Paradoxically, the large number of businesses should not necessarily be interpreted as a sign of economic might or dominance but as a symptom of economic desperation. The steep increase in the number of small, one-man (or -woman) businesses was a result, on the one hand, of the Great Depression and, on the other, of anti-Semitic ostracization, attacks, and pickets. Despite the fact that the lives of the Jewish and non-Jewish population were so closely interwoven, the economy began to splinter along racist fault lines in Berlin in the early 1920s.2 It is not always possible to trace the fates of many of the thousands of small sweatshops and businesses, but there was also a wealth of first-rate mid-sized companies that had been in the Berlin commercial register for decades and had played a formative role in the city’s economic development. Their standing was reflected in the fact that they were concentrated in Berlin’s commercial districts and arteries. While there was an especially – 334 –

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strong Jewish presence in traditional economic sectors such as textiles and garments, food, beverages, and tobacco as well as banks and insurance companies, Jewish business owners could in fact be found in every major sector. They had also embraced emerging sectors such as chemicals and toiletries, film, and photography and had begun to concentrate on production. In doing so, Jewish businesspeople in Berlin adapted to the economic structures of their non-Jewish environment more than they did in the rest of Germany. Although attacks on Jews and their businesses were nothing new, the destruction of Jewish business began to take a new, more systematic and sinister direction in 1933, and can, from this point on, be divided into a bureaucratic process and a violent one. These two processes often went hand in hand and culminated in the pogrom and subsequent Decree on the Elimination of the Jews from Economic Life of Germany. Bureaucratic persecution measures were aimed at the liquidation of companies, the bureaucratic form taken by any business. This process was launched and implemented by local authorities, from the police to the IHK, which imposed embargos on Jewish businesses and tried to have them struck off the commercial register long before central bodies openly embarked on the process of the destruction of Jewish commercial activity in late 1937. The violent subprocess was directed at the businesses—the shops and workshops—and was primarily implemented by the NSDAP and Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels and his deputy Arthur Görlitzer, even though the neighbors, onlookers and passers by played an important role, too. A number of aggressive persecution measures went into effect on the outskirts of the city before reaching the center. This is typical, with the outskirts of the city serving as a launch pad for persecution of Jews, and also shows how the borders between political centre and peripherie were blurrend in Berlin. There was broader coverage of events in the city than elsewhere in the country since Berlin was the capital and therefore the focus of international attention. In the summers of 1935 and 1938 this helped protect Jewish businesspeople and resulted in a suspension of the anti-Semitic campaigns. Jewish businesspeople managed to fend off the attacks on their businesses for a strikingly long time. This was due to four factors: Firstly, Jewish economic assistance institutions had been established in Berlin as early as the 1920s. Along with the first Jewish loan kassa set up in 1924, the first two Jewish cooperative banks were founded in Berlin in 1928/29 to provide economic assistance in the form of microloans. On the basis of its experience, the Jewish community was able to react rapidly to the changing circumstances and, in March 1933, founded the Central Office for Jewish Economic Assistance, which served as a blueprint for similar – 335 –

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organizations all over Germany. The economic assistance services of the Jewish community and the Reich Association were supported by numerous petitions submitted, for instance, by the Central Association for German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, which were somewhat successful up until 1935. As well as these collective initiatives organized by associations and bodies and supported by various institutions, the city, secondly, afforded Jewish businesspeople some scope to assert themselves in ways that proved effective for individuals but would have been out of the question for smaller communities. The result was a plethora of complaints and petitions to courts and authorities. With almost a quarter of Jews in Berlin not holding German citizenship, those affected by persecution were well placed to enlist consular support because the Reich capital was home to all the embassies and diplomatic representations. A process whereby companies adapted their structure and profile also took place. Changes to business and legal form were undertaken in order to avert anti-Semitic attacks, blockades and embargos. A further common form of structural adjustment was the appointment of non-Jewish partners, partly with succession rules in mind. Adapting a company profile often involved a switch in focus. Although most businesses did not aim to completely reposition themselves, almost all of them adapted the range of their services and products to the changing circumstances. Some businesses sought to boost their overseas ties and bolster their exports in order to obtain foreign currency. Since foreign currency was in short supply, these businesses remained relatively protected until late 1938. The wide range of survival tactics adopted by Jewish businesses in Berlin reflected the wide range of Jewish business. Thirdly, the relatively constant support of non-Jewish customers until 1938, especially in the inner-city high streets, also helped Jewish businesses remain afloat. The fact that the international press was concentrated in the German capital, finally, served as a fourth factor protecting Jewish businesses—as long as the Nazi regime needed relatively stable trade relations and cared about the world’s opinion. Given the many opportunities it offered to make a living, the German capital—seen as the heart of darkness from afar—served as a haven of refuge for Jewish businesspeople with some one thousand new Jewish businesses entered in the commercial register between 1933 and 1938. The consequences of persecution in rural areas could be felt in almost all major cities with sizeable Jewish populations. The trend had begun to subside in Breslau (Wrocław) and Frankfurt by the mid-1930s, but Berlin remained a major destination as a place of refuge, even absorbing businesses from other large cities after 1935/36. In this respect, the picture painted in numerous local studies of the ongoing destruction of Jewish business prior to 1937 requires further elaboration. This process should be considered, – 336 –

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at least in part, to be a movement toward the city and beyond. Home to Germany’s largest Jewish community and the seat of numerous organizations that supplied the requisite paperwork, Berlin played a central role in the organization of currency transfers and emigrations, with many partly cooperative transfer organizations and foreign currency advisers based here. To some extent, emigration represented the next step in the ongoing movement of Jewish businesspeople. Emigration comprised an entrepreneurial element and went hand in hand with the relocation of production and the transfer of claims. Jewish businesspeople opted to emigrate to the countries that had been their main trading partners, with the exception of Palestine, until emigration was reduced to outright flight in late 1938. The fact that Jewish businesspeople fought back against the destruction of their livelihoods ultimately led to the extremely violent turn taken by this process in Berlin. Because the number of Jewish owned businesses had hardly shrunk in his city, Goebbels pushed for a violent “solution” in 1938. In this respect the pogrom, still often referred to as crystal night, is cynically connected to the success of Jewish businesspeople had, asserting themselves against the ongoing process of destruction of their livelihoods. Evidence shows that the police and Gestapo had great difficulty in putting a stop to pillaging in Berlin and that it was still continuing on 12 November 1938, when the consequences of the devastation were discussed in the Ministry of Aviation. The promise of spoils was most certainly a determinant factor in the extraordinary aggression that gripped the neighbors, including many who previously had no hand in the destruction of Jewish commercial activity. Against this backdrop, Berlin’s Gau economic adviser developed an accelerated procedure for transferring possession of Jewish businesses in mid-November 1938. As Helmut Genschel surmised, but Avraham Barkai disputed, the culmination of the destruction of Jewish commercial activity actually occurred after the pogrom.3 Despite the havoc wreaked and the extensive bans, Jewish business evidently continued to operate in Berlin even after 1939. Its destruction in the Reich capital lasted well into the Second World War and overlapped with the genocide. Because the mass murder of Jews, that which we refer to today as the Holocaust or the Shoah, was based on division of labor and involved bureaucracy, it is also reflected in the commercial register files. This makes tragically clear that the destruction of Jews’ economic existence—as Raul Hilberg concluded more then fifty years ago—was an integral part of the process of their persecution and murder. However, the process described by Hilberg is not a linear one, because the subprocesses it entailed tended to overlap. The destruction of Jewish economic existence is the subprocess that lasted the longest and sometimes even surpassed the murders. In general terms, the process of the destruction – 337 –

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of Jewish commercial activity can be viewed as a sort of acid test for the authorities. In the wake of the violence in Austria in March and April 1938 and again during the Reich-wide pogroms, it transpired that the aggressive destruction took a pan-economic toll and was of no benefit to the state. The impact of this lesson should not be underestimated. It became clear to the regime that aggression might be a necessary tool to launch the destruction of Jewish economic existence. But to see it through until its end without overly grave economic repercussions, bureaucracy was needed. The same principle applied to the genocide. Army and Einsatzgruppen could rob corpses, but only tax officials could really expropriate the Jews of all their assets. The process of the destruction of Jewish commercial activity clearly reveals the limitations of the theory that there were passive spectators— bystanders—to the persecution of Jews. Within the parameters of the market—subject to the restrictions laid out in this book—these bystanders were the potential customers, whose behavior could ultimately make or break a Jewish business. It was for this reason that many persecution measures—such as the “boycott”—involved the general public. In this way, even window shopping amounted to a statement of inclusion or exclusion to the so-called Volksgemeinschaft, the heavily advertised people’s community that was defined along racist lines. The destruction of Jewish commercial activity was predicated not on economic factors but on racist ones, and drove most companies into liquidation. Hence, the destruction of Jewish commercial activity was a gigantic process of devastation, thinly masked as rationalization by the perpetrators. Once a state starts to exclude a particular group of businesspeople from access to resources and the market on the basis of random criteria not even relevant to the economy—as was the case in Nazi Germany—then the question of primacy has been clarified. This does not mean that those not-Jewish businesspeople who were not excluded or who even benefited from persecution measures lacked any room for maneuver or were exempted from the moral consequences of their actions. In this sense, the destruction of Jewish commercial activity marked a final sale, a sell out of all business standards and moral values.

Outlook Given the central role it played for Jewish business, Berlin inevitably became, as Martin Münzel and Kilian Steiner put it, a “flashpoint” of restitution after it was liberated.4 Due to the division of the city, this occurred in two steps, with a long time lag in between. In the western part of the – 338 –

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city, the process of restitution—referred to as Wiedergutmachung—was initiated at the behest of the Western allies in 1949. The process was slower in Berlin than in other West German states but was considered largely completed by the early 1970s. No such process took place in the eastern part of the city, where many of the former commercial hubs were located. Dormant businesses such as Gebr. Friedländer & Maaß and Ruilos Knoblauch-Verwertungs-GmbH were liquidated or collectivized. It was only in the wake of the peaceful revolution of 1989 and reunification that the Law on the Settlement of Unresolved Property Issues was passed, paving the way for restitution in East Berlin. In practice, this amounted to compensation, since the majority of businesses no longer existed. On 22 March 1991, on the strength of this law, Vitali Karantbeiwel, the son of one of the partners of the Jersey Club GmbH clothing company, applied from New York to the German Justice Ministry for the restitution of his assets. Six years later he received a reply from the Federal Agency for the Settlement of Unresolved Property Issues (BADV), which informed him that investigations had revealed that the company had been based in what had later become West Berlin. Since the law that Karantbeiwel had based his application on applied only to claims in the former East Germany, the agency told him, the company in question did not fall within its jurisdiction and the application had to be dismissed.5 In June 1997 Karantbeiwel protested against this decision on the grounds that his company had been seized by the Soviet military administration on 20 September 1946 and was later liquidated. Hence, his company had clearly been located in East Berlin.6 His protest was to no avail and in January 1999 Karantbeiwel’s restitution claim was rejected with the argument that “the seizure of the business by the Soviet military administration had possibly been posited on the basis of poor research by the relevant authorities at the time.”7 In truth, the company had been based since the late 1920s in Kommandantenstraße 3–4 in the district of Mitte, which later belonged to the Soviet sector—i.e., East Berlin. In late 1937 the property was subsumed into the administrative district of Kreuzberg in the wake of district restructuring. This meant that an administrative decision effectively catapulted the company from one district of Berlin, where restitution only began in the 1990s, to another, where restitution had been underway far longer. The members of the Karantbeiwel family were unaware of this since they had emigrated in 1938. In September 2008 the businessman’s widow successfully applied to have the case reopened. However, in May 2013 the German restitution authority finally decided that the families business had been in what was to become West Berlin and therefore did not fall under the new restitution laws of the early 1990s. Against this decision the family filed a complaint. – 339 –

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In February 2016, the Federal Administrative Court finally rejected the claim for purely formal reasons.

Notes

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1. Ibid., 17. 2. Kreutzmüller, Loose, and Nietzel, Persecution, 44. 3. Barkai, Entjudung, 140f.; Genschel, Verdrängung, 206f. 4. Martin Münzel and Kilian Steiner, “Die langen Schatten der ‘Arisierung’: Die Berliner Unternehmen Loewe und Ullstein nach 1945,” in Biggeleben et al., eds., Arisierung, 287–314, here 288. 5. Letter from the Federal Agency for the Settlement of Unresolved Property Issues to Vitali Karantbeiwel, 8 April 1997, from the private archive of Even-Zohar, New York. 6. Letter from Vitali Krantbeiwel to the Federal Agency for the Settlement of Unresolved Property Issues, 12 June 1997, ibid. 7. Letter from the Federal Agency for the Settlement of Unresolved Property Issues to Elisabeth Karantbeiwel, 21 January 2009, ibid.

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Bibliography

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B Rep. 039-01 (Archive for Restitution, Berlin Regional Court) (Archiv für Wiedergut machung bei dem Landgericht Berlin) B Rep. 042 (District Court Charlottenburg) (Amtsgericht Charlottenburg) B Rep. 058 (Public Prosecution Office, Berlin Regional Court) (Staatsanwaltschaft bei  dem Landgericht Berlin) C Rep. 300 (Chief Public Prosecution Office, Greater Berlin) (Generalstaatsanwalt schaft von Groß-Berlin) E Rep. 400-12 (Panofsky Family Papers, (Nachlass Familie Panofsky) Bpk Picture Agency of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz) Brandenburg Main State Archive (Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv) (BLHA) Rep 36 A (chief finance president, Foreign Exchange Board) (Oberfinanzpräsident,  Berlin-Brandenburg, Devisenstelle) Rep 36 A II (chief finance president, Berlin-Brandenburg) (Oberfinanzpräsident,  Berlin-Brandenburg, Vermögensverwertungstelle) Rep 70 (Berlin Chamber of Industry and Commerce [IHK]) Pr Br Rep 1 (Governor of Berlin-Brandenburg) (Oberpräsident) Center for Research on Antisemitism (Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung), TU Berlin My life in Germany Contest Central Archive of the National Museums in Berlin / Prussian Cultural Heritage (Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin / Preußischer Kulturbesitz) I/NG 370 Nationalgalerie Central Archives for the History of Jewish People, Jerusalem (CAHJP) D/Be4 (Jewish Community Berlin) (Jüdische Gemeinde Berlin) HM 2 (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) (Central-Verein  deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens) P 82 (Estate of Georg Kareski) P 231 (Estate of Curt [Kurt] Ball-Kaduri) Centrum Judaicum/Stiftung Neue Synagoge, Berlin (CJA) 7.103 (Photographs by Klaus Mirbach) 7.82 (Photographs by Hans Spieldoch) 1, 75 C, Fr 1 (League of Jewish Women) (Jüdischer Frauenbund) District Court Charlottenburg (Amtsgericht Charlottenburg) (AGC) GR (Cooperative Register, Genossenschaftsregister) HR A 90 (Commercial Register, Handelsregister A, Files A–K) HR A 91 (Commercial Register, Handelsregister A, Files M–Z) HR B (Commercial Register, Handelsregister B) HR A NZ (Commercial Register, New Files, Handelsregister A, Neue Zählung) Insolvency Files (Konkursakten) Federal Archive Berlin (Bundesarchiv Berlin) (BArch) NS 1 (Reich treasurer of the Nazi Party) (Reichsschatzmeister der NSDAP) R 2 (Reich Finance Ministry) (Reichsfinanzministerium) R 17 II (Main Association of the German Milk, Fat and Egg Industry) (Hauptvereini=  gung der deutschen Milch-, Fett- und Eierwirtschaft) R 43 II (Reich Chancellery) (Reichskanzlei) R 87 (Administration of Enemy Assets) (Feindvermögensverwaltung) R 182 (Deutsche Golddiskont Bank) R 3101 (Reich Economics Ministry) (Reichwirtschaftsministerium) R 8119 F (Deutsche Bank) R 8127 (Berlin Trading Company) (Berliner Handelsgesellschaft) R 8136 (Reich Credit Society) (Reichskreditgesellschaft) – 342 –

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Newspapers and Journals Der Angriff (1931–1943) Berliner Börsen-Courier (1933) Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger (1933, 1938) Berliner Tageblatt (1923, 1931–1933, 1938) Central-Verein-Zeitung, Blätter für Deutschtum und Judentum (1933–1938) Die Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (1933) Die Deutsche Eierwirtschaft verbunden mit der Eier-Börse (1935–1936) Dienstblatt des Magistrats der Stadt Berlin (1933–1938) Deutsche Justiz (1937) Der Deutsche Volkswirt (1933–1938) Frankfurter Zeitung (1933, 1938) Der Gau. Amtsblatt des Gaues Berlin der NSDAP (1936–1939) Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin (1931–1938) Die grüne Post (1933) Illustrierter Beobachter (1933) Informationsblätter der Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden / Informationsblätter der Reichsvertretung Juden in Deutschland (1933–1938) Der Judenkenner (1935–1936) – 343 –

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Jüdische Rundschau (1931–1938) Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt (1939–1941) Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege und Sozialpolitik (1935) Der Kurzberichterstatter für den rührigen Kaufmann (1933–1934) Mitteilungen der jüdischen Reformgemeinde zu Berlin (1933, 1934) Mitteilungen des Statistischen Amts der Stadt Berlin (1928) Mitteilungen des Vereins Berliner Kaufleute und Industrieller (1939) Mitteilungen der Industrieund Handelskammer zu Berlin / Wirtschaftsblatt der Industrie und Handelskammer zu Berlin (1930–1941) New York Times (1933–1939) Pariser Tageblatt / Pariser Tageszeitung (1933–1938) Soziale Praxis (1935–1938) Steglitzer Anzeiger (1933) Der Stürmer (1931–1939) Das Schwarze Korps (1935–1938) Der Tag (1934) Vierteljahreshefte für Konjunkturforschung (1933) Völkischer Beobachter—Norddeutsche Ausgabe (1933–1939) Vossische Zeitung (1927, 1933) Washington Post (1933, 1935, 1938) Zehlendorfer Anzeiger (1933) Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden (1920, 1930–1932) Zentralhandelsregisterbeilage des Deutschen Reichsanzeigers und Preußischen Staatsanzeigers (1931– 1942)

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Handbooks, Directories, and Reference Books Adressbuch des Deutschen Buchhandels, 97. Jg. Leipzig, 1935. Behring, Ellen, et al. (eds.). Eberswalder Gedenkbuch für die jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus. Angermünde, 2008. Bergemann, Claudia (eds.). Mitgliederverzeichnis der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, 2 vols.. Berlin, 1991. Berliner Adressbuch. Berlin, 1929–1943. http://www.zlb.de/de/besondere-angebote/berlineradressbuecher.html. Berliner Handels-Register. Verzeichnis der in den Amtsgerichtsbezirken Berlin-Mitte, Charlottenburg, Köpenick, Lichtenberg, Lichterfelde, Neukölln, Pankow, Schöneberg, Spandau, Tempelhof, Wedding und Weißensee wohnenden eingetragenen Einzelfirmen, Gesellschaften und Genossenschaften nach dem Stande vom 31. Dezember 1930. Berlin, 1931. Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933 (1980), Bd. 1. Deutsches Handelsadressbuch. Reichsadressbuch für Wirtschaft und Verkehr. Berlin, 1949. Handbuch des Kartell-Convent der Verbindungen deutscher Studenten jüdischen Glaubens. Berlin, 1937. Jersch-Wenzel, Stefi, and Reinhard Rürup (eds.). Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in den neuen Bundesländern, 6 vols. Munich, 1996–2001. Jewish Restitution Successor Organisation (ed.). Suchliste betreffend Berliner Firmen. Berlin, 1954. Jüdisches Adressbuch für Groß-Berlin, Ausgabe 1931 (Berlin 1930). Berlin, 1994. Klein, Hans-Günter. Das Mendelssohn Archiv der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Bestandsübersicht. Berlin, 2003. ———. “Das ‘Bankarchiv’ der Mendelssohns,” Mitteilungen der Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz 16 Jg. Heft 2 (July 1983): 94–105. Lilla, Joachim. Die Stellvertretenden Gauleiter und die Vertretung der Gauleiter der NSDAP im „Dritten Reich.” Koblenz, 2003. ——— (with Martin Döring and Andreas Schulz). Statisten in Uniform, Die Mitglieder des Reichstages 1933–1945. Ein biographisches Handbuch. Unter Einbeziehung der völkischen und nationalsozialistischen Reichstagsabgeordneten ab Mai 1924. Düsseldorf, 2004. Loose, Ingo (ed.). Berliner Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt. 1941–1944. Ein Gedenkbuch. Berlin and Lodz, 2009. Martin, Rudolf. Jahrbuch des Vermögens und Einkommens der Millionäre in Berlin. Berlin, 1913. ———. Jahrbuch des Vermögens und des Einkommens der Millionäre in Preußen, 2 vols. Berlin, 1912. Mitgliederverzeichnis des Vereins selbstständiger Handwerker jüdischen Glaubens e. V. zu Berlin, Berlin o. D. 1929. Mitgliederverzeichnis des Vereins selbstständiger Handwerker jüdischen Glaubens und Reichsverband des jüdischen Mittelstands, Berlin o. D. 1936. Preußisches Staatsministerium (eds.). Handbuch über den Preußischen Staat. Reichshandbuch der deutschen Gesellschaft. Das Handbuch der Persönlichkeiten in Wort und Bild, 2 vols. Berlin, 1930. Schroll, Heike, and Regina Rousavy. Das Landesarchiv Berlin und seine Bestände, Teil I: Übersicht der Bestände aus der Zeit bis 1945 (Tektonik-Gruppe A). Berlin, 2003.

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Literature Abraham, Erich. Konzernkrach: Hintergründe Entwicklungen und Folgen der Deutschen Konzernkrisen. Berlin, 1933. Adam, Uwe Dietrich. Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich. Königstein and Düsseldorf, 1979. Adler-Rudel, Salomon. Tätigkeitsbericht der Wirtschaftshilfe der Jüdischen Gemeinde Berlin für die Zeit von der Gründung (Mitte März 1933) bis Ende März 1935, d typewritten manuscript. Berlin, 1936. ———. Jüdische Selbsthilfe unter dem Naziregime 1933–1939. Im Spiegel der Berichte der Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland. Tübingen 1974. Ahlheim, Hannah. „Deutsche, kauft nicht bei Juden”. Antisemitismus und politischer Boykott in Deutschland 1924 bis 1935. Göttingen, 2011. ———. “Establishing Antisemitic Stereotypes. Social and Economic Segregation of Jews by means of Political Boycott,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 55 (2010): 149–173 ———. “Die Commerzbank und die Einziehung des jüdischen Vermögens,” in Ludolf Herbst and Thomas Weihe (eds.), Die Commerzbank und die Juden 1933–1945, 114–146. Munich, 2004. Aktives Museum (eds.). Ohne zu zögern. Varian Fry. Berlin, Marseille, New York. Berlin, 2007. Albrecht, Richard. “Exil-Forschung. Biographisch. Das biographische Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933,” PVS-Literatur 26 (1985): 120–130. Alexander, Gabriel E. “Die jüdische Bevölkerung Berlins in den ersten Jahrzehnten des 20. Jahrhunderts, Demographische und wirtschaftliche Entwicklungen,” in Reinhard Rürup (ed.), Jüdische Geschichte in Berlin. Essays und Studien, 117–148. Berlin, 1995. Aly, Götz, and Michael Sontheimer. Fromms. Wie der jüdische Kondomfabrikant Julius F. unter die deutschen Räuber fiel. Frankfurt, 2007. ———. Hitlers Volksstaat. Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus. Frankfurt, 2005. ———. Im Tunnel. Das kurze Leben der Marion Salomon 1931–1943. Frankfurt, 2004. Anderl, Gabriele, and Dirk Rupnow. Die Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung als Beraubungsinstitution. Vienna, 2002. Asmuss, Burkhard, and Andreas Nachama. “Zur Geschichte der Juden in Berlin und das Jüdische Gemeindezentrum Charlottenburg,” in Wolfgang Ribbe (ed.), Von der Residenz zur City. 275 Jahre Charlottenburg, 165–228. Berlin, 1980. Augustin, Dolores L. “Die soziale Stellung der jüdischen Wirtschaftselite im Wilhelminischen Berlin,” in Mosse and Pohl, Jüdische Unternehmer in Deutschland im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte, 64 (1992): 225–246.

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———. “The Usurious Jew: Wilhelm Roscher and the Homo Economicus Judaicus,” in Christoph Kreutzmüller, Michael Wildt, and Moshe Zimmermann (eds.), National Economies, 18–32. Newcastle, 2015. ———. “Guilt by Association. Julius Barmat and German Democracy,” Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements 47 (2012): 82–114. Ziegler, Dieter. Die Dresdner Bank und die deutschen Juden. Munich, 2006. ———. “‘Aryanization’ and the Role of the German Great Banks: 1933–1938,” in Gerald D. Feldman and Wolfgang Seibel (eds.), Networks of Nazi Persecution, Bureaucracy, Business and the Organization of the Holocaust, 44–67. New York and Oxford, 2005. ———. “Die Verdrängung der Juden aus der Dresdner Bank 1933–1938,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 47 (1999): 187–216. Zielenzinger, Kurt. Juden in der deutschen Wirtschaft. Berlin, 1930. Zierenberg, Malte. Stadt der Schieber. Der Berliner Schwarzmarkt 1939–1950. Göttingen, 2008. Zimm, Alfred. Die Entwicklung des Industriestandortes Berlin. Berlin, 1959. Zimmermann, Moshe. Die Deutschen Juden 1914–1945. Munich, 1997.

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Index

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(Company and Family Names)

Berlin–Suhler Waffen– und Fahrzeugwerke Simson & Co. (Simson & Co.), 270 Berliner Elektrizitätswerke (Bewag), 33, 58 Berliner Handelsgesellschaft, 14, 83 Biberfeld & Weil, 166 Bijenkorf, De, 280 Birkholz Nachf., Emil, 306–308 Bleichröder, S., 83 Blum, A., 64f Boas, Friedrich, 122 Böß, Gustav, 33 Borsig, A., 60 Brasch, Martin, 232f Brodnitz, Julius, 230 Brünn jr., A., 122 Brünn Nachf., A., 127 Busse, Heinrich, 329

A Abramowicz, Alter, 133 Adam, Martha, 293 Adam’s Cigarrenfabriken, 293 Adler–Rudel, Salomon, 225, 232–234 Adriane Fabrikation chemischer und kosmetischer Artikel, 305f Ahrndsen, Bernhard, 165 Allgemeine Elektricitäts–Gesellschaft (AEG), 56 Allgemeine Treuhand–Stelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Altreu), 294f Altschul, Jewsej, 241 Anglo Palestine Bank, 298 Arado Flugzeug (Arado Handelsgesellschaft), 61 Aron Elekticitätszähler Fabrik, H., 57 Aron, Hermann, 57 Aronheim, Heinz, 321 Aronheim & Horwitz, 321 Aschner, Ernst, 294 f Aschner & Kempner, Dr., 294f Asriel, Davisco Jochanan, 325 Auerbach, Lotte, 232 B Baer, Isaak, 261 Baer & Stein Metallwarenfabrik 243 Bajohr, Frank, 1f, 201–203 Bank der Templergesellschaft, 288 Barkai, Avraham, 9, 15, 53, 79, 226, 262, 334 Bauer, Yehuda, 116 Beer, Anton, 268 Beer, Nataly, 268 Behrendt, Max, 166 Bekleidung für Werktätige Be Ha We Wilhelm Scholem, 267 Beleuchtungshaus des Westens, 193–195 Bergmann, Robert, 50 Berliner, Cora, 11, 117, 228

C Café Bavaria, 307 Café Dobrin, 121, 247 Café New York, 103 Café Reimann, 121 Café Uhlandseck, 121 Café Wien, 119, 121 Caro, Ernst, 217 Casparius, Julie, 133 Chlebowsky, Benno, 133 Cigarettenfabrik Problem Szlama Rochmann, 83 Cohen, Else, 121 Cohn, Walder & Co., 279 Cohn, Adolph, 197 Cohn, Georg, 261f Cohn, Hanni, 261f Cohn, Heinz, 289f Cohn, Julius, 265f Cohn, Louis, 265 Cohn, Max, 201 Cohn, Selma, 261f

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Index

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Cohn, Walter, 264f Commerzbank, 7, 51, 199 Cukiermann, Benjamin, 124 Czapski, Georg, 324f Czwiklitzer, Else, 159f Czwiklitzer, Hermann, 133

Ernst, Karl, 39 Erste Berliner Rosshaarspinnerei (Ebro), 54, 207 Etablissement Mayer (Etam), 273, 287, 290

D Dalemo. Das lebende Modell Robert Wertheim, 164 Daluege, Kurt, 36, 39, 111 Darmstädter– und Nationalbank, 60 Dean, Martin, 2 Degner, J. F., 197 Demmer, Anna, 312 Demuth, Fritz, 50 Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke, 62 Deutsche Bank, 14, 199 Deutsche Briefkasten–Reklame, 62 Deutsche Erd– und Steinwerke, 62 Deutsche Familien–Kaufhaus (Defaka), 279f Deutsche Gasglühlicht (Auergesellschaft), 57, 270 Deutsche Golddiskontbank (Dego), 63, 288 Deutsche Leinen– und Webwaren, 308–311 Deutsche Metallbettstellen–Fabrik Max Mendelsohn, 84, 157 Deutsche Umsiedlungs–Treuhand, 64 Deutsche Waffen– und Munitionsfabriken (Berlin Karlsruher Industriewerke), 58, 61 Deutsche Waren–Treuhand, 5 Deutsches Kolonialhaus Bruno Antelmann Nachf., 273f Deutsches Theater in Berlin, 164 Diels, Rudolf, 34 Dobrin, Isidor, 101 Domaß, Erwin, 112 Dresdner Bank, 9, 14, 17, 84, 111, 198f, 243, 245, 267, 269 Dreyfus & Co., J., 294 Drimmer, Salomon, 241 E Edeka, 197 Eher Nachf., Franz, 204 Engelhardt Brauerei, 111 Engel, Siegfried, 321f Engels Nachfolger, H., 85f Eppenstein, Georg, 112, 273 Eppenstein, Martha, 112

F Fackenheim, Manfred, 232 Faklier, Norbert, 292 Falkenstein, Leo, 268f Feder, Gottfried, 100 Feilchenfeld, Werner, 50f Feld & Weihl, 320 Feller & Gralle, 168 Feuerstein, Elias, 133, 175, 262 Fischböck, Hans, 132 Flormann, Schaja, 196 Fränkel, Lea, 11, 323f Freifeld, Benno, 113 Friedenberger, Martin, 9, 168, 291 Friedmann, Richard, 202 Friedländer, Hans, 162f Friedländer, Saul, 3, 121, 262 Fischer, Albert, 248 Fritsch, Theodor, 99 Fritzsche, Peter, 101 Fromm, Bella, 126 Fromm, Julius, 83, 155 Fromms Act Gummiwerke, 203 Fry, Varian, 116 Funk, Walther, 48f, 51, 125, 136, 173 G Garbáty (Family), 205 Garbáty Zigarettenfabrik, 83, 167 Gay, Peter, 262 Gebr. Arnhold, 294 Gebr. Friedländer & Maaß, 308–311, 339 Gebr. Heyman, 294 Gebr. Levy, 202 Gebr. Sklarek, 101 Gebr. Ullendorf, 202 Gebr. Weinberger, 154f, 162, 164f, 300–303 Gebrüder Abrahamsohn, 83 Gebrüder Kristeller, 261 Gebrüder Leyser, 193 Granier, Gerhard, 35 Geisel, Eike, 15 Gelpcke, Karl, 50f Genschel, Helmut, 9, 15, 103, 238, 337 Gensler, Julius, 269 Gerson, Bruno, 246 Gerson, Hermann, 270

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Index

Gesellschaft für elektrische Unternehmungen, 58 Gisbert, Erich, 50 Glasberg, Max (Mendel Glückstern), 155 Goebbels, Joseph, 34–41, 48f, 50, 53, 100, 104, 105f, 111, 115, 121f, 125, 127, 129– 132, 170, 196, 203f, 335, 337 Göll, Franz, 101 Goldmann & Kuttner, 292 Goldmann, J., 84 Goldmann, Krajndla, 292 Goldschmidt, Jakob, 60 Goldschmidt, Karl, 239, 244 Goldtschmidt Rothschild, Albert von, 246 Goldstein, Sally, 133 Göring, 34-38, 48f, 53, 61f, 121, 125, 167f, 173, 196, 199, 203, 231, 275, 324 Görlitzer, Arthur, 38, 114, 125, 128, 204, 335 Golzen, Rudolf, 319 Grebler, Abraham J. , 84 Gronemann, Max, 246 Großmann, Hermann, 126 Grün, Reinhold, 292 Grünfeld, F. V., 87f, 119, 261 Grünfeld, Fritz, 119, 249 Grünfeld, Heinrich, 50 Gruner, Wolf, 9, 95f Grunwald, Heinrich, 232f Grynszpan, Herschel, 128 Gryntuch, Jack, 77 Grzesinski, Albert, 34 Gutheim, Robert, 244, 246 Gutmann’s Etage Franz Gutmann, 275f Gutmann, Franz, 275f Gutmann, James, 287 H Haavara Transfer, 51, 288, 294 Haber, Fritz, 57 Haber, Heinrich, 261 Hachtmann, Rüdiger, 41, 62 Hanau, Adolf, 274 Hansa Konditorei, 117, 272, 276 Haupt, Samuel, 113 Haupttreuhandstelle Ost, 64, 324 Heiser, Henriette, 220 Heisler, Izzak, 155, 163 Heißmeyer, August, 41 Helldorf, Wolf–Heinrich Graf von, 35f, 39f, 116, 121, 125, 127f, 162, 170, 204, 276, 302 Hemdenmatz, 105, 108, 162f, 191 Herbst, Ludolf, 2, 199

Herstatt, Otto, 290 Heß & Rom, 84 Heydrich, Reinhard, 125, 132, 195f Heymann, Siegfried, 293 Hilberg, Raul, 7, 190, 337 Himmler, Heinrich, 35f, 41, 293, 321, 328 Hirsch, Max, 125f Hirsch, Otto, 228 Hirsch, Siegfried, 110 Hirschfeld, Siegfried, 292 Hitler, Adolf, 6, 34, 37, 83, 102, 104f, 111, 121f, 125, 128, 151, 154, 167, 196, 204, 291 Hodin, Leopold, 268 Horwitz, Boto, 232 Hüttenwerk C. Wilh. Kayser & Co., 116, 232 Hugenberg, Alfred, 34, 48, 55 Hunke, Heinrich, 51, 53–55, 202, 204, 219 I Isaack, Hermann, 136 Israel, N., 80, 105, 227, 259, 261, 270, 278f Israel, Siegfried, 133 Israel, Wilfrid, 227, 259, 278, 280 J Jacobsohn, Cäcilie, 306–308 Jacobsohn, Casper, 271 Jacobsohn, Edith, 103 Jacobsohn, Siegfried, 306–308 Jagow, Dietrich von, 39 Jakoby, Ernst, 51 Jakoby, Ewald, 50 James, Harold, 54 Jaschkowitz, Clara, 267 Jaschkowitz, Max, 267 Jaulus, Alfred, 244, 246 Jersey Club, 279, 339 Joseph, Curt, 303–306 Joseph, Emil, 303 Joseph, Marie, 303f Juda, Else, 232 Judenkenner Ernst Pistor, Der, 118 Jüdische Darlehnskasse, 228, 239–244, 335 Jüdischer Kreditverein für Handel und Gewerbe (Bank des jüdischen Mittelstands), 243–245, 247–249 Juliusburger, Josef, 320 K Kästner, Erich, 5, 193 Kahan, Chaim, 77

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Final Sale in Berlin : The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest

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Index

Kahn, Daniela, 55 Kaiser–Friedrich–Apotheke, 84 Kakadu–Weinstuben Dagobert Tischauer, 259 Kaliski & Co., S., 84 Kann, Martha, 217 Kann, Max, 217 Kantelberg, Erwin, 163 Karantbeiwel, Vitali, 339 Kaufhaus Joseph, 194 Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe), 59, 88, 165 Kempinski & Co., M., 54, 271 Kempner, Robert, 294f Kersten & Tuteur, 88, 261 Kleemann, Wilhelm, 243–245 Klein, Adolf, 268 Klein & Hodin, 268 Kleinberger, Markus, 128 Kleinfeld, Moritz, 115 Kleinschmidt, Erich, 197 Knepel, Chaja, 278 Knepel, Leo, 278 Köhler, Bernhard, 203 Köhler, Ingo, 9 Koelle, Max, 50 Köster, Emil, 279f Kopelmann, Judka Janka, 103 Kopp, Emil, 303f Kopp & Joseph, 80, 303–306 Koppel, Leopold, 57 Koralnik, Israel, 77 Kornblum, Willi, 126 Kovács, Hermann, 130 Kovacs, Martha, 130 Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Gustav, 55 Kulies, Max, 1, 3, 311–313 Kuller, Christiane, 165 Kutschera, Karl 119, 214 L Labus, Albert, 127 Landau, Bernhard, 129 Landsberger, Marthe, 237 Lasker & Rynarzewski, 120 Laufer, Julius Inhaber Jüdel Laufer, 163f Leih– und Sparverein Esra, 246–249 Lenek, Alfred, 119 Leske, Erna, 268 Lesser, Paul, 308 Levetzow, Magnus von, 34f, 116

Levy, Julius, 84 Levy, Kurt, 195 Levy, Siegbert, 84, 133 Ley, Robert, 41 Leyser Herren Confection, Arthur, 268 Libowski, Jenny, 328 Libowski, Leo, 328 Liebermann & Comp., 82 Liedtke, Theodor, 277 Likörfabrikation und Weinhandlung Feuerstein und Czwiklitzer, 133, 175, 262 Likör– und Weinhandlung Brauner Weg 100 Else Czwiklitzer, 159f Lippert, Julius, 37, 49, 111, 151–153, 164, 173f, 198, 200, 203f, 228, 261 Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co., 32 Loeb & Sutheim, 269 Loeb, Josef, 269 Loeb, Ludwig, 269 Loeb, Moritz, 271 Löb, Rudolf, 293 Loeser & Wolff, 83 Loewe & Co., Ludwig, 57f Loewe, Paul, 270 Loewenberg, Bruno, 295 Löwensohn, Eva, 133 Löwenstein Deutsches Bücherversandhaus, Max, 157 Löwenstein Nachf., 202 Löwenstein, Erich, 50 Löwenstein, Eva, 133 Löwenstein, Lotte, 133 Lomnitz, Walter, 323 Longerich, Peter, 40 Lorenz, Dietrich, 51 Loritz, Hans, 321 Luftfahrtkontor, 62 Luftfahrt–Erprobungsstelle, 62 M Maas, Werner Salomon, 133 Makkabiah Transport (Deutschland– Palästina Verkehr), 295 Manne, Moses, 326 Manne, Nathan, 326 Manoli, 83 Marcus, Alfred, 76, 78, 86, 334 Marcus, Wilhelm, 236f, 240, 244 Markwald, Max, 267 Medert, Henning, 9, 19, 82 Meisner, Arnold (Ascher), 263 Meisner, Rosa, 263

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Final Sale in Berlin : The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest

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Index

Melchior, Carl, 227 Memisohn, Fritz, 291 Memisohn, Lucy, 291 Mendelsohn & Co., B., 84 Mendelsohn, Bruno, 232 Mendelsohn, Martin, 84 Mendelsohn, Max, 84, 157 Mendelssohn & Co., 5f, 10, 12f, 83, 294 Mendelssohn, Eleonora von, 6 Mendelssohn, Franz von, 50 Mendelssohn, Moses, 5 Mendelssohn–Bartholdy, Paul von, 5f Mendes, Käthe, 237 Merkur Horten & Co, 280 Meyer, Beate, 9 Meyer, Emilie, 309 Meyer, Erich, 290 Meyer, Paul, 309f Meyer, Oscar, 50 Meyer, Viktor, 50 Meyerstein, Eduard, 50 Michalke, Hans, 53, 177 Michalski, Max, 85 Michalski, Michael, 50 Michalski, Werner, 85 Michalski & Striemer, 85, 108f Michels & Co., 88 Mirbach, Klaus, 122, 266 Möbel–Cohn Louis Cohn (Großberliner Möbel–Vertrieb), 265f Moschkowitz, Philipp, 101f Mosse, Rudolf, 112 Motzkin, Leo, 110 Müller, Arnold, 88 Müller & Braun, 300 Mundt, Erich, 201f Münzel, Martin, 154, 338 N Naphta Industrie– und Tankanlagen, 77 Nero Film, 104 Neubauer, Rudolf, 194 Neumann, Sacher, 133 Nietzel, Benno, 217 Noher, Heinrich, 266 Nordland Verlag, 62 O Oppler, Erna, 260 Orenstein & Koppel, 54, 84 270 Ossietzky, Carl von, 35 Oswald, Carl, 118f

P Palästina Treuhandstelle zur Beratung deutscher Juden (Paltreu), 294f Palestine and Orient Lloyd, 295 Panofsky, Eugen, 229 Papen, Franz von, 34, 39, 102 Paucker, Arnold, 225 Pellot & Co., J.,20 Philippi, Wilhelm, 195 Piket & Noher, 266 Piket, Erich, 266 Pinner, Paula, 133 Pisarek, Abraham, 15 Prinz & Memisohn, 291 Probst, Mayere, 133 Q Quantmeyer, Hans–Joachim, 165 R Rector Lederwaren, M., 20 Reichmann, Hans, 135, 168, 193, 231f, 295 Reichsbank, 48f, 87, 228, 249, 270, 288 Reichskreditgesellschaft, 14, 202 Reichskulturkammer (Reich Culture Chamber), 161 Reichsnährstand, 63, 159, 161 Reichswerke Hermann Göring, 62 Reinhardt, Fritz, 275 Reinhart, Friedrich, 51, 111, 199 Residenz–Apotheke mit Drogenhandlung Dr. Hans Friedländer, 162f Riess, Julius, 152 Röhl, Charlotte, 64 Rogasner, Ludwig, 275f Rohstoff–Handels-Gesellschaft (Roges), 64 Rosenberg, Hans, 306 Rosenberg, Kurt, 260 Rosenberg, Louis, 152 Rosenthal, Hans, 232 Rosenthal, Jakob, 292f Rosenthal, Max, 308–311 Roth, Joseph, 76 Rothenberg, Moritz, 133 Rothkugel, Alfred, 308 Rotter, Alfred, 104 Rotter, Fritz, 104 Rotter, Gertrud, 104 Ruilos Knoblauch–Verwertung, 84, 112, 339 Rumpler Flugzeugwerke, 58, 61f Ryczywol, D., 86 Ryczywol, Robert Raphael, 86

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Final Sale in Berlin : The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest

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Index S Sahm, Heinrich, 33, 37, 105, 274, 277 Salberg, Adolf, 123 Salomon, Charlotte, 195 Salomon, Richard, 273f Salomonis, Felix, 244f Salomonis, J., 244 Salzmann, Simon, 291 Schacht, Hjalmar, 48, 63, 167, 231, 276 Schäfer Spedition & Möbeltransport, A., 85 Schäfer, Joseph, 319 Schäffer, Hans, 103, 227 Schapiro, Hermann, 104 Schieren, S., 152 Schimek, Herbert, 110 Schimek, Josef, 110 Schleier, Felix, 326f Schlesinger, Georg, 57 Schleusener, Jan, 54 Schmidt, Max, 202 Schmitt, Kurt, 48, 50, 230 Schoenbaum, David, 15 Schönberg, Alfred, 135 Scholem, Wilhelm, 267 Schragenheim, Siegfried, 276 Schreiber, Beate, 79 Sears, Roebuck & Co., 290 Siemens (Siemens & Halske, Siemens Schuckert), 56, 58, 323 Silbergleit, Heinrich, 76, 80 Silbermann & Co. (Silco), 264 Silberstein, Alfred, 136 Silbert, Boris, 247 Simon, Hermann, 9 Singer (Sewing Machine Company), 287 Singer, Felix, 198 Singer, Paul, 159 Sombart, Werner, 99 Sommerfeld, Adolf, 104 Sparkasse der Stadt Berlin/Berliner Stadtbank, 61, 200 Spiegler, Hans Eugen, 278 Sprenger, Emmi, 154 Stahl, Heinrich, 245 Steiner & Co., Dr. Franz, 84 Steiner, Kilian, 338 Sternberg & Salomon, 275 Sternberg, Alfred, 275 Sternberg, Arthur Niclas, 275 Sternberg, Walter, 275 Streicher, Julius, 104, 118 Striemer, Edgar, 85

Striemer, Samuel, 85 Szanto, Alexander, 78, 130, 233 T Tauber, Julius, 266 Tauber & Co., 266 Thürmann, Otto, 300-303 Tietz, Hermann, 80, 88, 105 Tietz, Leonard, 80 Tischauer, Dagobert, 259f Tonn, Willy, 84 Treitel, Hans, 290 Treitel, Lippmann, 260 Treitel & Meyer, 290 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 99 Tützer & Co., J., 64 U Ullendorf, Berthold, 202 Ullendorf, Curt, 202 Ullmann & Co., 135 Ullmann, Arthur, 135 Ullstein, 103, 277 Ullstein, Heinz, 103 Ultrazell, 305f Unilever/Lever Brothers, 288, 300 V Vasen, Sally, 133 Veit, Simon & Co., 244 Verlag der Weltbühne Siegfried Jacobsohn & Co., 103 Viseur, Max le, 175 Volksbank Iwria (Iwria Bank), 157–159, 241–249 W Wachsmuth, Fritz, 260 Wachsner, Walter, 291f Wachtel, Nathan, 133 Wachtel, Simon, 133 Waco–Kleider Walter Cohn, 265 Wächter, Werner, 113, 129, 204 Waechter & Co., R. F., 272 Wagener, Otto, 55 Wagner, Pesach, 263 Wagner, Salomon, 153, 234 Wagner, Salomon S., 234 Wagner, Tauber, 263 Wallach, Ernst, 248 Warburg, Max, 6, 121, 274 Warburg & Co., M. M., 5, 10, 227, 287f, 294f

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Final Sale in Berlin : The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest

Index

Wiener, Alfred, 8, 229f, 231 Wiesen, S. Jonathan, 123 Wolbe, Eugen, 74 Wolff, Louis, 236 Wulf, Anton, 268 Wulf, Gertrud, 268 Z Zacharias, Hannah, 166 Zacharias, Gustav, 166 Zacouto, Nissim, 165 Ziegler, Dieter, 9, 111 Zielenziger, Kurt, 78 Zielinski, Moritz, 128 Zigarrenfabrik Berolina, 152 Zigeunerkeller, 119

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Warenhaus Wertheim, 80, 101 Wassermann, A. E., 294f Wassermann, Eduard, 320 Wassermann, Max Moses, 320 Wechsler & Henning, 270 Wege, Fritz, 309 Weiler, Nathanson & Co., 166 Weisbart, Josef, 50 Weiß, Roszi, 133 Wellner, Moritz (Moszek), 271 Wellner, Simon (Szymon Lajb), 271 Wertheim, Robert, 196f Westphal, Uwe, 19, 82 Wieselberg, Mircia, 133 Wildt, Michael, 297 Wiegelmann, Hermann, 201

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Final Sale in Berlin : The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest