Vicky Ledia
The Jewish boycott of German goods refers to one of the international Jewish responses to the policies of the Nazis.
The boycott started in March 1933 in both Europe and the US. Sources claim it continued until the entry of the US into the war.
Both the Nazis and some outside Germany saw the boycott as an act of aggression, with the UK newspaper the Daily Express going so far as to put as headline: “Judea Declares War on Germany“. The Daily Express headline has been cited by Holocaust deniers such as Ernst Zündel as evidence of a conspiracy against the Nazi government by World Jewry.
The Nazi regime protested internationally and on April 1, 1933, organized a (one day) boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany.
The Haavara Agreement, together with lessened dependence on trade with the West, had by 1937 largely negated the effects of the Jewish boycott on Germany. According to a December 1936 article in Time, the Association of German National Jews was then fighting against the Jewish boycott of German goods.
German anti-Jewish sentiments
The Nazis had incorporated anti-Semitism into their ideology as early as 1920 in the “National Socialist Programme” and had continued to incite racial discord and hatred with articles and leaders in newspapers the party controlled such as Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter. An example of Hitler’s anti-Semitism can be found as early as 1920 in this lesser known example found in Irving’s The War Path: Hitler’s Germany 1933-1939 from an August 1920 speech in Salzburg, “This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst”. After six years of Jewish boycott of German products, Hitler stated his views on Jews as following, in this sixth anniversary speech:
Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevising of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!
— Adolf Hitler addressing the German Reichstag, 30 January 1939
