On This Day: Hitler Calls for Boycott of Jewish Businesses

The Nazi call for a national boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, designed to strip Jewish people of their livelihoods and economic assets, marked the first government-sanctioned persecution of the Jewish people.

Julius Streicher, editor and publisher of the vehemently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, announced the campaign just two months after Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor.

Streicher issued a series of orders urging the public to avoid Jewish-owned businesses in favor of “German-owned” establishments. He warned participants against using violence—not to prevent bloodshed, but to avoid giving boycotted shop owners any reason to retaliate by dismissing their non-Jewish workers or withholding their wages.

The Judenboycott sprang from Nazi propaganda blaming the Jewish people for a decade of financial depression, a message that had helped Hitler and the Nazi Party rise to power. The boycott lasted only a day and was largely ignored by German consumers.

But the campaign was followed by anti-Semitic laws that severely limited the economic and cultural freedoms of Jewish people in Germany over the following weeks and months. These measures culminated in the extermination of more than 6 million European Jews in the Holocaust.

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) was a longtime associate of Adolf Hitler and a prominent figure in the Nazi Party thanks to the activities of his deeply anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Stürmer (The Attacker). Appointed chair of the committee that oversaw the 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses, Streicher remained a Nazi leader, eventually becoming the only non-military defendant to be executed following his conviction at the Nuremburg War Trials in 1946.

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was appointed chancellor of Germany two months before the boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany. He rose to power over the previous decade as the head of the National Socialist German Workers' Party by advocating what he termed a strictly “Aryan” country and fanning anti-Semitic fears of a “Jewish threat” to Germany. Hitler then led the country into war in 1939 and committed suicide on April 30, 1945, during the final days of the war.

Two weeks after the Judenboycott, a Harvard professor placed the blame for the conditions in Germany on the shoulders of those in the international community who had been protesting Hitler’s actions. Suggesting that Hitler’s actions had unified the country for the first time since World War I, History Professor S.B. Fay stated that Germany’s affairs were “none of any other country's business.”

On March 27, 1933, the American Jewish Congress protested against the growing Nazi climate of anti-Semitism in Germany by holding interfaith rallies at New York City’s Madison Square Garden and about 70 other U.S. locations. Denouncing the American protests as “slanders,” the Nazi Party’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, accused Jewish Germans of “engineering a worldwide boycott of German goods” and warned of retaliation.