The Nazi Trade and Artisan’s Association has proclaimed a new anti-Jewish boycott which is to last two weeks, from March 23 to April 7. According to our report from Berlin, this new boycott will be more drastic even than the one-day boycott last April which startled and shocked the civilized world. The new boycott campaign will be opened with processions of Nazi organizations, poster displays, films, radio talks and picketing in front of Jewish shops. The German “Aryan” shopkeepers have been ordered to display signs urging the anti Jewish boycott.
The new boycott is being organized with typical German thoroughness and Nazi ruthlessness.
Hitler is apparently determined to push his defiance of world public opinion to the extreme limit. The greater portion of German Jewry has leady been ruined. The persecution of Jewish intellectuals has been carried out mercilessly. Those who could not escape from Germany were either placed in concentration camps, or forced out of their positions and thus deprived of their livelihood. The Jewish children, the most pathetic victims of the Nazi regime, have been degraded and persecuted by Nazi teachers and by their “Aryan” schoolmates.
At home the Jewish children in Germany have been taught that they were Germans, that Germany was their fatherland, that as Germans they were superior to all other nations. Suddenly the Jewish children found themselves persecuted, hounded by their former friends and playmates. Their parents had been dreaming in a fool’s paradise. They had imagined that their loyalty to the “fatherland” and their sacrifices for the German people, had made them part and parcel of Germany. They had never dreamed that their status as citizens could be affected, that they would be degraded to the category of inferiors and undesirables to be shunned or attacked.
The Hitlerites commenced by striking at the Jewish intellectuals and at the Jewish children. They were most energetic in stamping out culture and education. They aimed their blows chiefly at the spirit of the Jew as a symbol of peace and progress.
While the Nazis endeavored to reduce German Jewry also to a state of economic ruin, they did conduct this parent of their campaign quite so ruthlessly. They permitted certain Jewish merchants, industrialists and financiers to continue their business, because they believed that the economic situation of Germany could not yet afford their complete elimination. Now Hitler Germany is apparently determined to expand the anti-Jewish war and strike also at this element.
This is not necessarily an evidence of Hitler’s strength. It is rather a sign of his desperation. But whatever the motives behind the new drive against the Jews of Germany, it is inconceivable that it will fail to consolidate world public opinion against the menace of Hitlerism.