The jacket image shows a non-Jewish woman and a Jewish man with placards around their necks blaming themselves for their liaison (“I am the biggest pig in place and got involved with Jews”). They are surrounded by seven SA men. For decades, this telling photo was thought to be from 1935, when the Nuremberg Laws forbade “racial” mixed relationships. Today we know that this pillory scene happened in Cuxhaven in summer 1933. Very aptly, the image illustrates Hermann Beck's core argument: Antisemitic humiliation and violence were already severe in the year Adolf Hitler came to power. All the more surprising is that any information about this image and the names of the victims subjected to public humiliation, Oskar Dankner and his mistress Adele Edelmann, are absent from Beck's book.
As the outstanding anti-Jewish event of 1933, mentioned in every historical work touching on the National Socialist regime, the boycott of Jewish-owned businesses of April 1, 1933 is often narrated as disciplined and violence-free. Beck challenges both assumptions. The boycott was accompanied by broken shop windows, brutal harassment, and threats to shut down businesses forever. Hundreds of Jews committed suicide as a consequence. It was “more of a Reich-wide pogrom than a targeted commercial or professional boycott” (228, cf. 462). Beyond that, the boycott and similar local events against Jewish businesses before and after April 1 were not the only instances of persecution in early 1933. Historians like Peter Longerich, Ludolf Herbst, John Dippel, and others have given them some attention. We already knew, for example, how armed SA men chased Jewish jurists out of the Breslau law court on March 11, 1933. But never before has such a comprehensive panorama of exclusionary practices and antisemitic brutality during winter and spring 1933 been presented as in Beck's monograph.
Until the last Reichstag election of March 5, 1933, the regime concentrated on the persecution of communists. Immediately after, a wave of severe maltreatment of Jews started. This led to global reactions and boycotts of German goods in France, Great Britain, the USA, and other countries, which then justified the “counter-boycott” on April 1. In fact, this enterprise was at the same time a reaction against the uncoordinated local actions against Jews, originating from below, which Hitler desperately and repeatedly pleaded with his underlings to stop. The boycott aimed to reinstall governmental competence. Nevertheless, brutal attacks continued until autumn 1933.
Part I of the book discusses violence against foreign Jews – especially “Ostjuden” and partly also American and West European Jews – which is distinguished in part II from violence against German Jews. Five chapters categorize the violence: individual attacks, pillory marches, murder, boycotts, and the legal and economic discrimination manifest in different laws in April 1933, like the Law on the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service (April 7, 1933) and laws discriminating against Jewish lawyers, physicians, and students. Especially the chapter about pillory marches is innovative, though Michael Wildt devoted some pages to them before. Everything is based on new and extensive archival research. Documents are rare and hidden, exact statistics about attacks or murders – spontaneous, out of revenge, or under arrest – are difficult to discover. Most assaults were not reported to the police, but foreign Jews complained at their embassies, a source that has not been evaluated before. Beck also consults the records of postwar trials.
Whom could a Jew address for help and protection after SA men invaded their home and violated inventory and inhabitants? The police? They were assisted by SA men as auxiliary police. The running slogan was: “It is not the obligation of the police to protect Jews” (3, cf. 64). Those who complained at police stations risked being beaten up again and being accused of spreading atrocity rumors. The Perfidity Decree (March 21, 1933) made criticism against Nazi activities even more risky. It could bring out the worst in people and foster denunciations. What about the churches, lawyers, the legal system, politicians? In every instance in March and April 1933, they rapidly turned away from Jews. The German press remained silent.
The final part, part III, analyzes the reactions to antisemitic violence in the Protestant and Catholic Churches, in administrative and judicial bureaucracies, and in the DNVP, Hitler's coalition partner. Administrators downplayed the violence or blamed the victims. Unfortunately, the three chapters about the Protestant Church repeat exactly the same quotations and stories that Klaus Scholder already presented in his groundbreaking book in 1977 (Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, Vol. 1), ranging from Otto Dibelius, Kirchenpräsident Theophil (not Alois, as Beck claims on page 288) Wurm, Hermann Kapler, Wilhelm von Pechmann, Henri-Louis Henriod, to Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze and others. Even less innovative is the chapter about the Catholic Church. The well-known quotations of the bishops Conrad Gröber, Adolf Bertram, and Michael von Faulhaber, of Oscar Wassermann (a desperate Jew addressing Bertram), the priests Alois Wurm and Franziskus Stratmann are replicated and even presented in the same order and combination as in Scholder. These 125 pages of Beck's book (275-400) are the weakest among otherwise excitingly strong chapters. The end result is well known: the silence of the churches in 1933, despite being well informed about the suffering of Jews, should not, as Beck confirms, be reduced to the churches’ fear but also attributed to antisemitic prejudice.
The outburst of antisemitism during the German “awakening” was more severe than formally noticed, and the apathy of those who could have helped was an amalgam of loyalty to the national government and intimidation. “What thus astonishes is not just the shrinking back from any form of open (or even veiled) protest, but the anxious anticipation of the wishes” of the new regime (470). The explanation lies in the growing popularity of the new regime, fear of Nazi terror, and antisemitism. Research distinguishes three waves of antisemitism before the war began: winter and spring 1933, spring and summer of 1935, and the pogroms in November 1938. Beck will be recognized as the standard work on the first wave. After reading this book, one wonders how the dramatic events in March 1933 could have been underestimated until now.
