The Jews Who Opposed Boycotting Nazi Germany
web.archive.org
Calls for Sanctions Were Resisted by German Jews and Many in Pre-state Israel. Newly Uncovered Documents Reveal the Passions and Arguments Surrounding the Controversy.

(Mirror.)

Quoting Faris Yahya’s Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, pages 21–3:

The efforts of anti[fa] Jewish circles to organise a boycott of [the Third Reich] arose as a counter‐measure to the [Reich] authorities’ boycott of 1 April 1933.

This was “a general boycott […] of all Jewish places of business and of all Jewish doctors, lawyers and other professional men. From that day, for the next six years and a half, there was a succession of acts of increasing inhumanity until the outbreak of war ushered in a region of unparalleled barbarity. The boycott was merely a prelude to a system of persecution that robbed Jews of every source of livelihood.”22

Jews in many parts of the world hoped that by retaliating with a boycott of German goods they could show solidarity with their oppressed co‐religionists and perhaps pressure the [Third Reich] into relaxing the persecution. The Zionists’ signature of the Ha’avara agreement effectively sabotaged this hope. “The result was that in the thirties, when American Jewry took great pains to organise a boycott of German merchandise, [Zionist‐occupied] Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of goods ‘made in Germany’.”23

Well b[e]fore the 18th Zionist Congress, the Zionist movement has made clear its intention of sabotaging the anti[fascist] boycott. The Zionist Federation of Germany went so far as to reassure a senior [Reich] official that “the propaganda which calls for boycotting Germany, in the manner it is frequently conducted today, is by its very essence completely un‐Zionist.”24

The unfortunate precedent was thus created of sacrificing the interests of the Jewish masses in Europe for the sake of Zionist political ambitions. The usefulness of this was not lost on the [Fascists].

“In signing […] the Ha’avara agreement, the [Reich] authorities were simultaneously pursing two objectives: breaching the boycott organised against Germany by the Jews in various foreign countries and facilitating the departure of Jews from the Reich to Palestine.

“But, little by little, the second objective came to be considered the more important in Berlin. On one hand, the effects of the Jewish boycott had been considerably weakened while on the other hand, the expatriation of the Jews had become one of the major goals of the [Third Reich’s] internal policy. Now the Zionists were the only ones, among Jews and [gentiles], to propose a constructive solution to the Jewish problem in [the Third Reich] and above all to be able to put it into effect. The Ha’avara had provided them with the means for this. The [Fascist] government could not remain indifferent to that. Thus one saw the Ministries of the Interior and the Economy simultaneously vying with each other to establish the Ha’avara and develop the activities of the Zionist Organisation in Germany.

“The organs of the Ha’avara thus gradually acquired a dominant, even privileged, position in German–Palestine trade… Urged on by the Zionist leaders in [the Third Reich], the 19th Zionist Congress, which met in Lucerne from 20 August to 3 September 1935, decided to place the whole Ha’avara system under the direct control of the Zionist Executive Committee whose shares, held hitherto by the Anglo‐Palestine Bank, were consequently transferred. In 1933, the transfer operations realised by the Ha’avara were for 1,254,956 marks. In 1937, they reached the value of 31,407,501 marks.”25

(Emphasis added.)

Click here for events that happened today (January 19).

1863: Werner Sombart, ex‐socialist turned fascist economist, existed.
1883: Hermann Abendroth, the Third Reich’s Kapellmeister of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, was created.
1932: Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Schicklgruber travelled to Munich, Germany together; en route, Goebbels attempted to convince Adolf Schicklgruber to run for the office of the President of Germany.
1939: The Fascists launched T10 at the F. Schichau yard in Elbing, Germany (now Elblag, Poland).
1940: Fascist submarine U‐9 torpedoed and sank Swedish(!) merchant ship Patricia, massacring nineteen folk but leaving four alive. Fascist submarine U‐55 sank Norwegian vessel Telnes off the Orkney Islands, Scotland, slaughtering eighteen folk, and submarine U‐59 torpedoed and sank French steamer Quiberon off Great Yarmouth, England, exterminating the crew. Fascist submarine U‐44 began tracking Greek steamer Ekatontarchos Dracoulis in the Bay of Biscay. Around midnight, U‐44 fired a torpedo at the Greek ship, but the torpedo detonated prematurely before reaching the target.
1941: Benito Mussolini visited Adolf Schicklgruber at Berchtesgaden, accepting Reich assistance in North Africa, but not Albania. The Chancellor noted that he would launch an invasion of Greece if British troops there began to threaten the oil refineries at Ploiesti, Romania. The Axis lost the railway junction at Kassala, Sudan, on the border with Axis‐occupied Eritrea to the Allies, and it lost its submarine Neghelli along with its entire crew to Allied depth charges. Luftwaffe Stuka dive bombers assaulted Valletta Harbour, Malta for the fourth consecutive day, damaging a couple Allied ships but losing an aircraft in the process. Lastly, Luftwaffe aircraft bombed RAF Feltwell in England.
1942: The Axis commenced its conquest of Burma; it captured the airfield at Tavoy (now Dawei). Axis troops landed at Sandakan, British North Borneo unopposed and an Axis air raid took out the headquarters of the Indian 45th Brigade in Malaya. Tōkyō named Rensuke Isogai Hong Kong’s new Governor‐General.
1943: Axis troops landed at Wewak, New Guinea, but the Empire of Japan lost a cargo ship off Honshu to Allied torpedoes.
1944: Although the Wehrmacht managed to avoid being encircled at Novgorod, the Axis had to cancel a motor torpedo boat raid on Allied‐held Naples. The Axis likewise lost the Usines Ratier airscrew works, in southwestern France; the resistance wrecked it so thoroughly that it never resumed production in wartime. The charges with 30‐minute fuses, laid while Axis guards patrolled the yards outside, detonated with such force that one 30‐ton press was sent twenty‐five feet into the air.
1945: Adolf Schicklgruber ordered that any attacks or retreats by divisions or larger units must be approved by him beforehand. The Reich commenced evacuating settlers from Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) as the Axis lost the Łódź Ghetto to the Soviets. Of the ghetto’s more than 200,000 inhabitants in 1940, fewer than 900 had survived the Axis occupation. Later, an Axis V‐2 rocket hit Town Quay, Barking, London.
1979: Moritz Jahn, Fascist principal, died.
1983: The authorities arrest Axis war criminal Klaus Barbie in Bolivia.