12 No. 77 JUSTICE It should be noted, incidentally, that Ford is the only American mentioned by name in Mein Kampf as “the single great man” who “maintains full independence in the United States” to the “fury” of the “Jews who govern the stock exchange forces in the American Union.”6 Hitler’s obsession with the concept that the alien Jewish race had been able to insinuate itself into the Germanic or Aryan race aligned comfortably with Ford’s worldview. While much of Hitler’s screed in Mein Kampf focused on what he considered the Jewish intrusion into and attempted domination over the political, economic, and cultural areas of society, he also focused on the Jew as a foreigner with “distinct racial characteristics” marrying into and thus polluting the aforesaid Germanic or Aryan race.7 The dire threat, according to Hitler, was that the hated Jew was being successful in becoming “German.” He pointed out, for example, how “the Jewish influence on economic affairs grows with terrifying speed through the stock exchange”8 and how the Jew “seizes possession” of the press. And of course, at the same time, Hitler demonized the Jew as the Marxist par excellence. Far from demonstrating any novel thought, Hitler merely echoed The Protocols and Ford’s International Jew in depicting “the Jew” simultaneously as the capitalist, the communist, the liberal, and everything he abhorred as inimical to or incompatible with Germany and the German or Aryan people or race. In March 1933, almost immediately after Hitler came to power, Nazi stormtroopers engaged in an organized campaign against German Jews, including the distribution of billboards urging Germans not to shop in Jewish stores as well as looting of Jewish homes, physical violence and at least one death.9 The New York Times reported on March 26, 1933, that by then, as a result of the Nazi antisemitic policies, “Jewish physicians have been dismissed from hospitals, Jewish judges relieved of office, Jewish prosecuting attorneys dismissed and Jewish citizens and tourists molested.”10 The Nazis’ actions against Germany’s Jews resonated in the U.S. On March 19, 1933, around 1,500 “duly accredited representatives of national and local Jewish organizations” met at the Astor Hotel in New York City, in the words of Bernard S. Deutsch, president of the American Jewish Congress, to express their “horror and indignation against the reign of terror to which our brethren are subjected in Germany.”11 The attendees at this gathering approved a resolution to protest the Nazi antisemitic policies across the U.S., with a central mass-meeting at Madison Square Garden to take place at the end of that month. J. George Fredman, commander-in-chief of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, proposed an amendment to the resolution calling for the boycott of German goods. On March 27, a crowd of more than 20,000 protested against the new Nazi regime in Madison Square Garden, with another 35,000 in the streets outside the Garden and at an overflow demonstration at Columbus Circle. Among the speakers was former New York Governor and Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith who likened the Nazi German regime to the Ku Klux Klan. An estimated one million people attended hundreds of similar meetings throughout the United States that day.12 That same day, the National Socialist Party announced that it would undertake a counter-boycott campaign against Jewish businesses in Germany.13 Four days later, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels declared in a fiery speech to a Nazi audience in Berlin: 6. Adolf Hitler, MEIN KAMPF 639 (Ralph Manheim trans., Houghton Mifflin Co. 1943). 7. Id. at 311. 8. Id. at 314. 9. Armin Nolzen, “The Nazi Party and its Violence Against the Jews, 1933-1939: Violence as a Historiographical Concept” (2003), available at https://wwv.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%207001.pdf 10. “Half Million Jews Affected by Hitler Furor in Germany,” N.Y. TIMES, March 26, 1933, § 8, at 4. 11. “Nazi Foes Here Calmed by Police,” N. Y. TIMES, March 20, 1933, at 5. 12. “55,000 Here Stage Protest on Hitler Attacks on Jews,” N.Y. TIMES, March 28, 1933, at 1. 13. “Ban on Jews Spreads; Hitler’s Party Prepares Boycott in Revenge for ‘Atrocity Tales,’” N.Y. TIMES, March 28, 1933, at 1.
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