Zionists Provoked Nazi Persecution

The claim is the antisemitic argument from provocation, applied historically. It treats Jewish self-defence and political response as the cause of the genocidal violence directed against them, rather than as a response to that violence. The claim has a long pedigree: it was made in real time by Goebbels and the Nazi propaganda apparatus, which framed the German persecution of Jews as a response to a coordinated Jewish hostility. The claim required the listener to accept that Jews collectively constituted a hostile force against which Germany was defending itself, a premise that was then and remains transparently false. The Jewish boycott of 1933 was a defensive response to a regime that had already, in its first weeks of power, begun the public persecution of German Jewry. The chronology refutes the claim before any further argument is needed.

The chronology of 1933

Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. The Reichstag fire occurred on 27 February. The Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties, was issued on 28 February. The Enabling Act giving Hitler dictatorial powers was passed on 23 March. The first concentration camp at Dachau opened on 22 March. The boycott of Jewish-owned shops and businesses was conducted by the SA on 1 April. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, expelling Jews from the German civil service, was passed on 7 April. The Law against Overcrowding of German Schools, restricting Jewish access to higher education, was passed on 25 April. The book burnings (including books by Jewish authors) occurred on 10 May. The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, the first racial-sterilisation law, was passed on 14 July.

By the time the international Jewish boycott of German goods was formally declared at the American Jewish Congress meeting in Madison Square Garden on 27 March 1933 (with the call for a co-ordinated boycott emerging that day, and the Anti-Nazi League formally launched on 19 May), the regime had already taken every one of the steps listed in the previous paragraph. The boycott was a response to a campaign of state-sponsored antisemitism, not its cause. The cause-and-effect relationship is unambiguous in the dated documentary record. Treating the boycott as the provocation requires reading the chronology in reverse.

The boycott itself

The 1933 international Jewish boycott was a serious political action. It was promoted in the United States, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland and elsewhere; it had support from a wide cross-section of Jewish organisations (the American Jewish Congress, the British Board of Deputies of British Jews, the French Comité de Défense des Israélites, the Polish Bund and the Zionist movement); and it had measurable economic effect, particularly on certain German export categories. It was an attempt to use the limited tools available to Jewish communities outside Germany to put economic pressure on the German government to halt the domestic persecution. The contemporary publications of the boycott organisations, surviving in the major Jewish archive collections, are explicit about the defensive purpose.

The boycott was contested within the Jewish world. Some German Jewish leaders opposed it on the grounds that it would worsen the position of German Jews; the Zionist movement was internally divided, with the Labour Zionists running the Jewish Agency in Palestine eventually negotiating the Haavara Agreement of August 1933 with the German Ministry of Economics specifically to break the boycott (in exchange for permission for German Jews to take some of their wealth with them in the form of German exports when emigrating to Palestine). The boycott therefore had complex and contested support; it was not a unified Jewish action under coordinated leadership, and it was certainly not the cause of the regime’s persecution.

The Goebbels framing

The framing of the Jewish boycott as an act of war against Germany was a creation of the Nazi propaganda apparatus from 1933 onwards. The 1 April 1933 SA boycott of Jewish-owned shops in Germany was justified as a response to “Jewish atrocity propaganda abroad”, an early instance of the regime’s broader pattern of presenting its persecutions as defensive responses to alleged Jewish aggression. The regime returned to this framing repeatedly: the November 1938 pogrom (Kristallnacht) was framed as a “spontaneous” response to the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by the Polish Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan; the 1942 Final Solution was framed in Hitler’s speeches as the predicted outcome of Jewish responsibility for the war (his Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939, in which he had “prophesied” that a new world war would result in “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”, was systematically reinvoked from 1942 onwards as the justification for the killing then in progress).

The framing was a deception in real time and is a historical falsity. The killing of European Jewry was not a defensive response to Jewish aggression; it was the implementation of a policy that had been in the regime’s ideological core since the early 1920s, that was put in motion as state policy from 1933, that escalated with the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, that intensified with Kristallnacht in 1938, and that became mass killing from 1941. None of the steps was a response to Jewish action; all were the regime’s own choices.

The wider antisemitic argument from provocation

The argument from provocation is the standard antisemitic move in many historical episodes. The medieval pogrom narrative often included the claim that Jews had committed some specific outrage (a blood libel, a host desecration, a poisoning of a well) for which the violence was the response. The pogroms in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were similarly justified by claims of Jewish provocation. The denier framing of the Holocaust as a response to Jewish provocation continues this tradition; recognising it as the continuation is the first step in seeing past it.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it inverts the moral framework of the Holocaust. Victims become provocateurs; perpetrators become defenders; the killing becomes a regrettable response to Jewish aggression rather than a campaign of unprovoked aggression. The inversion serves the same purpose as the original Nazi propaganda framing: to provide a moral justification for the violence by recasting the violent party as the wronged one. To accept the claim is to accept the propaganda framing eighty years after the propaganda was first promulgated, with the same political consequences as accepting it would have had at the time.

What did the regime do in its first three months of power? When was the international Jewish boycott declared? Who was responding to whom?

See also

• Adolf Hitler
• Kristallnacht 1938
• The Nuremberg Laws
• The Haavara Agreement

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Sources

• Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933 to 1939, HarperCollins, 1997, on the chronology of 1933 and the contemporary Jewish responses
• Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews 1933 to 1939, University of Illinois Press, 1970
• Moshe R. Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance 1933 to 1941: An Historical Analysis, Ktav, 1982
• Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, Carroll and Graf, 1984
• Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, University of Texas Press, 1985, on the Haavara Agreement and the boycott debate within the Zionist movement
• American Jewish Congress, contemporary records of the 1933 boycott campaign, in the Center for Jewish History, New York
• Adolf Hitler, Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939, in Verhandlungen des Reichstags, IV. Wahlperiode, 1939
• Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher, edited by Elke Fröhlich, K. G. Saur, 1993 to 2008, on the propaganda framing of Jewish provocation
• Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889 to 1936: Hubris, Penguin, 1998, with the chronology of the early regime’s antisemitic measures
• Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Boycott of Jewish Businesses” and “Antisemitism in History: Nazi Antisemitism”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org