The boycott was worrying the business men of the country, and at the same time enraging the party leaders, and it was a question which point of view would prevail. Jupp Goebbels was calling for a boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany, and the result was a panic on the stock exchange—for some of the principal enterprises of the Fatherland were Jewish-owned, including the big department stores of Berlin. These were the concerns which the original party program had promised to "socialize," and now the ardent young S.A.'s and S.S.'s were on tiptoe to go in and do the job.
The Cabinet was having one of its customary rows over the question, so Johannes explained. The business magnates who had financed Hitler’s rise were coming down on him; how could they pay taxes, how could the government be financed, if rowdies were to-be turned loose to wreck business both at home and abroad? The result of this tug-of-war was a curious and rather comical compromise; the boycott which the party fanatics had announced to begin on the first day of April was to be carried on, but it was- to continue for only one business day of eight hours; then Germany would wait for three days, to see if there was a proper response from the foreign agents and Jewish vampires who had been so shamelessly lying about the Fatherland. If they showed repentance and abandoned their insolent threats, then Germany would in turn permit the Jewish businesses to continue in peace; otherwise they would be sternly punished, perhaps exterminated, and the blame would rest upon the Jewish vampires abroad.
This boycott was the idea of Dr. Goebbels—the Führer himself being busy with the reorganizing of the various state governments. On the evening before the event the crippled little dwarf with the huge wide mouth spoke to his party comrades at a meeting in a hall of the West End, and all over Germany the Stormtroopers listened over the radio. The orator called for a demonstration of "iron discipline"; there must be no violence, but all Jewish establishments would be picketed, and no German man or woman would enter such a place.
The day was made into a Nazi holiday. The Jews stayed at home, and the Brownshirts marched through all the cities and towns of the Fatherland, singing their song to the effect that Jewish blood must spurt from the knife. They posted "Jew signs" wherever there was a merchant who couldn’t prove that he had four Aryan grandparents. They did the same for doctors and hospitals, using a poster consisting of a circular blob of yellow on a black background, the recognized sign of quarantine throughout Europe; thus they told the world that a Jewish doctor was as bad as the smallpox or scarlet fever, typhus or leprosy he attempted to cure.
These orders were followed pretty well in the fashionable districts, but in poorer neighborhoods and the smaller towns the ardent Stormtroopers pasted signs on the foreheads of shoppers in Jewish stores, and they stripped and beat a woman who insisted on entering. That evening there was a giant meeting in the Tempelhof Airdrome, and Goebbels exulted in the demonstration which had been given to the world. The insolent foreigners would be awed and brought to their knees, he declared; and since most of the newspapers had by now been confiscated, the people could either believe that or believe nothing. The foreigners, of course, laughed; they knew that they weren’t awed, and the mass meetings and distribution of boycott leaflets went on. But the Nazi leaders chose to declare otherwise, and next day there was a washing of windows throughout Germany, and "business as usual" became the motto for both Aryans and non-Aryans.
IX
There were curious outgrowths of this anti-Semitic frenzy. An "Association of German National Jews" was formed, and issued a manifesto saying that the Jews were being fairly treated and there was no truth in the stories of atrocities; some leading Jews signed this, and the name of Johannes Robin was among them. Perhaps he really believed it, who could say? He had to read German newspapers, like everybody else; those foreign papers which reported the atrocities were banned. Perhaps he considered that the outside boycotts would really do more harm than good, and that the six hundred thousand native Jews in the Fatherland were not in position to offer resistance to a hundred times as many Germans. The Jews had survived through the centuries by bending like the willow instead of standing like the oak. Johannes didn’t mention the subject in his letters, either signed or unsigned. Was he a little ashamed of what he did?
It seemed to an American that a man could hardly be happy living under such conditions. Lanny wrote a carefully guarded letter to the effect that Hansi was giving important concerts and Irma various social events; they would be delighted to have the family present. Johannes replied that some business matters kept him from leaving just now; he bade them not to worry about the new decrees forbidding anyone to leave Germany without special passports, for he could get them for himself and family whenever he wished. He added that Germany was their home and they all loved the German people. That was the right sort of letter for a Jew, and maybe the statements were true, with a few qualifications.
The Nazis had learned a lesson from the boycott, even though they would never admit it. The brass band stage of persecution was at an end, and they set to work to achieve their purpose quietly. The weeding out of Jews, and of those married to Jews, went on rapidly. No Jew could teach in any school or university in Germany; no Jewish lawyer could practice; no Jew could hold any official post, down to the smallest clerkship. This meant tens of thousands of positions for the rank and file Nazis, and was a way of keeping promises to them, much easier than socializing industry or breaking up the great landed estates.
The unemployed intellectuals found work carrying on genealogical researches for the millions of persons who desired to establish their ancestry. An extraordinary development—there were persons who had an Aryan mother and a Jewish father, or an Aryan grandmother and a Jewish grandfather, who instituted researches as to the morals of their female ancestors, and established themselves as Aryans by proving themselves to be bastards! Before long the Nazis discovered that there were some Jews who were useful, so there was officially established a caste of "honorary Aryans." Truly it seemed that a great people had gone mad; but it is a fact well known to alienists that you cannot convince a madman of his own condition, and only make him madder by trying.
By one means or another it was conveyed to leading Jews that they had better resign from directorships of corporations, and from executive positions which were desired by the nephews or cousins of some Nazi official. Frequently the methods used were such that the Jew committed suicide; and while these events were not reported in the press, word about them spread by underground channels. That was the way with the terror; people disappeared, and rumors started, and sometimes the rumors became worse than the reality. Old prisons and state institutions, old army barracks which had stood empty since the Versailles treaty, were turned into concentration camps and rapidly filled with men and women; motor trucks brought new loads daily, until the total came near to a hundred thousand.
Lanny wrote again to say what a mistake his friends were making not to come and witness Hansi’s musical and Irma’s social triumphs. This time Johannes’s reply was that his business cares were beginning to wear on him, and that his physicians advised a sea trip. He was getting the Bessie Budd ready for another cruise, this time a real one; he wanted Hansi and Bess to meet him at one of the northern French ports, and he hoped that the Budds would come along— the whole family, Lanny and Irma, Mr. and Mrs. Dingle, Marceline and Baby Frances, with as many governesses and nurses as they pleased. As before, the cruise would be to whatever part of the world the Budd family preferred; Johannes suggested crossing the Atlantic again and visiting Newcastle and Long Island; then, in the autumn, they might go down to the West Indies, and perhaps through the Panama Canal to California, and if they wished, to Honolulu and Japan, Bali, Java, India, Persia—all the romantic and scenic and historic places they could think of. A university under Diesel power!