Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores
[IMAGE – anti-Tietz and Wertheim Cartoon, Der Angriff, August 1st, 1927 –
Propagandist Joseph Goebbels published this cartoon in the fifth issue of Der Angriff (“The Attack”), a paper Goebbels founded after he became the leader of the Nazi Party’s Berlin branch. The paper attacked the Weimar Republic and Jews, often drawing links between the two. In this cartoon, Goebbels lampooned two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them. The sketch portrayed a fat Jewish owner sitting atop a supposedly combined Tietz-Wertheim emporium advertising an end-of-season sale. The propaganda suggested the Jewish owner had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers, but showed the truly “patriotic” German populace streaming into an Aryan middle-class shop next door.
[IMAGE – Headline of Der Angriff, December 12th, 1927
In December 1927, Goebbels published his first of five special editions dedicated to opposing the Jewish-owned department stores. No other theme of Nazi propaganda was blazoned across the masthead of the newspaper so frequently. Under the front-page headline, “Berlin Department Stores Tax Evasion,” the article read:
Goebbels viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” whose shrill tone was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But the expansion of his diatribes to the Jewish responsibility for the Weimar Republic as well as other issues such as the revised Allied reparations in the Young Plan and war-hero President Paul von Hindenburg may have masked Goebbels’s frustration of not having a unified National Socialist program or it may have been intended to expand the tiny number of only 200 subscriptions. Campaigning in the newspaper led to victories at the polls, but Goebbels’s efforts were not immediately rewarded by Hitler. During the months from 1929 until September 1930 Hitler fluctuated between giving Strasser or Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. But Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930 were merely replaced with internal tensions with Stennes in 1931, since Hitler needed the violence by the SA to prevent the NSDAP from stalling in its rise to power. Goebbels’s exasperation with Nazi economic policies reached a peak in March 1931 when Otto Wagener’s economic platform envisioned a pro-business perspective, supported by Göring, which excluded all Goebbels’s pro-Socialism views. That month Hitler fired Stennes, who took revenge by occupying Der Angriff’s offices. The years of political infighting only ended in June 1932 when Goebbels realized that his radical backing of SA violence, in contrast with Hitler’s pursuit of apparent legal means to power, were detrimental to both the Party and his own propaganda career.[1]“plans to spread a network of department and junk stores across Berlin have expanded. Karstadt is building an enormous department store ‘palace’ in the middle of the Communist section of Berlin, Neukölln.
The Jewish-owned Karstadt chain, with capital of nearly a quarter billion Marks and ninety stores, has flourished due to the stupidity of the masses and the interests of Social-Democratic newspapers. However, the growth has ruined innumerable small and mid-sized businessmen through the power of department stores’ capital and their unscrupulous business practices.
… But already in 1903, the three owners of the Karstadt Department Stores were sentenced to the fantastically high fine of 20,000 Marks for tax evasion, since they had reported only 22,000 Marks of their 120,000 Marks income.
According to expert estimates, the annual income of all department stores in Germany is 1 ½ billion Marks, which is three times as much as before the War. Of this sum, approximately 1 billion may be apportioned to the five largest Jewish department stores: Hermann Tietz, Wertheim, Karstadt, Wronker in Frankfurt am Main, and Leonhard Tietz headquartered in Cologne.”
German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores
After the Nazis took power in Germany, they developed a wide variety of legal and extra-legal strategies aimed at removing Jews from economic life entirely. This Aryanization process included new laws that prevented Jews from operating businesses, participating in trades, and from selling goods and services, and ones that restricted their access to savings and bank accounts, as well as extrajudicial murders and deportations to concentration camps. Subsequent laws required the registration of Jewish businesses and empowered the state to set the sales value of Jewish firms at a fraction of their market worth, enabling non-Jews to purchase businesses from Jews desperate to flee the country at far below their value. Finally, in November, 1938, the Nazi regime passed new regulations that forced the sale of all Jewish-owned businesses, stocks, and property, with the proceeds to go directly to the state.
Many of Germany's largest Jewish-owned department stores were Aryanized when Germany's two biggest banks, Deutsche Bank and the Dresdner Bank, suddenly recalled loans. Department store owners often relied on loans to acquire new merchandise, as most adopted the tactic of selling their entire inventories several times a year and reinvesting the profits into expanding their chains. That meant very few retained large amounts of Marks in cash, and so when the loans were recalled, most found it impossible to pay. Non-Jews, using various degrees of coercion, would then acquire the companies at massively reduced costs, using the patently unjust Nazi legal system to their advantage.
Such was the case with the hostile takeover of Hermann Tietz's Department Store chain.
Georg Karg had the experience to acquire a department store by means of a hostile takeover. He had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and by 1909 he had been promoted to buyer in the textiles department. Thereafter he became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. Hermann Tietz purchased all the Jandorf stores in 1926 and thereby Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain.
Baron von der Tann secured a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders. He and Georg Karg forced a restructuring of the company in which Georg and Martin Tietz’ position changed from private owners to Board members, but their brother-in-law Dr. Hugo Zwillenberg immediately forfeited all his financial interest in the firm. At first, Tann and Karg only assumed decisive power in case of split decisions, whereas the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities. But by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain.
[1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography. New York: Random House, 2015, pp.88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199.