Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores
1 2017-05-03T16:26:54-07:00 Caroline Luce 15876dd2f73462af784ac961ee54f3b5170890ce 218 17 "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 plain 2018-04-27T04:50:02-07:00 Caroline Luce 15876dd2f73462af784ac961ee54f3b5170890cePage
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Composite |
is live | scalar:isLive | 1 |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2017-05-03T16:26:54-07:00 |
Version 17
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.17 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 17 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign Propagandist Joseph Goebbels published this cartoon in the fifth issue of Der Angriff (The Attack), a paper he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams into an Aryan middle-class shop next door. 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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 at far below their value from Jews desperate to flee the country. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. After they were Aryanized, the Tietz stores took on a new name, "Hertie" (a contraction of Hermann Tietz) to mask their ties to their Jewish founders, and while only three of the large “palaces of consumption” Karg acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2018-04-27T04:50:02-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 16
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.16 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 16 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign Propagandist Joseph Goebbels published this cartoon in the fifth issue of Der Angriff (The Attack), a paper he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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 at far below their value from Jews desperate to flee the country. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. After they were Aryanized, the Tietz stores took on a new name, "Hertie" (a contraction of Hermann Tietz) to mask their ties to their Jewish founders, and while only three of the large “palaces of consumption” Karg acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2018-04-27T04:47:32-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 15
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.15 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 15 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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 at far below their value from Jews desperate to flee the country. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. After they were Aryanized, the Tietz stores took on a new name, "Hertie" (a contraction of Hermann Tietz) to mask their ties to their Jewish founders, and while only three of the large “palaces of consumption” Karg acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/205 |
created | dcterms:created | 2018-04-24T21:17:24-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 14
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.14 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 14 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. After they were Aryanized, the Tietz stores took on a new name, "Hertie" (a contraction of Hermann Tietz) to mask their ties to their Jewish founders, and while only three of the large “palaces of consumption” Karg acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/205 |
created | dcterms:created | 2018-04-24T21:12:25-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 13
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.13 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 13 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. After they were Aryanized, the Tietz stores took on a new name, "Hertie" (a contraction of Hermann Tietz) to mask their ties to their Jewish founders, and while only three of the large “palaces of consumption” Karg acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/205 |
created | dcterms:created | 2018-04-24T21:11:14-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 12
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.12 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 12 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. After they were Aryanized, the Tietz stores took on a new name, "Hertie" (a contraction of Hermann Tietz) to mask their ties to their Jewish founders, and while only three of the large “palaces of consumption” Karg acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2017-10-03T12:34:19-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 11
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.11 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 11 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. After they were Aryanized, the Tietz stores took on a new name, "Hertie" (a contraction of Hermann Tietz) to mask their ties to their Jewish founders, and while only three of the large “palaces of consumption” Karg acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2017-10-03T12:28:21-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 10
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.10 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 10 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. Although only three of the Tietz “palaces of consumption” he acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. Georg travelled between his branches via his BMW and by August 1945, his son had returned from a prisoner-of-war camp and was assigned to direct Munich sales. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2017-10-03T12:07:54-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 9
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.9 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 9 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. Although only three of the Tietz “palaces of consumption” he acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. Georg travelled between his branches via his BMW and by August 1945, his son had returned from a prisoner-of-war camp and was assigned to direct Munich sales. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2017-10-03T12:07:09-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 8
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.8 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 8 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. Although only three of the Tietz “palaces of consumption” he acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. Georg travelled between his branches via his BMW and by August 1945, his son had returned from a prisoner-of-war camp and was assigned to direct Munich sales. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2017-10-03T12:02:54-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 7
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.7 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 7 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. Although only three of the Tietz “palaces of consumption” he acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. Georg travelled between his branches via his BMW and by August 1945, his son had returned from a prisoner-of-war camp and was assigned to direct Munich sales. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2017-10-03T11:19:28-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 6
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.6 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 6 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling the anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. Although only three of the Tietz “palaces of consumption” he acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. Georg travelled between his branches via his BMW and by August 1945, his son had returned from a prisoner-of-war camp and was assigned to direct Munich sales. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2017-10-02T16:44:33-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 5
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.5 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 5 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling the anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. Although only three of the Tietz “palaces of consumption” he acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. Georg travelled between his branches via his BMW and by August 1945, his son had returned from a prisoner-of-war camp and was assigned to direct Munich sales. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2017-10-02T16:33:26-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 4
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.4 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 4 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling the anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. Although only three of the Tietz “palaces of consumption” he acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. Georg travelled between his branches via his BMW and by August 1945, his son had returned from a prisoner-of-war camp and was assigned to direct Munich sales. In a private restitution settlement after the war, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. But by then he had expanded his retail empire: having purchased several more department stores in Austria, by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2017-09-29T22:19:06-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 3
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.3 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 3 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 he 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. As seen in this cartoon, Jewish-owned department stores were a favorite target of his ire. Here he lampoons two Jewish-owned department store chains, Tietz and Wertheim, and the Aryan Germans who supported them, portraying a fat Jewish owner sitting atop an emporium advertising an end-of-season sale to suggest that the Jewish owners had both the capital to invest in advertising and lacked moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers. On the right side of the image, the truly “patriotic” German populace streams 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: Even though he viewed himself as the editor of a major “metropolitan tabloid,” Goebbels' shrill and aggressive tone towards Jews was early evident in his targeting of the Jewish-owned department stores. But his expanded diatribes about the Jewish responsibility for the failures of the Weimar Republic broadly, may have masking his frustrations about the insufficiencies of the National Socialists' program. His efforts at 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 and Goebbels support for a Nazi newspaper in Berlin, at which time Goebbels made an agreement with Max Amann of the Eher Publishing House. The Party intrigues with Strasser in 1930, and then with Stennes in 1931, only increased Goebbels’s exasperation with National Socialists, which reached their 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. 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] His attacks on German Jews and Jewish-owned department stores, however, continued throughout, fueling the anti-Semitism among Berliners and National Socialists throughout Europe. German Businessmen’s Hostile Takeovers of Department Stores After the National Socialists 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. 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, a process engineered by one of their own employees, Georg Karg. Karg had been a salesman for the Jewish-owned Jandorf Department Stores in 1908 and eventually became the business manager for the Wilmersdorfer Straβe branch. In 1926, the Tietz company purchased all of the Jandorf stores, and Karg became the director for all textile purchasing in the larger chain. In 1933, Tietz' lenders recalled their loans, and the company found itself desperate for cash. Karg worked with Baron von der Tann to secure a new 14 million Marks loan from a consortium including the prior lenders but used it to force a restructuring of the company. Hermann Tietz' sons, Georg and Martin, were removed from their positions as private owners of the company and instead placed in positions on the Board of Directors alongside Tann and Karg who claimed they would only assume decisive power in case of split decisions. But the Tietz brothers maintained responsibility for all liabilities and by 1934, Georg and Martin were forced to relinquish their entire financial investment in the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Similar methods were used by Josef Neckermann to acquire Siegmund Ruschkewitz’s department store in Wurzburg. Ruschkewitz owned both the department store and a single-price store in Wurzburg, but in 1935, when he attempted to obtain new funding for more merchandise, the Dresdner Bank recalled all loans. Josef Neckermann, a coal supplier had been on the lookout to buy a Jewish firm at a depressed price. He seized the opportunity and obtained an early inheritance of 200,000 Marks (RM) from his mother. He then claimed that the inventory of the two stores consisted of scraps, using the pretense to push the price down even further to 100,000 RM. His assertion about the merchandise clearly had no basis, since he later maintained that he earned his first million in Wurzburg. Not satisfied with taking over just one Jewish-owned company, Neckermann took control of Karl Amson Joel’s mail order business in 1937. Although the price had been set at 2.3 million RM, Neckermann only paid 1.14 million from his trust account.[2] Meanwhile, Aryanizers like Georg Karg survived largely unscathed. Although only three of the Tietz “palaces of consumption” he acquired in Berlin were still standing after the war, stores in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe survived. Georg travelled between his branches via his BMW and by August 1945, his son had returned from a prisoner-of-war camp and was assigned to direct Munich sales. Not content with a department store chain in Germany alone, Karg added to his retail empire by purchasing in 1957 more stores in Vienna and by 1960, Karg had 35 branches in operation. West Germans viewed him as an economic hero, since 83% of his pre-war realm would lie in East Germany after the wall was built.[3] In a private restitution settlement, Karz was forced to pay rent for the Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe facilities to the Tietz family. [1] Peter Longerich, Goebbels; A Biography (New York: Random House, 2015): 88-92, 121-126, 139-146, 199. [2] Hans Steidle, Neckermann & Co. Die Ausplünderung der Würzburger Judn im Dritten Reich (Wurburg: Echter Verlag GmbH, 2014): 81. Thomas Veszelits, Die Neckermanns; Licht und Schatten einer deutschen Unternehmerfamilie (Bergisch Gladbach: Verlagsgruppe Lübbe GmbH, 2008): 27, 75, 80-83. Toni Pierenkemper, “Josef Neckermann (1912-1992) – Anmerkungen zur Autobiographie,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol 2 (1996): 237-238. [3] Friedrich W. Köhler, Zur Geschichte der Warenhäuser. Seenot und Untergang des Hertie-Konzerns (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1997): 26-29. Peterle, Op. Cit., 195. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2017-09-29T21:46:34-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 2
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.2 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 2 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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] 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. |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2017-09-29T19:35:15-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |
Version 1
resource | rdf:resource | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/goebbels-and-the-nazi-attack-on-jewish-owned-department-stores.1 |
versionnumber | ov:versionnumber | 1 |
title | dcterms:title | Goebbels and the Nazi Attack on Jewish-owned Department Stores |
description | dcterms:description | "Walter Arlen and the Dichter Department Store" by Bill Katin, Part 3 |
content | sioc:content | Goebbels begins his propaganda campaign [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 during a period when the Party was officially banned. Under the motto, “For the oppressed against the exploiters,” 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 portrays a fat Jewish owner sitting atop a supposedly combined Tietz-Wertheim emporium advertising an end-of-season sale. The propaganda suggests the Jewish owner has both the capital to invest in advertising and the lack of moral consciousness to publish indecent notices in newspapers, but shows the truly “patriotic” German populace streaming into an Aryan middle-class shop next door. [Am I getting this right? Is this what you’re trying to say?] [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: “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.NEED SOME FOLLOW-UP COMMENT HERE – how this article demonstrates how Goebbels wove together critiques of the Jews, the Weimar Republic and the prevailing political economy in Germany to stir up anti-Semitism – then take it to how the Nazis use that anger to get Hitler into power. Can be brief but need to draw out that connection |
default view | scalar:defaultView | plain |
was attributed to | prov:wasAttributedTo | https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/es-geht-wohl-anders-things-turn-out-differently-the-unexpected-life-of-walter-arlen/users/204 |
created | dcterms:created | 2017-05-03T16:26:54-07:00 |
type | rdf:type | http://scalar.usc.edu/2012/01/scalar-ns#Version |