Ausverkauf: Die Vernichtung der jüdischen Gewerbetätigkeit in Berlin, 1930–1945 by Christoph Kreutzmüller (review)

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, approximately 100,000 businesses in Germany were classified as “Jewish.” They encompassed every form of commerce, from banking and manufacturing to shopkeeping and peddling. Almost half were located in the German capital, and the fate of these 50,000 Berlin businesses is the subject of Christoph Kreutzmüller’s impressive book. We already have studies on the dismantling of Jewish economic life in Germany and the forced sale of businesses; we understand the complicity of big banks and the motivations of industrialists who enriched themselves at the expense of a persecuted minority. But Kreutzmüller combines an exhaustive study of institutionalized larceny with the experiences of those on the ground—the person who smeared hateful words on a storefront and the proprietor who was left to clean them off.

Ausverkauf is the culmination of a multi-year Humboldt University project on the destruction of small and mid-sized Jewish businesses in Berlin. An exhibit on this theme has made its way from Germany to New York, premiering in 2009, and this book builds on this visual “preliminary report.” Kreutzmüller has scoured public documents and private testimonies in pursuit of as many personal stories as possible, and despite the dearth of surviving files from small firms, the author’s revelations are both numerous and disturbing. We observe the beating of storeowners, the wrecking of shops, and Jews’ desperate attempts to revive or sell off their damaged businesses. We watch as the regime devises policies that justify robbery, and we observe the Berlin police and the chamber of business and industry spearheading a mass appropriation.

In these stories Kreutzmüller makes it clear that for Berliners, dispossession was not a distant matter, embodied in the stilted legal concept of “Aryanization” or in halfhearted “boycotts.” These terms imply a top-heavy persecutory bureaucracy, with average people merely avoiding Jewish shops or turning a blind eye to SA-inspired brutality. Rather, in 1930s Berlin participatory violence was woven into the fabric of everyday life. Rioters smashed shops on the Kurfürstendamm, young men scrawled fresh graffiti above preexisting insults, party hacks produced antisemitic placards, hooligans kidnapped storeowners, and ordinary citizens pillaged stores on their way to work. In short, the wave of violence that accompanied Hitler’s ascent to power did not settle into a quiet discrimination over the five years leading up to Kristallnacht. Rather, the persecution of Jewish business owners was constant, vicious, and widespread.

Kreutzmüller is precise in his terminology and nuanced in his assessments. He necessarily employs the term “Jewish business” without blindly accepting the Nazis’ own racist labeling, and he documents the omnipresence of Jews in the Berlin economy without suggesting an “overproportionality.” Jews were indeed a vital presence in commerce—notably in the retailing of textiles, leather, foodstuffs, and pharmaceutical goods—and their removal allowed countless non-Jews to assume new jobs or expand their businesses into shuttered spaces. But the victims did not accept their fate without a fight. From neighborhood groceries to ice cream parlors, from sausage manufacturers to furniture stores, Jews employed a variety of survival mechanisms amid the uncertainty. With the state enacting increasingly elaborate forms of thievery, Jews wrote pleas to the economics ministry and moved capital abroad. They transferred ownership to non-Jewish relatives, changed their store names to make them sound less “Jewish,” delivered merchandise in unmarked trucks, and relocated to parts of the city where Brownshirts were not a regular presence. Jewish organizations helped sustain an increasingly destitute community by providing microcredit for would-be entrepreneurs as well as food for the hungry. Early on, personal interventions could be surprisingly effective in reversing an unfair policy, but by 1939 any push-back was largely in vain. The chances of escaping financial devastation—and outright murder—became vanishingly small.

With his highly accessible prose, Kreutzmüller keeps both scholarly and lay audiences...