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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ausverkauf: Die Vernichtung der jüdischen Gewerbetätigkeit in Berlin 1930-1945 by Christoph Kreutzmüller Lida Barner Christoph Kreutzmüller , Ausverkauf: Die Vernichtung der jüdischen Gewerbetätigkeit in Berlin 1930-1945. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2012. Pp. 427. Hardcover €24.00. ISBN 978-3-86331-080-6. Given the abundance of literature on the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, one might be surprised that we lack a thorough account of Jewish business activities and their destruction in Berlin, the capital of the German Reich. In what ways was the Nazi purge of the Jews from economy in the capital distinct from other places? In Ausverkauf: Die Vernichtung der jüdischen Gewerbetätigkeit in Berlin 1930-1945 ("Final Sale: The Destruction of Jewish Business Activities in Berlin 1930-1945"), Christoph Kreutzmüller of the Humboldt University of Berlin provides us with innovative answers to this question. Ausverkauf is part of a larger project by a group of German scholars who followed the suggestion of Ludolf Herbst to compare the persecution of Jewish entrepreneurs and their strategies for survival in the three largest Jewish communities of the German Reich. The book's first chapter roughly sketches the framework in which the destruction of Jewish businesses in Berlin, in the early 1930s a metropolis of industry and commerce, took place. The reader is reminded of the city's importance as the focal point of German Jewish business activities: According to Kreutzmüller, in 1933 about half of all German Jewish businesses—55,000—were located in the capital. (104) Consequently, [End Page 111] those branches in which Jews were particularly active, such as textile and manufacture, were of essential importance for the city's economic success. The author briefly summarizes the dynamics of anti-Jewish persecution in Berlin from 1933, where, as is typical for the Third Reich, violent actions and administrative enforcements went hand in hand. Kreutzmüller adds some valuable details to this picture, showing that the Nazi destruction of the Jewish economy in Berlin was unique in two ways. First, the city's size enabled threatened Jewish businesses to maintain some business activity on a low profile until a comparatively late point in time, often until the business owners were deported and murdered. In September 1938, for example, there were still 42,750 Jewish businesses in Berlin. (252) Second, as the Reich's capital, Berlin was home to foreign consulates to which Jewish businessmen turned in the hope for help (this holds especially true for Jews with Polish citizenship, about one-quarter of all Jews in Berlin.) Thus, the city offered Jewish enterprises some strategies for economic self-assertion. These strategies are described and analyzed in chapter IV, certainly the most fascinating and stimulating part of Ausverkauf. Chapter IV.1 provides the reader with an overview of institutional counter-strategies, for example, those of the Jewish community's Central Bureau for Jewish Economic Aid. Kreutzmüller is well aware that efforts to protect Jewish businesses with the help of German Jewish institutions have been a focus of scholarship for several decades. He is able to specify, define more precisely and to complement the existing studies with new sources and thus correct our understanding of the economic side of the Nazi persecution. His treatment of Jewish loan societies and cooperative banks, moreover, covers new ground, as little work has been conducted on their economic behavior in the 1930s. There were a variety of individual strategies that Jewish business owners undertook in order to survive economically. Whereas readers familiar with Jewish life in Nazi Germany may have some sense of them, Kreutzmüller, a qualified banker, deserves credit for specifying them in chapter IV.2 and IV.3 and explaining their economic chances under the aspect of commercial law. Some threatened shop owners changed the "Jewish-sounding" names of their firms, adapted the legal forms of their business to partnership (oHG) or limited partnership (KG), nominated "Aryan" partners in company management, increased investment in export and foreign business, transferred their enterprise abroad, moved the business within Berlin to areas with a larger Jewish clientele, or petitioned authorities and protested before the local court after their shop's...