Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

COUP D'ETAT BY INSTALLMENTS 587The attack of the National Socialists was not directed against the Jewsin economic life. Here it became apparent that a new day really haddawned. The economic was no longer dominant, and the Jew ineconomic life no longer seemed dangerous; the new state, whichsubjected economic life, was able for many years to use the GermanJews in its economy and to draw profit from them. How new the timeswere was to be learned with bitterness by the German middle class,which critics, still thinking in terms of the economic age, have declaredto be the force behind National Socialism. This middle class might havehad the most grounds for anti-Semitic feeling; for years the smallindependent shop had been carrying on a hard fight against departmentstores and one-price shops which in Germany belonged predominantlyto Jewish capital. Point 16 of the party program even declared that thesedepartment stores would be broken up and their space rented to smallbusinessmen; representatives of small business were already goingaround the department stores, looking over the places they thought ofrenting. Seldom has a party so bitterly disappointed its own supportersas National Socialism these small-business men; on July 7, Rudolf Hessstated that the party leadership regarded 'active measures with the aimof abolishing department stores and enterprises resembling departmentstores as not indicated for the present,' and he therefore forbade 'anyactions against department stores and enterprises resembling departmentstores.' The Jewish department stores continued to thrive for years.It was not the Jewish businessman, but the Jewish intellectual, whowas excluded from German society in 1933, first from governmentadministration and the practice of the law, later from other intellectualprofessions. Frick submitted statistics to the Reich cabinet showing thatthe great majority of Berlin lawyers, and in some courts even themajority of the judges, were Jews; he cited Jewish utterances to theeffect that the Jews themselves ought not to favor so high a proportion.There had been resistance to the destruction of the Jewish masses by theboycott, but reduction of the Jewish share in the state proved a plan ofgreat popularity, against which good will and sense of justice availednothing. Jewish officials had entered some branches predominantlythrough the influ-