aid when it learned the child’s mother had bought her stockings in a Jewish store.
“This example of neighborly love,” the newspaper stated, “should serve as a lesson to all those who still lack the proper knowledge.”
The Bremer Zeitung is conducting a satiric column entitled, “What must be invented immediately.” In its request for contributions it asks its readers to take incidents from daily life. The first contribution it printed read as follows:
“What must be invented: A preparation to mark all citizens, especially party members, who still buy from ‘non-Aryan’ chain stores, department stores and shops and who do not yet realize the implications of what they are doing.
“I am thinking of an odorless and harmless gas which can be placed in the homes of these persons, causing the women to grow mustaches and the men blue noses that will last fourteen days.”
So menacing has the situation become that the Frankfurter Zeitung published a long editorial analyzing the trend of the boycott against Jewish merchants.
BERLIN SALES
In Berlin, however, conditions were in direct contrast to those in other parts of the Reich. Jewish merchants on the Kurfuerstendamm and other leading shopping thoroughfares, interviewed by Jewish Telegraphic Agency correspondents, said their turn-over had increased in the last few months and they were doing much better business during the Third Reich than during prior administrations.
The manager of a large department store which also sells by mail order declared that whereas there had been 80,000 customers on the mail order list before the advent of National Socialism, there are 90,000 at present. The store’s sales also were proportionately larger, he said.
Asked to what they attributed the improvement in trade, some merchants explained that many “Aryans,” resentful against the government’s anti-Jewish policies, were now buying exclusively from Jews to spite the administration.
One Jewish woman, proprietor of an exclusive millinery shop on the busy Tauntsien Strasse, described typical examples. Numerous “Aryan” women, upon entering her establishment, she said, have inquired whether she is a Jewess, a question which she has answered in the affirmative.
“Fine,” they have replied. “Then we’ll buy our hats here.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
