
On April 1, 1933, the Nazis began their boycott of Jewish businesses across the country. It was not the first indication of the persecutions in store. A week earlier, thirty brownshirts had broken into Jewish homes in a small town in southwest Germany, herded the occupants into the town hall, and beaten them up. The boycott, however, was something different. As Saul Friedlander has commented, it was "the first major test on a national scale of the attitude of the Christian Churches toward the situation of the Jews under the new government." [...]