Journal of Contemporary History2014, Vol. 49(4) 675–701.docx

Journal of Contemporary History
2014, Vol. 49(4) 675–701
! The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0022009414538472
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Article
The Fortress Shop:
Consumer Culture,
Violence, and Security
in Weimar Berlin
Molly Loberg
California Polytechnic State University, USA
Abstract
Antisemitic attacks on shops are a well-known facet of the
history of National Socialism.
But patterns of violence against commercial targets during the
Weimar Republic are less

familiar. Widespread theft and vandalism initially corresponded
with periods of emer-
gency, such as the Spartacist Revolt or Hyperinflation. By the
early 1930s, looting
became a regular rather than an exceptional part of urban
commercial life.
Shopkeepers and police officials struggled to comprehend and
categorize these
crimes and to implement effective responses. By 1931, in the
context of a general
breakdown in public security, the police promoted a fortified
shop as the best means
for crime prevention. In contrast to ‘invisible’ security
measures invented by department
stores to deter crime without inhibiting consumption, these
measures made explicit a
defensive posture of the shop toward the street. Violence
against shops shaped com-
mercial practices and policing tactics not only during the
Weimar Republic but also
during the National Socialist era. As evidenced by the April
1933 Boycott, Nazi officials
strategically unleashed and contained public violence. In
response, shopkeepers

struggled to comprehend and adapt old protections to new
threats. More broadly, I
argue that attacks on shops reveal the precariousness of modern
consumer culture and
how easily domestic unrest can destabilize its fundamental
assumptions and practices.
Keywords
Berlin, boycott, consumer culture, looting, National Socialism,
Weimar Republic
Corresponding author:
Molly Loberg, Department of History, California Polytechnic
State University, San Luis Obispo, CA 93407-
0324, USA.
Email: [email protected]
at CEDAR CREST COLLEGE on March 21,
2016jch.sagepub.comDownloaded from
http://jch.sagepub.com/
In his 1927 film, Berlin: Symphony of the Big City, director
Walter Ruttmann
captured the transition of night to day with the lifting of
protective iron shutters
that exposed shop windows to the morning light.
1
This gesture revealed many

assumptions about the daily patterns and practices of urban
commerce. The
plate glass window was the shop owner’s single most expensive
and most fragile
investment. During the day, light fell through the glass,
illuminated the interior,
and reduced electricity costs. The transparency of the glass
created a field of
visual communication between shop and street. Window
dressers developed
elaborate schemes such as pyramids of abundant goods or
dramatically
staged mannequin tableaux to elicit and hold pedestrians’ gazes.
But the gaze
through the shop window went in the other direction as well.
The window was
the ‘eye of the shop.’
2
From this vantage point, shopkeepers observed the move-
ments of vehicles and pedestrians and anticipated the approach
of potential
customers.
Raising the protective barrier made the window useful, but it
also rendered the
shop vulnerable. This model of shop architecture took for
granted a dynamic,
peaceful street on the other side of the glass. Yet at several
moments during the
Weimar Republic, violent disturbances in Berlin’s public spaces
erupted into shops
through these windows. These instances initially coincided with
states of emergency

such as the Spartacist Revolt (January 1919), the March Unrest
(March 1919), and
the climax of Hyperinflation (October–November 1923). In the
early 1930s, a wide-
spread and prolonged wave of looting posed a less acute but
more sustained threat
to the practice of modern commerce. These lootings took place
in almost every
district of Greater Berlin but concentrated geographically within
the urban core.
Rather than occurring during a few tumultuous days or weeks,
the lootings
extended over a period of years and totaled in the hundreds.
Moreover, the lootings
did not take place within the context of political
demonstrations. Instead, the
perpetrators, usually groups of four to 20 young men between
the ages of 15
and 25, emerged from and disappeared back into the ‘normal
streetscape.’
3
Such
disturbances became part of the pattern of urban commerce
rather than the
exception.
How did the violence associated with Berlin streets during the
Weimar Republic
shape the practices of commerce and consumption? And how did
commerce and
consumption shape the violence of Berlin’s streets? This article
brings together two
key approaches in the study of the Weimar Republic often
treated as distinct: the

rise of modern consumer culture and the fragmentation and
collapse of political
authority. Scholars of Weimar culture have described the period
as an extreme
expression of capitalist modernity. They draw on texts from
novelists, architects,
journalists, and Frankfurt School theorists as guides to Berlin
streets and
1 Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt, directed by Walter
Ruttmann (1927; Los Angeles, CA 1999),
DVD.
2 ‘Schaufenster-Mörder,’ Die Reklame (April 1919), 78.
3 See, for example: Polizei Oberwachtmeister report, 2
December 1932, Landesarchiv Berlin (here-
after: LAB) A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
676 Journal of Contemporary History 49(4)
spectacles.
4
Through scholars’ and contemporaries’ descriptions of office
buildings,
department stores, movie palaces, grand hotels, and traffic hubs,
an urban land-
scape emerges that appears designed to generate and manipulate
crowds and their
desires. Scholars of Weimar politics convey a noticeably
different urban landscape

populated by demonstrators, street fighters, and police.
5
A different source base –
newspapers, government reports, and party papers – informs
these accounts. These
two research areas remain insufficiently integrated both in
terms of sources and
narrative. Instead, they seem to describe two very different
worlds or two separate
chapters of German history.
6
The disassociation of urban consumer culture from street
politics and violence
mirrors broader historiographical trends. Historians of consumer
culture have not
extensively researched methods of security and surveillance.
7
Instead, desire has
dominated the narrative of consumer culture: the various means
by which ‘produ-
cers’ aroused the desire to purchase, the various resistances and
demands that
‘consumers’ exercised against ‘producers,’ and, more recently
in the historiography,
the role of the state in mediating these interactions.
8
True, shopkeepers during
4 A. Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and

Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton,
NJ 1999); J. Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in
1920s Germany (Berkeley, CA 2001);
D. Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations
(Cambridge 2001); S. Hake, Topographies of
Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin
(Ann Arbor, MI 2008). On consumer
culture, urban space, and gender: P. Petro, Joyless Streets:
Women and Melodramatic Representation in
Weimar Germany (Princeton, NJ 1989); K. von Ankum (ed.)
Women in the Metropolis: Gender and
Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley, CA 1997).
5 Some more recent examples include: E. Rosenhaft, Beating
the Fascists?: the German Communists
and Political Violence, 1929–1933 (Cambridge 1983); G. Paul,
Aufstand der Bilder: die NS Propaganda
vor 1933 (Bonn 1992); E. Weitz, Creating German Communism,
1890–1990: From Popular Protests to
Socialist State (Princeton, NJ 1997); M.-L. Ehls, Protest und
Propaganda: Demonstrationen in Berlin zur
Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Berlin 1997); D. Blasius, Weimars
Ende: Bürgerkrieg und Politik, 1930–
1933 (Göttingen 2005); P. Swett, Neighbors and Enemies: The
Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929–1933
(Cambridge 2007); D. Schumann, trans. T. Dunlap, Political
Violence in the Weimar Republic: The Fight
for the Streets and the Fear of Civil War, 1918–1933 (New
York, NY 2009).
6 Synthetic works tend to separate these topics by chapter, e.g.:
D. Peukert, trans. R. Deveson The
Weimar Republic and the Crisis of Classical Modernity (New
York, NY 1993); E. Weitz, Weimar
Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ 2007); E. Kolb,
Deutschland 1918–1933 (Munich
2010). The essential sourcebook has a similar thematic
organization: A. Kaes, M. Jay, and

E. Dimendberg (eds) The Weimar Republic Sourcebook
(Berkeley, CA 1994). A recent synthetic work
on European streetlife in the twentieth century similarly divides
politics and culture into distinct chap-
ters: L. Jerram, Streetlife: The Untold History of the Twentieth
Century (Oxford 2011).
7 A few exceptions: E. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving:
Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian
Department Store (Oxford 1989); U. Spiekermann, ‘Theft and
Thieves in German Department Stores,
1895–1930. A Discourse on Morality, Crime, and Gender,’ in G.
Crossick and S. Jaumain (eds)
Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store,
1850–1939 (Aldershot 1999), 135–59.
8 P. Stearns, ‘Stages of Consumerism: Recent Work on the
Issues of Periodization,’ The Journal of
Modern History, 69, 1 (March 1997), 102–17. For
historiographical essays on German consumer cul-
ture: H. Siegrist, H. Kaelbe, and J. Kocka (eds) Europäische
Konsumgeschichte: zur Gesellschafts- und
Kulturgeschichte des Konsums (Frankfurt 1997); A. Confino
and R. Koshar, ‘Regimes of Consumer
Culture: New Narratives in Twentieth Century German History,’
German History, 19, 2 (2001), 135–61;
K. Jarausch and M. Geyer, ‘In Pursuit of Happiness:
Consumption, Mass Culture, and Consumerism,’
in Shattered Pasts: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton,
NJ 2002), ch. 10; and P. Lerner, ‘An
All-Consuming History? Recent Works on Consumer Culture in
Modern Germany,’ Central European
History, 42, 3 (2009), 509–43.
Loberg 677

Weimar depended on heavy traffic and dynamic street scenes
for business. They
used tantalizing displays behind plate glass windows to kindle
consumer desire.
But, as this article reveals, shopkeepers also feared the violent
potential of crowds
and passersby, particularly in times of economic and political
crisis, and the dan-
gers of desire run amok.
Political and social historians have long studied violence
against property, espe-
cially as a target of collective action.
9
They have measured the scale and frequency
of such actions as an ‘index of social tension’ and situated these
examples within
larger histories of working-class protest. As part of these
studies, historians com-
monly cite a statistical decline in large-scale violent
disturbances from the second
half of the nineteenth century until the First World War,
although they dispute
whether the cause lay in the maturing and modernization of
working-class politics,
in increased interventions by authorities through both greater
public assistance and
more systematic repression, or simply in a temporary
improvement in living stan-
dards.

10
Regarding the Weimar period, historians have integrated
lootings into the
dominant political narratives about the collapse of the Republic
and the rise of
National Socialism.
11
And yet lootings remain a somewhat awkward fit within
these narratives. After all, the targets of these actions were not
explicitly political
figures or sites but rather shops and their merchandise. If we as
historians focus
only on the potential motives of the perpetrators, we follow the
investigatory lead
of the police for whom solving the crime was the primary
objective. We miss the
opportunity to examine how the police and shopkeepers
responded to threats
against shops and how violence shaped the culture and practice
of commerce
and consumption.
9 Classic studies include: G. Rudé, The Crowd in History: A
Study in Popular Disturbances in France
and England 1730–1848 (New York, NY 1964); E.P. Thompson,
‘The Moral Economy of the English
Crowd,’ Past and Present, 50 (February 1971), 76–136; C., L.,
and R. Tilly, The Rebellious Century,
1830–1930 (Cambridge, MA 1975).
10 Subsequent studies confirm this overall pattern of limited
incidents of mass collective violence in
the last decades before the First World War even as they raise

important exceptions with case studies. R.
Evans, ‘‘‘Red Wednesday’’ in Hamburg: Social Democrats,
Police, and Lumpenproletariat in the
Suffrage Disturbances of 17 January 1906,’ Social History, 4, 1
(January 1979), 1–31; K. Tenfelde
and H. Volkmann (eds) Streik: zur Geschichte des
Arbeitskampfes in Deutschland während der
Industrialisierung (Munich 1981); M. Gailus (ed.) Pöbelexzesse
und Volkstumulte in Berlin: zur
Sozialgeschichte der Straße, 1830–1980 (Berlin 1984); H.
Volkmann and J. Bergmann (eds) Sozialer
Protest: Studien zu traditioneller Resistenz und kollektiver
Gewalt in Deutschland vom Vormärz bis zur
Reichsgründung (Opladen 1984); R. Evans, Proletarians and
Politics: Socialism, Protest, and the Working
Class in Germany before the First World War (New York, NY
1990); M. Gailus and H. Volkmann,
Kampf um das tägliche Brot: Nahrungsmangel,
Versorgungspolitik und Protest, 1770–1990 (Opladen
1994). For the entire period 1850–1914 in Berlin, archival
evidence shows roughly 30 isolated incidents
in which crowds damaged persons and property. Reports from
these events do not mention looting,
with two important exceptions: riots in the working-class
districts of Wedding and Moabit in 1892 and
again in 1910. Beginning in 1918, however, the number of
reported cases of damages from crowds and
unrest rose exponentially. LAB A Rep 000-02-01, Nr. 462,
1648, 1649. Also: Bundesarchiv Berlin
(hereafter: BArch) R1501/116424-116439.
11 Schumann, Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1,
11–16; Weitz, Creating German
Communism, 160–87; Swett, Neighbors and Enemies, 195–6; M.
Schartl, ‘Ein Kampf ums nackte
Überleben: Volkstumulte und Pöbelexzesse als Ausdruck des
Aufbegehrens in der Spätphase der

Weimarer Republik,’ in Gailus (ed.) Pöbelexzesse und
Volkstumulte in Berlin, 142–3.
This alternative perspective shows us that the Weimar period
distinguished itself
not by violence against property but rather by the collision of a
modern commer-
cial landscape with a period of extreme and extended political
and economic unrest.
Looters during the Weimar Republic did not move through the
same kinds
of spaces as the food rioters of the early nineteenth century.
During the period
of comparatively peaceful streets from roughly the 1850s to the
First World War, a
remarkable commercial transformation had taken place.
12
Cities expanded at an
exponential rate. The population of Berlin alone rose from
824,484 to 2,029,852
between 1871 and 1914.
13
Commerce increasingly moved indoors with a significant
rise in the number of shops and enclosure of many public

markets in the glass and
iron structures of centralized market halls. Commercial
practices adapted to serve a
more massified public. Plate glass, first manufactured at a
reasonable cost in the
1840s, found regular use in commercial architecture by the turn
of the century.
Advertising, in particular the alluring displays in shop windows,
supplemented and
even supplanted intimate consultations with customers.
Department stores and
chain stores, which came to Germany in the final decades of the
nineteenth century,
exemplified such practices. But even small shops standardized
and depersonalized
relations with fixed prices and service by employees rather than
owners. Such
innovations in shop architecture and business practices set the
stage and deter-
mined the tactics of looters in the Weimar period: the easy
accessibility of goods,
the anonymous escape, and the fearsome crash of shattered
glass.
Violence against shops and their defenses, therefore, offers
means to integrate
and complicate the spaces of commerce and politics.
14
Most significantly, I argue
that the attacks on shops revealed the precariousness of modern
consumer culture
and how easily domestic unrest could destabilize its
fundamental assumptions and
practices. Modern shop design depended on political and

economic stability and
secure public space. Extensive crime and political unrest forced
officials and shop-
keepers to consider a more fortified commercial sphere, but
they approached the
problem from different angles and this divergence widened in
the final years the
Republic. Police argued for a defensive rather than seductive
positioning of the
shop to the street. Shopkeepers pressed for a greater occupation
of public space
12 On this transformation in Germany: U. Spiekermann, Basis
der Konsumgesellschaft: Entstehung
und Entwicklung des modernen Kleinhandels in Deutschland,
1850–1914 (Munich 1999), W. Schivelbusch,
trans. A. Davies, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of
Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley,
CA 1995), 146; A. Artley, The Golden Age of Shop Design:
European Shop Interiors, 1880–1939 (New
York, NY 1976); D. Reinhardt, Von der Reklame zum
Marketing: Geschichte der Wirtschaftswerbung in
Deutschland (Berlin 1993), 435–41. For transnational
comparisons: Crossick and Jaumain (eds)
Cathedrals of Consumption; M. Miller, Bon Marche: Bourgeois
Culture and the Department Store,
1869–1920 (Princeton, NJ 1981); R. Williams, Dream Worlds:
Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth
Century France (Berkeley, CA 1982); P. Nord, Paris
Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment
(Princeton, NJ 1984), ch. 2; W. Leach, Land of Desire:
Merchants, Power, and the Rise of New
American Culture (New York, NY 1994); E.D. Rappaport,
Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the
Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ 2000).
13 H. Silbergleit, Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Berlin (Berlin

1920), 4–5.
14 For more on integrating the spaces of politics and commerce
as well as the precariousness of
modern consumer culture: M. Loberg, ‘The Streetscape of
Economic Crisis: Politics, Commerce, and
Urban Space in Interwar Berlin,’ The Journal of Modern
History, 85, 2 (June 2013), 364–402.
Loberg 679
and greater protection of shops by security forces. Proposals for
surveillance and
security, as well as the crucial question of how to pay for these,
evolved according
to shopkeepers’ and police officials’ understanding of the
specific nature of the
threat. Such understandings were neither static nor abstract but
rather embedded
in historical circumstances and informed by memories of
previous violent encoun-
ters. Therefore, the violence that defined the contours of the
Weimar commercial
landscape also shaped the Nazi regime’s attacks against Jewish-
owned shops as
well as shopkeepers’ efforts at defense, as demonstrated by the
example of the April
Boycott of 1933. And yet, as experiences of the Weimar
Republic and early Nazi
period would prove, neither the older seductive nor the newer
defensive model of

commercial space could withstand a sustained period of
economic and political
instability.
During its brief run in 1920 and 1921, the Berlin magazine,
Self-Defense, harkened
back to a more innocent time before 1914 when shopkeepers left
display windows
illuminated and uncovered at night and simply trusted
Berliners’ honesty.
15
In a
1921 article entitled ‘Display Windows: For Burglars Only,’ the
author lamented
the contrast of the secure past to the anxious present. ‘Today
the windows are
outfitted with fantastic security apparatuses. They are covered
with thick, overhead
iron bars as if they were lion cages,’ he wrote. Shopkeepers
hung warning signs in
their display windows for would-be burglars: ‘Self-firing
Guns!’ Liquor stores still
aroused thirst with fantastic pyramids of champagne bottles, but
signs in bold red
letters read: ‘ATTENTION! BOTTLES EMPTY!’ and
diminished the effect.
Likewise did the signs below hams and sausages in butchers’
shops stating:
‘MADE OF WOOD!’ or ‘MADE OF CARDBOARD.’ Daring
shopkeepers
slept in windows to prevent thefts. As a response to heightened
insecurity, shop-
keepers designed display windows that treated passersby not
only as potential

customers but also as potential criminals.
Nostalgia, heightened by the rupture of wartime experiences
both on the battle-
field and the home front, undoubtedly colored the author’s
memory of the safety of
Berlin’s pre-war streets and the openness of its commerce.
Despite the appearance
of accessibility, modern shop design had always incorporated
security features, but
these features were tailored to milder expectations of crime,
namely shoplifting and
nocturnal break-ins. Department stores cultivated the sensual
experience of shop-
ping through the perceived proximity of goods. The ubiquitous
use of glass, how-
ever, served a dual function: it created the illusion of openness
but a barrier to
touch. Mirrors, like transparent glass, were security measures in
disguise.
16
They
gave impressive dimensions to stores but also provided shop
assistants a means to
watch customers in secluded corners. In smaller shops, the sales
counter obstructed
the customer’s reach toward more expensive goods on display.
At night, a time of
15 ‘Schaufenster, nur für Einbrecher,’ Selbstschutz: einzige
Fachzeitschrift für die Sicherheit von Person
und Eigentum (1 July 1921).
16 Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving, ch. 3.

particular anxiety for shop owners, security measures became
more visible.
In prime districts, electric lighting advertised shops but also
broke the cover
of darkness.
17
Elsewhere locks, iron shutters, private security personnel, and
warn-
ing signs about vicious dogs deterred break-ins.
18
Private security measures proved insufficient, however, for a
postwar atmosphere
of political violence and economic insecurity. Measures
originally designed to
thwart occasional shoplifters and nighttime burglars failed to
suppress crime
waves or deter belligerent crowds. Property crime rates across
Germany rose in
the final years of the war and peaked in 1923.
19
These statistics included common
crimes such as break-ins and robberies. But many of these
crimes occurred in the

context of political disturbances, food uprisings, and a general
breakdown in public
security, all of which plagued Germany in the postwar period
and magnified the
scale of destruction and theft. From small towns such as Aachen
and Gotha to
major urban areas such as Cologne and Munich, thousands of
shopkeepers reported
looting and damage by crowds, whose numbers and agitated
state obscured the
identity of individual perpetrators.
20
Replacement of shattered display windows
was the shopkeepers’ greatest cost, especially as glass prices
spiked. Because of
inflation and sudden demand, many glass companies refused
payment in any cur-
rency other than US dollars by 1923.
21
In the early period of the Weimar Republic,
incidents in Berlin exemplified broader patterns of property
crime. And because so
many political authorities, parties, professional associations,
and newspapers main-
tained their headquarters in the capital, the visible and visceral
experience of its
streets necessarily shaped their perceptions of the problems of
the day. In the midst
of the Spartacist Revolt in January 1919, a crowd looted a
clothing store in the Mitte
district of Berlin. For weeks afterward, suits, fur coats,
women’s gloves, and umbrel-

las found their way onto the black market.
22
On the evening of March 4, at the
beginning of the so-called ‘March Unrest,’ a parade of
demobilized soldiers fresh
from protesting at Alexanderplatz mingled with a crowd that
had been dancing in
the streets to the music of a hurdy-gurdy.
23
Together they tore the protective iron
shutters from a clock and jewelry shop and demolished its
interior. Police estimated
the losses and damages at this store, one of many looted in
those weeks, at over
100,000 marks. As inflation reached its climax in 1923, crowds
demonstrated, broke
display windows, robbed bakeries, and raided public markets.
24
17 ‘Die Unsicherheit in Groß-Berlin,’ Selbstschutz (1 December
1920).
18 J. Schlör, trans. P.G. Imhof and D. Rees Roberts, Nights in
the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London,
1840–1930 (London 1998), 71–91.
19 For a thorough listing and discussion of these statistics, see:
P. Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne
Verbrecher: Konzeptionen und Praxis der Kriminalpolizei in der
Zeit der Weimarer Republik und des
Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg 1996), 28–42.
20 BArch R1501/116424-116439.
21 Reichskommissar für Aufruhrschäden to Reichsminister des

Innern, 5 October 1923, BArch
R1501/116439.
22 ‘Böttcher u.a. wegen Hehlerei, 1919,’ LAB A Rep 358-01,
Nr. 493.
23 ‘Siebert u.a. wegen Plünderung eines Uhrengeschäftes,’ LAB
A Rep 358-01, Nr. 321; see also, LAB
A Rep 358-01, Nr. 500.
24 For 1923 cases, see: LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 402, 404, 924.
Loberg 681
The state’s traditional defenses against violence in public space
and protec-
tions for property foundered. Police appeared unable or
unwilling to manage
the revolutionary context to the satisfaction of the diverse
citizenry of Berlin.
The faith of conservatives in the imperial police plummeted
after officers’
abandonment of the streets during the 1918 revolution.
25
The republican
police force too became suspect in January 1919 with the
dismissal of the
new Independent Socialist police chief on charges of corruption,
an event
which sparked the Spartacist Revolt. Those loyal to the
Republic resented

the inaction of the heavily armed security police units during
the right-wing
Kapp Putsch in 1920. In reaction to police shortfalls in times of
unrest,
militias recruited particularly in middle-class Berlin
neighborhoods.
26
The
Prussian Ministry of the Interior sanctioned such groups until
Versailles nego-
tiations prohibited them.
27
During their brief existence, militia groups did not
eagerly risk confrontations. Nevertheless, the recruitment of
militias reveals a
clear skepticism among citizens toward government capacities.
In the early
1920s, a restructured and augmented police force deployed
special brigades
to combat surges in looting and to cordon off areas of
disturbance.
28
Despite the guarantee of freedom of assembly in the Weimar
Constitution,
police and higher authorities limited or suspended this right for
43 per cent
of the period of the Republic.
29
Such expansive bans show that authorities did

not trust ordinary police means to contain demonstrations and
provide ade-
quately for ‘security and order’ at moments of heightened
political and eco-
nomic tension. Because of security failures, suspect political
loyalties, and
international pressures, the police underwent constant
reorganization in the
early Weimar era. The early disarray of the police set the tone
for shop-
keepers’ attitudes throughout the period: they resented state
failures to main-
tain order and the consequent increased responsibilities and
rising costs of
private security.
Unwilling to rely fully on public institutions for protection,
shopkeepers
adapted their own established security techniques to new crisis
experiences.
During episodes of domestic unrest, shopkeepers followed
essentially the same
procedure as for the regular nighttime closing of shops but did
so in broad
25 P. Lessmann-Faust, Die preußische Schutzpolizei in der
Weimarer Republik: Streifendienst und
Straßenkampf (Düsseldorf 1989); R. Bessel, ‘Policing,
Professionalization, and Politics in Weimar
Germany,’ in C. Emsley and B. Weinberger (eds) Policing
Western Europe: Professionalism and
Public Order, 1850–1940 (New York, NY 1991); J. Buder, Die
Reorganisation der preußischen Polizei,
1918–1923 (Frankfurt am Main 1986); Hsi-Huey Liang, The
Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic

(Berkeley, CA 1970).
26 For a list of Berlin recruitment centers, see: BArch R 43
I/2729; LAB Plakatsammlung F Rep 260-
01, A 0052. But such groups also failed to master the security
situation and seldom willingly risked
violent encounters, according to Schumann, Political Violence
in the Weimar Republic, 25.
27 D. Clay Large, The Politics of Law and Order: A History of
the Bavarian Einwohnerwehr
(Philadelphia, PA 1980), 66.
28 ‘Die Berliner Polizei. Schnelle Hilfe bei Gefahr,’ Berliner
Lokal-Anzeiger, 19 November 1922, in
BArch R 8034/4452.
29 Ehls, Protest und Propaganda, 226.
daylight: they locked up and, when possible, left the area.
30
They used security
barriers such as metal shutters and gates to make shops as
impenetrable as possible.
Market vendors sold goods through small gaps in their shutters.
31
Some shop-
keepers invested in more technologically sophisticated burglar
alarms or sturdier

window coverings such as the so-advertised ‘Revolution Rolling
Walls.’
32
According to a 1923 review in the Berliner Tageblatt, the new
invention protected
against gun shots and clawing mobs better than the older iron
blinds first developed
to foil nighttime break-ins. Such products advertised themselves
not only as secur-
ity against criminal elements but as bulwarks against politicized
crowds.
Shopkeepers petitioned the state for direct monetary
compensation for its security
failures and, when these petitions failed, invested in private
insurance products
such as the new riot insurance that covered damages exempted
by traditional
theft and fire policies.
33
As an ominous precursor to tactics used a decade later,
some shopkeepers during the riots of 1923 pre-emptively used
signs in the display
window to distinguish their shops as a ‘Christian Business’
from the presumed
‘Jewish’ businesses around them.
34
Thus, shopkeepers developed a set of emergency
tactics during the early postwar period. These tactics addressed
intense but rela-
tively short outbursts of political unrest and assumed failures by

public security
forces. But such solutions were temporary. Modern commerce,
premised on stable
public space, could not function in an atmosphere of persistent
agitation.
An examination of a single day of incidents in the late Weimar
Republic reveals
the ineffectiveness of these emergency tactics during extended
periods of wide-
spread yet diffuse insecurity and crime. Property crime rates,
especially for theft,
dropped across Germany with economic stabilization in the mid-
1920s.
35
The
incident numbers, however, climbed by the thousands each year
in cities with the
onset of the Great Depression in 1929 and with spiraling
unemployment. Window
smashing during demonstrations and aggressive boycotts, which
police and shop-
keeper associations usually attributed to rising political
tensions, amplified the
sense of commercial insecurity.
36
In this context, 3 June 1931 was a bad
though not exceptional day in Berlin. At approximately 10 a.m.,
the sound of
30 ‘Arbeitslosenkrawalle im Zentrum Berlins,’ Berliner
Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (16 October

1923); ‘Die Teuerungsdemonstrationen in Berlin,’ Berliner
Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (17 October
1923); see photographs of the arrests after the November 1923
Scheunenviertel riots in: G. Feldman,
The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics and Society in the
Germany Inflation, 1914–1924 (Oxford 1997),
781.
31 Dr. Gaupp, ‘Markthallenpsychose. Zur Psychologie der
Teuerungskrawalle,’ Berliner Tageblatt und
Handelszeitung (8 August 1923), BArch R 8034/4452.
32 S. Nelken, ‘Schutzvorrichtungen für Schaufenster,’ Berliner
Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (22
November 1923), section ‘Technische Rundschau.’
33 G. Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business
(Cambridge 2001), 3; also BArch R 1501/
116424-116431.
34 D. Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt:
Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republic
(Bonn 1999), 153.
35 Wagner,Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher, 33–42.
36 ‘Der Berliner Einzelhandel wehrt sich,’ Der Konfektionär
(16 October 1930); ‘Boykott von Geschäft
aus parteipolitischen Gründen,’ Lebensmittel-Zeitung:
Generalanzeiger für Lebensmittel (31 August
1932).
Loberg 683
glass crashing onto the street disturbed the usual heavy traffic
around

Alexanderplatz.
37
Seconds later, witnesses observed a group of young men
running
from the scene of shattered display windows and jumping into a
taxi, which van-
ished into the stream of traffic. Throughout the day, teletype
messages about
further disturbances came over the wire to police headquarters.
Looting bands
elsewhere in the city had become more violent. At midday in the
north of Berlin,
a female shop assistant who tried to intervene was knocked to
the ground.
38
A gathering crowd in the Mitte district beat, kicked, and
stabbed a police officer
trying to make an arrest. Towards evening, bike-riding vandals
broke more store
windows near City Hall. During the night, members of the Nazi
paramilitary SA
marauded down the main shopping streets in West Berlin calling
out ‘Jews out of
Germany!’ and physically harassing pedestrians.
39
One of the SA men waved a gun.
On the following day, newspapers placed the diverse and
geographically dis-
persed actions within a recognizable pattern of extremist street
politics perpetrated

by the National Socialists (NSDAP) and the Communists (KPD).
40
Several news-
papers characterized window smashing as a typical Nazi tactic.
Others suspected
KPD agitation among the unemployed, who demonstrated near
town hall against
Chancellor Brüning’s austerity measures and especially against
sharp benefit cuts.
The KPD paper, Die Rote Fahne, emphasized widespread
desperate conditions and
drew connections to similar protests in Düsseldorf and Hamburg
with the headline:
‘Hunger Revolts Everywhere.’
41
But several of the lootings on 3 June suggested an
emerging pattern of attacks with no direct connection to open-
air demonstrations
and no explicit link to party politics. And this is precisely what
made them so
disconcerting and uncontrollable. These lootings typically
occurred during high
traffic hours, at midday and at closing time, when shops
expected to do their
best business. Police reports described how perpetrators rushed
the shop at an
opportune moment, executed a looting within minutes, and then
disappeared in
plain sight. Rather than disrupt the street scene as a show of
political power, these
looters hid in well-lit and heavily trafficked streets. The
lootings that occurred in

Berlin in the early 1930s, thus, had a particularly modern and
urban quality.
Rather than the disorder of a demonstration, the looters relied
on the anonymity
of the big city and the geographic dispersion of chain grocery
stores to obscure
their identities and enable their escape.
37 ‘Scheibe zerkrache! Sturm auf Schaufenster—Die neueste
Form des Kampfes,’ Der Abend (3 June
1931); police memo ‘Beabsichtigte Erwerbslosenkundgebung,’ 3
June 1931, in file LAB A Pr. Br. Rep
030, Nr. 7538.
38 ‘Krawalle in Zentrum. Fenster-Sturm und
Geschäftsplünderung,’ Berliner Tageblatt und
Handelszeitung (4 June 1931).
39 ‘Hakenkreuzler-Pöbeleien am Kurfürstendamm,’ Berliner
Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (4 June
1931).
40 Der Abend and Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung linked
breaking windows to Nazi tactics. Der
Tag, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung,
and Vossische Zeitung assumed that com-
munist ‘wire pullers’ stood behind these actions.
41 ‘Hungerrevolte überall,’ Die Rote Fahne (9 June 1931).
As so many looters escaped with their identities unknown,
perceptions of the

perpetrators became the basis for interpreting the attacks and
strategizing pre-
ventative measures. Shopkeepers and the police turned their
eyes to the crowds.
Their perspective reveals a different kind of urban gaze than the
dispassionate,
voyeuristic, and aimless viewpoint of the flâneur, often
described by cultural
historians as the archetypal mode of visually engaging the
modern city.
42
Instead, it was a purposeful assessment of potential danger:
reading urban
inhabitants as they passed before the windows, stood at corners,
or entered
stores to deduce their capacities and intentions to loot or to
shop. And yet
such predictions depended on fleeting impressions amidst an
urban environment
largely defined by anonymity and distraction. The police
engaged the street
primarily as managers of traffic, and their duties to prevent
accidents and to
notice suspicious behavior conflicted. Similarly, customers
busied shop assistants
and kept them close to their counters. Advertisements, street
hawkers, and
loiterers obstructed the view of the street. Thus, glimpses of the
looters’
bodies and snatches of a few terse words served as the basis to
comprehend
and categorize these attacks. These interpretations then
determined police tactics
and shop security.

Reports fixated on the gender of the perpetrators. Because of
starkly perceived
differences in men’s and women’s public roles as well as in
their respective capa-
cities for violence, this category struck observers as particularly
significant for
interpreting crime. An entrenched discourse held that women
stole spontaneously
out of psychological, physiological, or moral weakness rather
than out of conscious
intent and rational planning. From the late nineteenth century
through the 1920s,
the female kleptomaniac – typically a respectable, married,
middle-class woman
shoplifting in a department store – became a prevalent figure in
medical and
psychological studies as well as popular narratives and jokes.
43
In the contempor-
ary discourse, theft was a pathological extension of women’s
role as shoppers.
Kleptomaniacs, according to physicians and psychologists,
shoplifted in a state
of biological excitation brought on by menstruation, pregnancy,
menopause, or
frustrated sexual desire. Small shopkeepers, too, accused
department stores of
preying on women’s moral as well as biological frailty with
sensual temptations.
Police officials and journalists deployed similar psychological
and biological para-
digms to explain mob actions by working-class women during
the Meat Revolt of

42 For the classic description of the flâneur: W. Benjamin,
trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin,
R. Tiedemann (ed.) The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA
1999); for more recent scholarly studies,
see: S. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and
the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA
1989); A. Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk; David Frisby,
Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical
Explorations (Cambridge 2001).
43 For the United States of America: Abelson, When Ladies Go
A-Thieving. For Germany: U.
Spiekermann, ‘Theft and Thieves in German Department Stores,
1895–1930’; P. Lerner, ‘Consuming
Pathologies: Kleptomania, Magazinitis, and the Problem of
Female Consumption in Wilhelmine and
Weimar Germany,’ WerkstattGeschichte, 42 (2006), 46–56. For
France: M.B. Miller, The Bon Marché:
Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920
(Princeton, NJ 1981), 197–206.
Loberg 685
1912, the First World War, and the Hyperinflation.
44
But, they ascribed a different
emotional spectrum to these acts: desperation to feed their
families and rage at the
long lines, high prices, and insults of shopkeepers. According to

the prevailing
view, women regardless of class stole as frustrated shoppers
rather than as
wanton criminals or political agitators.
Looters during the late Weimar Republic were almost
exclusively male. Because
men’s presence in shops ran counter to assumed gender roles, an
interpretation of
male looters as desperate shoppers found little resonance. An
unsourced but fre-
quently cited statistic held that women made 85 per cent of all
purchases.
45
But
practices changed faster than the common wisdom. Rising
unemployment in the
early 1930s turned shopping into an increasingly male
responsibility.
46
Novels such
as Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? (1932) thematized
harassment of unem-
ployed male shoppers as undesirable intruders in an established
consumer land-
scape.
47
In the final scenes of the novel, a policeman mistakes the
protagonist
Pinneberg for a potential looter as he tries to buy bananas for

his young son.
For the unemployed Pinneberg, the shame of public harassment
pushes him to
the edge of despair and, ironically, toward the camps of
notorious window-
smashers, either the Communists or the Nazis. Witness
testimony from looting
cases confirms widespread suspicion of men’s presence around
and in shops. As
an example from a 1931 looting in the Prenzlauer Berg district,
an eyewitness
identified a male shopper as a looter but later recanted with the
excuse that the
accused bore a ‘deceptive similarity’ to one of the young male
perpetrators.
48
Whereas police accepted thefts by women as spontaneous,
reports overwhel-
mingly characterized male lootings in the early 1930s as
‘planned’ or ‘systematic’
and, thus, ‘political.’ In other words, the young men were not
shopping or standing
in line when the impulse to loot overwhelmed them, rather they
approached the
44 Police reports and journalistic accounts of these incidents
suggested that women goaded men into
action or that a female agitator spurred on other women to loot.
Nevertheless, descriptions generally
remained sympathetic because of the presumed political
innocence of women and perhaps identification
with their material struggles. T. Lindenberger, ‘Die
Fleischrevolte am Wedding. Lebensmittelversorgung
und Politik in Berlin am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs,’ in

Gailus and Volkmann (eds) Der Kampf um
das tägliche Brot, 283–304; B. Davis, Home Fires Burning:
Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World
War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, NC 2000); Dr. Schneikert, ‘Frauen
als Anstifterin von Verbrechen,’ Berliner
Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (29 October 1918); D. Goebeler,
‘Die Teuerung,’ Berliner Hausfrau (5
August 1923); Dr. Gaupp, ‘Markhallenpsychose. Zur
Psychologie der Teuerungskrawalle,’ Berliner
Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (8 August 1923), BArch Berlin, R
8034/4452; ‘Unruhen in Berlin und
im Reich,’ Die Zeit (14 October 1923).
45 J. Sneeringer, ‘The Shopper as Voter: Women, Advertising,
and Politics in Post-inflation
Germany,’ German Studies Review, 27, 3 (2004), 487, 499; A.
Hertz, ‘Reklamespaziergang mit einer
Frau,’ Die Reklame, (June 1928), 335; M. Jecker, ‘Werbung und
Verbraucherschaft,’ Die Reklame,
(March 1932), 193; ‘Damen oder Herren als Verkäufer,’ Die
Reklame, (June 1928), 458; C. Meithner,
‘Die Frau als Käuferin und Verkäuferin,’ Die Reklame, (January
1929), 55.
46 K. Hagemann, Frauenalltag und Männerpolitik: Alltagsleben
und gesellschaftliches Handeln von
Arbeiterfrauen in der Weimarer Republik (Hamburg 1990), 90–
2; M. Jahoda, P. Lazarsfeld, and
H. Zeisel, Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed
Community (1933, 1971; New Brunswick,
NJ 2010), 67–73; Swett, Neighbors and Enemies, 82–7.
47 H. Fallada, Kleiner Mann, Was Nun? (1932; Hamburg 1994),
299–300.
48 Witness report, 20 October 1931, LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr.
1027.

store with the intention to loot. Reports highlighted signs of
premeditation and
coordination: a timed approach, a gang leader, a division of
labor, the use of look-
outs, sacks to carry goods, and bicycles as getaway vehicles.
Precinct officials
admitted, for example, that a patrol had passed by a store only
five minutes
before it was attacked: ‘It seems that the youths, who later
invaded the shop,
waited for the departure of the patrol from under good cover.’
49
Although these attacks were relatively unsophisticated,
especially when com-
pared with the spectacular robberies by gentlemen cat burglars
and criminal orga-
nizations that filled the tabloids of the time, the police took
these common tactics
not only as clear signs of premeditation but of a larger political
conspiracy, most
likely instigated by the KPD. The police admitted that they had
no direct evidence
of such a connection but nevertheless anticipated that the arrest
and interrogation
of the looters would lead back to this ‘center.’
50
Such interpretations meshed well

with the traditional assumptions and tactics of the detective
division responsible for
looting investigations, the Political Police. Established in the
aftermath of the
1848 revolution, the Political Police suppressed democratic and
socialist
agitation through press censorship and control of associational
life in imperial
Germany.
51
After the 1918 revolution, the coalition government, including
the
formerly-targeted Democrats and Social Democrats, reformed
the division to
target subversion against the Republic from the extreme right
and left within a
newly constituted political spectrum.
52
But tactics did not change significantly: the
Political Police inspected and banned publications, infiltrated
working-class mili-
eus, monitored demonstrations, and hired informants as a way to
uncover subver-
sive networks.
53
To insist upon an interpretation of the attacks as premeditated
and political, the
Political Police dismissed the looters’ own explanation for the
crime: hunger.

Looters typically announced their purpose with phrases like ‘We
are hungry!’ or
‘Don’t be afraid, we’re hungry, we don’t want money.’ They
stole bread, sausage,
bacon, chocolate, sardines, and other foodstuffs but seldom
cash. Moreover, gath-
ering crowds regularly sympathized with the looters and their
motives, physically
intervened to aid their escape, and verbally abused arresting
officers with shouts
such as: ‘Let them go’ and ‘They’re hungry!’
54
Looters invoked hunger as a legal
defense. Two youths, arrested for looting amid the street
violence of 3 June 1931,
denied any participation in the demonstrations of that day or a
political motive.
49 113 R. to Si. Kb., 2 November 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030,
Nr. 7538.
50 S1a, ‘Dienstanweisung für z.b.V. Beamte, 6 July 1931, LAB
A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
51 A. Funk, Polizei und Rechtsstaat: die Entwicklung des
staatlichen Gewaltmonopols in Preußen, 1848–
1918 (Frankfurt am Main 1986), 67.
52 Liang, The Berlin Police in the Weimar Republic, 6.
53 Funk, Polizei und Rechtsstaat, 257–60; R. Wilms, Politische
Polizei und Sozialdemokratie im
Deutschen Kaiserreich: zur Tätigkeit der politischen Polizei in
der Provinz Hannover von der Zeit der
Reichsgründung bis zum Ende des Sozialistengesetzes 1871–
1890 (Frankfurt am Main 1992), 79–80; Ehls,
Protest und Propaganda, 399.
54 Kriminalassistent Mehwald, 20 October 1931, LAB A Rep

358-01, Nr. 1027.
Loberg 687
They claimed that they accidentally happened upon a group of
looters, followed
out of ‘curiosity,’ and stole food because of ‘hunger.’
55
True, such justifications served a practical purpose: ‘theft of
food’ (Mundraub)
carried a lighter sentence than ‘violation of the public peace’
(Landfriedensbruch),
the usual charge for looting. But it is striking that police
insisted that in such cases
hunger and politics were mutually exclusive motives. Whereas
police had accepted
desperation and rejected politics as a motive for female looters
during the 1912
Meat Revolt, the First World War, and the Hyperinflation, they
rejected this
possibility for male looters during the period of the Great
Depression – even as
these crimes typically occurred in working-class neighborhoods
and near unem-
ployment offices. The Political Police saw in the choice of
target, grocery stores,
political theater rather than a genuine reflection of need. In
other words, the looters

wanted to make a statement that the population suffered
desperately from hunger
even as the looters themselves did not. As they read newspapers
such as Die Rote
Fahne or Vorwärts, police furiously scribbled exclamation
points and question
marks over sympathetic portrayals of the looters.
56
On the scene, they scanned
the bodies of looters for indications of class. One officer who
witnessed an escape
by looters noted their clothing, bicycle, and backpack as well as
their apparent
health as marks of ‘a certain prosperity.’
57
He concluded:
It was the work of an organized gang, which carries out lootings
either for party
political reasons or in order to prevent any deprivations in their
spoiled lifestyle.
The desperation, always credited to these people as an excuse,
was not visible on a
single perpetrator.
Later scholars have noted affinities between the actions of
looters and the attitudes
of the KPD leadership.
58

They have not doubted the membership of some looters
in KPD organizations. But they generally dismiss the notion
that the leadership
directed such actions from above. For the longer history of
protest in Germany,
scholars have argued for a more expansive and more nuanced
view of politics that
includes the concerns of daily life, that accepts the possibility
of multiple and
blurred motives behind actions, and that does not see party
membership as a
prerequisite for political interest and influence.
59
Indeed, memoirs recall the fluid
55 ‘Schwere Strafen gegen Lebensmittelplünderer,’ Vossische
Zeitung (20 June 1931), LAB A Pr. Br.
Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
56 Clippings marked by S1a: ‘Überfälle auf
Lebensmittelgeschäfte,’ Vorwärts (2 June 1931); ‘Sturm
auf Lebensmittelläden,’ Die Rote Fahne (2 July 1931), LAB A
Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
57 Kriminalassistent Mehwald, 20 October 1931, LAB A Rep
358-01, Nr. 1027.
58 Schumann, Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1,
11–16; Weitz, Creating German
Communism, 160–87; Swett, Neighbors and Enemies, 195–6; M.
Schartl, ‘Ein Kampf ums nackte
Überleben,’ 142–3.
59 For the pre-war period, see T. Lindenberger, Straßenpolitik:
zur Geschichte der öffentlichen
Ordnung in Berlin 1900 to 1914 (Bonn 1995), ch. 1. For the
First World War see Davis, Home Fires
Burning, 93. For the lootings in the early 1930s, see P. Steege,

‘Staging a Revolution: Political Struggle
‘‘betwixt and between’’ in Weimar Era Berlin,’ in B. Davis, T.
Lindenberger and M. Wildt (eds) Alltag,
Erfahrung, Eigensinn: historisch-anthropologische Erkundungen
(Frankfurt am Main 2008), 365.
movement of young men between the neighborhood milieu,
party youth organiza-
tions, and informal gangs.
60
I do not aim to settle the question of the looters’
motives in this article but rather contrast the breadth of
possibilities with
the limited interpretations and their effect on security measures.
For the Political
Police during Weimar, the issue of motive was a dichotomous
one. Such an
approach understood politics only as ‘party political’ and drew
a noteworthy
divide between personal circumstances and political
identification. The primary
dissent within the police department came from uniformed
police in working-
class precincts. They described desperation as a general
condition and the primary
motivation for looting and, in the process, denied the possibility

of direct political
connections. A precinct in Wedding dismissed a political motive
as ‘out of the
question.’ They contextualized the crimes within neighborhood
conditions
observed on their beat patrols: ‘If one considers the desperate
circumstances in
general and that of the residents of Wedding, the majority of
whom are part of the
lowest classes of the needy population, . . . so must the number
of lootings be
considered as completely tolerable.’
61
Even if some accepted that economic hardship motivated
looters, this premise
offered neither police nor shopkeepers feasible security
solutions because of the
magnitude of the Depression. Police in the Wedding district
instructed shopkeepers
and shop assistants who saw young men ‘standing around in a
suspicious way’ to
‘immediately call the police precinct or the riot squad.’
62
This instruction was
almost impossible to follow. Young men filled the streets of
Berlin during the
Depression. By the end of 1932, 600,000 of the four million
Berliners were unem-
ployed. Crowds gathered in the thousands outside
unemployment offices where
they waited in long lines segregated by gender and
commiserated over conditions.

63
Approximately one in five registered unemployed persons was
male and under the
age of 25.
64
The desperation of these young men intensified after the Second
Emergency Decree of 5 June 1931, which effectively eliminated
unemployment
insurance for those under 21.
65
As young men spent less time in the workplace,
60 H. Benekowski, Nicht nur für die Vergangenheit: streitbare
Jugend in Berlin um 1930 (Berlin 1983);
G. Staewen-Ordemann, Menschen der Unordnung: die
proletarische Wirklichkeit im Arbeitsschicksal der
ungelernten Großstadtjugend (Berlin 1933); also H. Lessing and
M. Liebel, Wilde Cliquen: Szenen einer
anderen Arbeiterjugendbewegung (Bensheim 1981); E.
Rosenhaft, ‘Organising the ‘‘Lumpenproletariat’’:
Cliques and Communists in Berlin during the Weimar
Republic,’ in R.J. Evans (ed.) The German
Working Class, 1888–1933: The Politics of Everyday Life
(London 1982); D. Peukert, Jugend zwischen
Krieg und Krise: Arbeiterjugend in der Weimarer Republik
(Cologne 1987).
61 Si. Wd. to Sg. Nd., 15 December 1931, in LAB A Pr. Br. Rep
030, Nr. 7538.
62 Report, R. 42 to Sg. Nd., 30 May 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep
030, Nr. 7538.
63 D. Crew, Germans on Welfare: From Weimar to Hitler

(Oxford 1998), 157–65. For images of the
unemployment lines, see: Swett, Neighbors and Enemies, 89; D.
Kerbs, (ed.) Auf den Straßen von Berlin:
der Fotograf Willy Römer (Berlin 2004), 171.
64 D. Peukert, ‘The Lost Generation: Youth Unemployment at
the End of the Weimar Republic,’ in
R.J. Evans and D. Geary (eds) The German Unemployed:
Experiences and Consequences of Mass
Unemployment in Germany from the Weimar Republic to the
Third Reich (New York, NY 1987), 176.
65 W. Patch, Heinrich Brüning and the Dissolution of the
Weimar Republic (Cambridge 1998), 163; E.
Harvey, ‘Youth Unemployment and the State: Public Policies
towards Unemployed Youth in Hamburg
during the World Economic Crisis,’ in Evans and Geary (eds)
The German Unemployed, 145.
Loberg 689
streets provided an escape from the confines of tight living
quarters that
characterized working-class neighborhoods.
66
Scenes of young men out of work,
wandering the streets, riding subways, gathering on corners, or
simply killing time
had become a standard part of the city’s visual landscape and
provided further

camouflage for looters.
67
To account for the repeated attacks against a store in the
northeast of the city, one officer noted its ‘exceptionally
convenient’ location.
68
‘In the [nearby] square,’ he explained, ‘there are always many
young men drifting
around.’
The invocation of a general condition of desperation did nothing
to placate shop-
keepers who already experienced such conditions through
declining purchases and
deteriorating profits, which looting losses exacerbated. Instead,
the rising violence
caused shopkeepers to doubt the capacity of the police to
maintain order even as they
demanded more protection. Shops had already weathered
moments of acute eco-
nomic and political unrest during the early Weimar Republic
and had developed
emergency tactics in response. But emergency tactics were not
long-term solutions.
Businesses could not survive for extended periods with
shuttered windows, closed
doors, and empty streets. Nighttime security measures such as
locks, alarms, and
rolling shutters were useless since looters did not ‘break-in’ but
came through the
open front door during normal business hours. Looted a half
dozen times in late
summer of 1931, the Butter Landau company complained to

police headquarters, ‘It
is impossible to do business in such a manner, if robber bands
break into a store in
broad daylight and loot and not even one of the twenty young
men loaded with
goods gets captured.’
69
Petitions for better security from the stores arrived regularly
at police precincts and headquarters. To petition for police
protection, the
Nordstern company detailed the costs and geography of 32
separate lootings in
their stores between February and July 1931.
70
Total costs reached nearly 3000
RM. After looters targeted Goldacker stores across Berlin from
the outer districts
of Steglitz and Reinickendorf to the central districts of
Schöneberg, Kreuzberg, and
Prenzlauer Berg, the company threatened to take matters up the
chain of command
to the Ministry of the Interior.
71
In mid-August 1931, police responded to criticisms and
stationed beat patrols
within sight of endangered stores, thus, providing individual
security for shops.
72

But almost immediately, precincts declared the order untenable.
The urban geo-
graphy of commerce was simply too diverse and fragmented.
The police estimated
66 E. Rosenhaft, ‘The Unemployed in the Neighborhood: Social
Dislocation and Political
Mobilisation in Germany 1929–1933,’ Evans and Geary (eds)
The German Unemployed, 202.
67 For images of the unemployed see: Kerbs (ed.) Auf den
Straßen von Berlin, 180; E. Geisel, Im
Scheunenviertel: Bilder, Texte, und Dokumente (Berlin 1981),
127. Detlev Peukert describes similar
scenes in ‘The Lost Generation,’ in Evans and Geary (eds) The
German Unemployed, 182.
68 Kriminalpolizei report, 1 April 1932, in LAB A Rep 358-01,
Nr. 1137.
69 Butter Landau to Polizei-Revier, 9 September 1931, LAB A
Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
70 Nordstern to Polizeipräsidium, Abteilung IA, 23 July 1931,
LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
71 Eduard Goldacker Nachfolger to Polizeipräsidium Abteilung
I, 12 August 1931, LAB A Pr. Br.
Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
72 Internal memo, S1a to Sg., Si., R.,18 August 1931, LAB A
Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
400 chain grocery stores within Berlin. Within the district of

Wedding, there were
126 grocery stores, eight weekly markets, a market hall, and a
Tietz department
store, all of which required some degree of protection.
73
A precinct in Wedding
weighed the use of resources: ‘The security achieved through
these policies for a few
shops is disproportionate to the rising danger in general to
public peace, safety, and
order.’
74
The precinct suspected the KPD would exploit the distraction of
the
police to intensify recruitment not just on factory floors but
within increasingly
radicalized neighborhoods.
Only weeks after the special order to watch the streets for
potential dangers to
shops, the police suddenly reversed the direction of their gaze
to scrutinize shops.
They began a surveillance operation to determine shops’
accountability in a looting
epidemic. Headquarters instructed officers to dress in civilian
clothes, blend into
traffic, pass as shoppers, and observe any security failures.
75
Orders instructed
police officers to pay particular attention to two features in

shops: the presence
of a telephone and the gender of the shop assistant. Teletype
messages came over
the wire during the next few days with the tally. Of the 177
stores observed, 135 had
exclusively female personnel. Only 49 stores had installed
telephones. The police
suspended the individual protection of shops by the end of
September. Afterwards,
police cited the gender of employees and the lack of security
apparatuses to deflect
shopkeepers’ criticisms of insufficient public security and to
redirect culpability
back onto the shops for negligent private security.
Police characterized female shop assistants as the weak point in
shop
defenses. Their reports consistently described female shop
assistants as cow-
ering, agitated, and paralyzed. They assumed that male
personnel would risk
violent encounters. But this assumption ran counter to evidence
from a grow-
ing number of case files. Regardless of gender, shop assistants
and bystanders,
neighbors and strangers, seldom came to the defense of stores,
especially when
faced with the possibility of bodily harm. When questioned by
police after the
looting of a Nordstern grocery, a male bystander explained his
lack of heroic
intervention: ‘Even if we were not threatened, I had the feeling
that the
perpetrators were armed and would undoubtedly make use of
their firearms.
For this reason, I didn’t dare to make a stand against the

youths.’
76
Residents
and passersby regularly failed to identify escaping looters
because, according to
the police, they did not want to have ‘their bones smashed in
two.’
77
Neighboring shopkeepers, either out of fear of retribution or
resentment of
the competition, usually watched the looters ‘with their hands in
their pockets’
and with little demonstration of ‘solidarity.’
78
Even police officers demonstrated
73 Si. Wd. 2 to Sg. Nd., 20 January 1932, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep
030, Nr. 7538.
74 Rv. 53, 21 August 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
75 S1a, 2 September 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
76 ‘Unbekannt wegen Plünderung, 1932,’ LAB A Rep 358-01,
Nr. 1082.
77 Rv. 68 to Si. Pb., 1 December 1932, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030,
Nr. 7538.
78 Polizeipräsident to Regierungsdirektor Goehrke, 23 October
1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030,
Nr. 7538.
Loberg 691

reluctance to pursue looters aggressively. In one case, female
shop assistants
pointed out the escaping looters to a police officer, and he then
walked in the
other direction. In his statement, the officer shifted the blame
back to ‘young,
fearful, female shop assistants’ without ‘the necessary courage
to take energetic
steps to prevent looting.’
79
From studies of Nazi Germany, we know that Germans
grumbled but few
demonstrated substantive resistance to state sponsored violence
against Jewish
shops during the April Boycott (1933) and Kristallnacht (1938).
80
But it is important
to note that already in the Weimar period, attacks against shops
seldom elicited ‘civil
courage’ from urban crowds. Certainly fear of retribution
played a role.
Shopkeepers and police also sensed the crowds’ sympathy with
looters and their
apathy, even hostility, toward shops. The owners of Butter
Landau in the Mitte
district recounted with horror and outrage after a looting: ‘The
crowd watched and

laughed about it.’
81
The police concurred that the crowd reacted ‘exceptionally
passively even positively’ toward the lootings.
82
There were many possible explana-
tions for such reactions. The thin ties between neighborhoods
and chain stores
fostered an auspicious climate for looting. Although chain
stores had branches
throughout the city, many of their stores were located in
working-class districts to
the north and the east.
83
The broad, multi-site network of chain stores frequently
meant physically distant ownership and a lack of investment in
community rela-
tions.
84
Hostilities lingered from the First World War, when rumors of
profiteering
flourished.
85
Class differences, between middle-class proprietors and their
working-
class customers, marked relations between shops and the
surrounding community.
Police in the Wedding district attributed their failure to catch

looters to the attitude
of the neighborhood toward large businesses:
Ninety-five per cent of the investigations remain unsuccessful
because the witnesses
here in Wedding almost always sympathize with the looters and
hold back testimony
because they fear revenge by the perpetrators and their
associates and the damage to
the large companies is a matter of total indifference to them.
86
In the increasingly politicized climate of the early 1930s,
neighborhood newspapers
called for the boycott of a shop if the political sympathies of the
owner were out of
step with the rest of the neighborhood, usually if a shopkeeper
in a working-class
79 Stellungnahme, 2 December 1932, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030,
Nr. 7538.
80 I. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the
Third Reich: Bavaria 1933–1945 (Oxford
1983), 233, 273; D. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity,
Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life
(New Haven, CT 1987), 58–60; A. Steinweis, Kristallnacht 1938
(Cambridge, MA 2009), 8.
81 Butter Landau to Polizeipräsident, 30 August 1931, LAB A
Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
82 Si. Ax., 18 September 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr.
7538.
83 Brochure Butter Landau, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
84 The police recommended that the manager of a Butter

Landau store move closer because the store
was situated in ‘exceptionally communist area,’ report from 82.
R., 13 December 1932, in LAB A Pr. Br.
Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
85 Davis, Home Fires Burning, 81, 134.
86 Sg. Wedding, 10 October 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr.
7538.
neighborhood sympathized with the National Socialists.
87
But the National
Socialists opposed the existence of large retailers in principle.
88
The ranks of the
commercial classes splintered between small proprietors and
larger chains.
Moreover, although not a major theme in police reports on the
lootings, some
shopkeepers suspected antisemitism as a motive. After multiple
robberies of their
shops, the Butter Landau company concluded that looters
targeted ‘primarily
Jewish businesses (Geschäfte jüdischer Confession)’.
89

But the company also specu-
lated that looters sought revenge after Butter Landau neglected
to buy advertising
space in a local political newspaper, ‘The Unemployed.’ In her
studies of homicide
cases during the Weimar Republic, Sace Elder has suggested
that Berliners demon-
strated ‘surveillance’ and ‘accusatory practices’ well before the
Nazi era as they
aided police in investigations driven either by personal gain or a
sense of ‘civic’
responsibility.
90
Such impulses, however, are far less evident for property
crimes, as
evidenced by responses to lootings. Instead, complex and
diverse hostilities divided
the commercial sphere and the communities that surrounded it.
By October 1931, the police increasingly pushed shop
fortifications and self-
defense as the most reliable means for preventing crime. This
new precept tacitly
admitted the inability of police to catch perpetrators. It placed
greater responsi-
bility for crime control on proprietors. Most importantly, it
implicitly accepted a
new interpretation of the crime that assumed an inherently
dangerous public
sphere. In contrast to the ‘invisible’ security measures of
nineteenth-century depart-
ment stores, these measures relied on a conspicuously defensive
posture. They

treated the street and its crowds as threats. Contemporary shop
design featured
the abundant display of goods, with cans and packages piled on
counters, on
shelves, and in the display windows. According to the new
model, goods would
sit behind the counter, sealed off by protective screens or panes
of glass.
91
Iron
rolling shutters would cover display windows. The police
advocated alarm bells,
pistols for firing warning shots, and bags of pepper to throw in
the eyes of thieves.
92
Rather than rely on protection from public security forces, the
police counseled
shopkeepers to hire private guards. They directed shops to
develop a specific pro-
tocol for robberies, to install telephones, and to train employees
in their use.
Despite evidence of local tensions or mere indifference, the
police encouraged
more cooperation among neighbors through secret knocks and
other coded calls
for help.
87 For several boycott cases investigated by the police in 1932
see: LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 1305, Nr.
1597, Nr. 1514.
88 See for example: 25-Punkte-Programm der NSDAP, 24
Munich 1920.

89 Butter Landau to Polizeikommissar Dittschlag, 10 September
1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr.
7538.
90 S. Elder, ‘Murder, Denunciation, and Criminal Policing in
Weimar Germany,’ Journal of
Contemporary History, 41, 3 (July 2006), 402.
91 Sj. Kb. 1., 3 November 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr.
7538.
92 Sg. Wd., 6 October 1931; Präsidial-Beamten-Ausschuss to
Kommando der Schutzpolizei,
5 October 1931; S1a report, 18 December 1931, LAB A Pr. Br.
Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
Loberg 693
Shopkeepers wanted thoroughly policed streets, but police
preferred fortified
shops. At stake in this dispute between shops and police was the
question: Who
bears the cost of security, particularly in a time of economic
crisis? In 1930 alone,
15,500 people visited the Advice Center of the Criminal Police
at Alexanderplatz,
a similar rate as during the crisis years of 1922 and 1923 and
significantly higher
than that of the mid-1920s.
93
There they could preview the latest in locks, bar-

riers, and alarms as well as receive tips on crime prevention.
Publications of the
various lobbying and professional associations for retailers
offered similar
advice.
94
But in these publications as well as in their correspondence with
the
authorities, shopkeepers focused above all on the issue of state
responsibility.
Shopkeepers defended their rights as taxpayers and their
business expertise.
They resented greater financial investments such as hiring more
expensive male
personnel or installing unproven devices like telephones.
‘There’s no doubt that
the looters would seize control of the apparatus immediately
and prevent the
shop assistant from calling the robbery brigade,’ the Nordstern
company pre-
dicted.
95
According to the Goldacker company, it took less time to loot
than for
the operator to connect to the correct division in the police
department.
96
The
Butter Landau company proposed arming their female shop
assistants – a pro-
position that the police found both alarming and preposterous.

97
Shopkeepers
cast the repercussions of failed policing in broader economic
and political terms.
Butter Landau described the high crime rate not only in terms of
the practical
difficulties of retaining insurance but as damaging to the image
of Germany in
the eyes of the world: ‘We had an English insurance company
which has can-
celled our policy with the observation that if such African
conditions prevail in
Berlin they can no longer make such contracts with us.’
98
Shopkeepers warned of
inhibited commerce and consumption. In late 1931, the National
Association of
German Delicatessens described a ‘rising disquiet’ among its
members because
‘the state no longer guaranteed constitutional protections for
persons.’
99
Retailers, the association threatened, might determine ‘a failure
of state force’
and organize their own ‘self-defense.’
Even if police and shopkeepers had acknowledged the validity
of the other’s
position in this debate, each faced political and economic
pressures particular to

the period of the Weimar Republic that constrained their ability
to compromise
or find alternatives. The Chief of Police Albert Grzesinski
countered in response
93 Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher, 107–8; LAB A
Pr. Br 30, Nr. 21317.
94 ‘Wie sichere ich meine Räume gegen Einbruch,’ Die Berliner
Konfektion (1 August 1932); ‘Der
Berliner Einzelhandel wehrt sich,’ Der Konfektionär (16
October 1930); ‘Straßentumulte und
Plünderungen,’ Deutsche Einzelhandels-Zeitung, November
1931.
95 Nordstern, 2 October 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr.
7538.
96 Goldacker, 26 September 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr.
7538.
97 In the letter from Butter Landau of 25 September 1931, the
police both underlined the phrase ‘die
Verkäuferinnen zu bewaffen’ and marked it with an exclamation
point. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr.
7538.
98 Butter Landau, 25 September 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030,
Nr. 7538.
99 Reichsverband Deutscher Feinkost-Kaufleute to
Polizeipräsidium, 19 October 1931, LAB A Pr. Br.
Rep 030, Nr. 7538.

to the delicatessen association: ‘Every man is entitled and, in
the interest of the
general public, also obligated to self-defense within the
boundaries of the law.’
100
But ‘self-defense’ meant technological innovations and private
security firms. The
police could neither imagine a force of armed female shop
assistants nor, partly
due to international treaties, could they openly advocate militia
justice. In this
impasse, shopkeepers too had limited options. Shopkeepers
widely reported a
‘decline in customers’ and lamented that every retailer suffered
from economic
‘misery.’
101
This made security investments demanded by the police difficult
to
contemplate, especially because these apparatuses threatened to
obscure shop-
keepers’ primary means to arouse depressed purchasing desire:
the shop
window. Across Germany, National Socialists wooed small
retailers with the
promise of suppressing Communism and even offered special
‘protection’ services
to sympathetic business owners.
102
But the police had also arrested SA members

for terrorizing pedestrians and smashing windows on
Kurfürstendamm, a street
which the National Socialists menaced as an alleged hotbed of
Jewish business.
103
In their strongholds across Germany, particularly in smaller
towns, local party
activists had organized boycotts of department and chain stores
and Jewish-
owned businesses of all sizes. Thus, even as the insecurity of
the streets might
disillusion retailers with the Republic and its police forces, the
Nazi appeal only
worked for retailers who fit the ‘racial’ profile, who accepted
the Nazi ideal of
small-scale commerce, and who approved of violent
intimidation as a means to
achieve it.
And yet the dismissive stance of the police, which made
shopkeepers responsible
for security, posed at best a public relations problem and at
worst undermined state
legitimacy. If the police could not suppress violence in public
space, particularly at
moments of economic crisis and political agitation, then what
purpose did they
serve? Police officials recognized this and, in mid-October
1931, they quietly mod-
ified tactics even as they maintained a hard line in
correspondence with shop-
keepers. Despite the massive investment of resources to prevent
lootings in
previous months, police had caught few looters and then only

‘by coincidence,’
the Wedding district reported.
104
The Political Police, the lead investigators, had
not captured a single suspect. The district recommended
transferring the cases to
the other major detective force in the police department: the
Criminal Police. The
Criminal Police was a significantly larger department with
better resources.
105
But
perhaps more importantly, the Criminal Police put on a better
show for the public,
which at this moment lacked confidence in the authority of the
state but seemed
100 Polizeipräsident to Reichsverband Deutscher Feinkost-
Kaufleute, 13 November 1931, LAB A Pr.
Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
101 ‘Die ernste Lage im Einzelhandel,’ Das Spezialgeschäft (31
October 1930).
102 A. McElligott, Contested City: Municipal Politics and the
Rise of Nazism in Altona, 1917–1937
(Ann Arbor, MI 2001), 176.
103 LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 20.
104 Reports from SJ. Wedding to SG. Nord, 10 October 1931,
LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
105 The criminal detective force had roughly 2360 officials in
1932 compared with 300 in the Political
Police. Liang, The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic,
52, 125.

Loberg 695
fascinated with both the criminal underworld and its
investigators.
106
In contrast to
the Political Police, who worked largely behind the scenes
through cultivating
informants and monitoring political publications, the Criminal
Police arrived on
the scene in special cars and brought cases of equipment for
gathering forensic
evidence. They interrogated witnesses. Even if such tactics
failed to identify the
guilty parties, they might intimidate potential perpetrators. As
the Political Police
explained, ‘Above all, the public will see that the police are at
work and something
is being done.’
107
But this shift in jurisdiction entailed a shift in interpretation.
The Criminal
Police focused primarily on nighttime thefts because police
identified nocturnal
urban terrains with the criminal underworld and crime for
material gain. In con-

trast, the Political Police assumed that agitators perpetrated
daytime thefts to sow
disorder. Through late August 1931, the Political Police claimed
jurisdiction over
lootings even as some precincts bypassed them. They reminded
in an internal
memo:
It seems necessary once again to point out that the lootings of
grocery stores are
political matters that will be handled by the Political Police and
for this reason
must not be handed over to the precinct Criminal Police by the
precinct captain.
108
But by October of that year, the maligned and frustrated
Political Police conceded
that perhaps criminals had copycatted the ‘communist agitators’
who originated
such attacks.
109
They noted the use of weapons and demands for cash in recent
lootings. The distinction between looting and armed robbery
became blurred. The
new stance of the police corresponded with ideas presented by
Vice Chief of Police,
Dr. Bernhard Weiß, in his 1928 study, Politics and Police. Weiß
asserted that
criminal opportunism flourished in periods of civil unrest: ‘The
political motive
that marks common crime is often only feigned. . . . Any

halfway decent profes-
sional criminal knows how to suck the honey from the flower of
every era.’
110
And
yet the Political and Criminal Police shared some underlying
assumptions. Both
imagined looting as part of a conspiracy, but the Criminal
Police believed that
organized crime rather than political parties ‘pulled the strings.’
This assessment fit
within the general interpretative paradigm of the Criminal
Police, who attributed
property crimes to the profit motive and, increasingly with their
own failures to
staunch the crime rate, to the biological pre-disposition of the
‘professional crim-
inal.’
111
The interpretation was different but equally narrow. Neither
department
was willing to contemplate a direct connection between
economic crisis and
106 Liang, The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic,
114-51; Elder, ‘Murder, Denunciation, and
Criminal Policing in Weimar Germany,’ 406.
107 Politische Polizei to Kriminalpolizei, 31 October 1931,
LAB A Pr. Br. 030, Nr. 7538.
108 S1a memo, 22 August 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr.
7538.
109 Politische Polizei to Kriminalpolizei, 31 October 1931,

LAB A Pr. Br. 030, Nr. 7538.
110 B. Weiß, Polizei und Politik, vol. 3, Die Polizei in
Einzeldarstellung (Berlin 1928), 91.
111 Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher, 22, 138.
lootings. Such widespread desperation implied a security
problem that far exceeded
police capacities.
The question of whether politics or criminality motivated the
lootings remained
open even after sweeping changes in political authority, police
administration, and
security tactics in the second half of 1932. Despite efforts by
the police to stave off
public criticism, parties across the spectrum accused them of
incompetence
and bias. By spring, ‘civil war’ became a catchword to describe
violence in
public space, especially the frequent bloody clashes between the
NSDAP and
KPD in the streets.
112
The right-wing Chancellor Franz von Papen seized upon
the perception of a security crisis and accused Prussian state
officials of leniency

toward the KPD. Under the auspices of the 20 July emergency
decree ‘For the
Restoration of Public Order in the State of Prussia,’ Papen
assumed authority over
the Prussian state government, fired most high-ranking police
officials (particularly
those associated with the Social Democrats), subordinated the
police to the mili-
tary, and temporarily imposed martial law in Berlin. Afterward,
this authoritarian
turn manifested in everyday policing as greater tolerance of
National Socialists in
their political agitation in the streets and their clashes with
Communists.
113
And
yet, months later, officials still argued about the relationship
between the lootings
and the broader category of ‘civil war.’ When department heads
met months later
in December 1932 to prepare for an anticipated upsurge in
lootings during the
Christmas season, the head of the Political Police still insisted
that there was ‘not a
single indication’ linking the KPD or ‘another big organization
to the lootings.’
114
The Chief of Police sidestepped the wrangling between the
departments and called
for cooperation between the Political and Criminal Police. To
combat a broad but
unspecified threat as well as public scrutiny, they changed

tactics to a more inten-
sive occupation of the streets and greater show of force. Ninety-
eight mounted
police along with new motorized, free-roaming patrols
converged on particularly
unstable parts of the city.
115
They intensified beat patrols and grabbed more
quickly for their guns. With these spectacular measures, they
successfully arrested
some, albeit few, looters.
116
Ironically, a female shop assistant played a key role in
one of the few arrests in mid-January as she commandeered a
vehicle and followed
looters to an apartment building.
117
The police apprehended only one looter there,
who invoked the common defense for the theft of food: ‘You
don’t need it, but I
112 Blasius, Weimars Ende, 35.
113 Lessmann-Faust, Die preußische Schutzpolizei in der
Weimarer Republik, 373–4; Liang, The Berlin
Police Force, 163.
114 S1a, 20 December 1932, LAB A Pr. Br. 030, Nr. 7538.
115 S1a, 21 December 1932, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.
116 ‘Kommunistische Plünderer und Räuber entlarvt,’ Berliner
Lokal-Anzeiger, 17 January 1933,
clipping in LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.

117 ‘Vier Geschäftsplünderer und eine mütige Verkäuferin,’
Vorwärts (16 January 1933); ‘Kampf ums
Lebensmittel,’ Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (13
January 1933); ‘Eine Verkäuferin verfolgt eine
Plünderungsbande,’ Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (13 January
1933), clippings in LAB A Pr. Br. Rep
030, Nr. 7538.
Loberg 697
do, because I am hungry.’
118
Such a claim did not convince those officials and
journalists who still suspected a widespread Communist plot.
The Weimar justice system would not have the opportunity to
resolve the ques-
tion. After Hitler’s appointment to the position of chancellor at
the end of January
1933, the new regime adopted and intensified the occupation of
streets. In
February, the regime deputized the SA as auxiliary police and,
thus, re-categorized
them from agitators to enforcers of the new order. The
traditional police and SA
auxiliaries, then, rounded up thousands of suspected communist
sympathizers as
well as beggars and petty criminals.

119
Young men in working-class neighborhoods
no longer loitered in groups on street corners because such
gatherings attracted
unwanted attention from the SA.
120
For months, the area around the main unem-
ployment office, the alleged staging grounds for many lootings,
remained comple-
tely abandoned. The regime pre-emptively and ruthlessly
targeted the people and
the places most associated with looting. In an October interview
with the Nazi
newspaper, Der Angriff, the new director of the Criminal Police
triumphantly
reported a ‘constant decline in criminality.’
121
Statistics for robberies and thefts
showed a marked decrease, but the numbers for looting were
astonishing. Director
Friedrich Schneider boasted:
The lootings of grocery stores – in the past years a real plague
of the big city – have
totally stopped. If there were 45 stores looted in Berlin in the
first half of December
1932, not a single case was reported for the whole year of 1933.
He attributed the decline in criminality to the ‘perceivable

revitalization of public
morals in National Socialist Germany’ and to more aggressive
investigation, pro-
secution, and punishment of ‘professional crime.’ Crime rates
fell. But such
statistics also reflected changing definitions of crime. From the
perspective of
the new government, illicit violence against shops had stopped.
But in Berlin,
Jewish-owned stores accounted for 26 per cent of retail sales.
122
An estimated
3700 stores of this kind survived in the city as late as 1938.
From the perspective
of many shopkeepers, the experience of intimidation and
violence was only just
beginning.
The National Socialists, once in power, inherited a complex
legacy of commercial
violence, which they then selectively exacerbated and mitigated
to achieve ideo-
logical objectives. We can find evidence for this legacy in the 1
April 1933 boycott
118 Kriminal-Tagebuch, 12 January 1933, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep
030, Nr. 7538.
119 R. Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi
Germany (Oxford 2001), 19, 36;
Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher, 300.
120 Jan Petersen, Our Street: A Chronicle Written in the Heart
of Fascist Germany (London 1938), 72,
137.
121 ‘Seit der Machtübernahme durch die Nationalsozialisten

ständiger Rückgang der Kriminalität,’
Der Angriff, 26 October 1933.
122 A. Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic
Struggle of German Jews (Hanover, NH
1989), 6–7; Stadtpräsident Berlin Report, 5 January 1939,
BArch 3101/32170.
of Jewish businesses. Although the violence experienced by
many shopkeepers
lessened after the Nazi seizure of power and with the
implementation of a more
militarized policing style, Jewish shopkeepers became targets of
both grassroots
and regime-sponsored attacks. The government may have
deputized the SA as
auxiliary police in February 1933, but in March SA troops
across Germany
acting on independent initiative terrorized shopkeepers,
smashed windows, and
demanded businesses close. In part, the new regime launched its
nation-wide
boycott as a means to channel widespread rank-and-file violence
into concerted
but contained action.
123
The tactics of the boycott drew upon the features of modern

shop design and manipulated them for new purposes. The SA
hung posters
or painted crude gold stars on display windows and, thus,
transformed beacons
of desire into instruments for terrorizing shopkeepers and
repelling customers.
124
This was neither a seductive nor a defensive positioning of the
shop toward
the street but rather an offensive positioning of public space and
German con-
sumers against the shop. And yet the SA was explicitly ordered
not to break
shop windows or loot.
125
The regime wanted to categorically distinguish their
‘orderly’ attack against shops from the violence and crime of
the late
Weimar Republic, which left many shopkeepers unable to trust
the streets as
safe for business and, thus, made many skeptical of the
government’s
authority and competence. Nazi leaders, partly because of their
fears of exacer-
bating economic turmoil with a hostile commercial atmosphere,
abandoned the
boycott after one day and blocked subsequent local boycott
efforts.
126
Modern

consumer culture remained precarious, and violence and
intimidation destabilized
its fundamental assumptions and practices even when the state
coordinated such
actions.
Shopkeepers, too, drew lessons from the Weimar Republic, as
revealed by the
photographs of the boycott. Scholarly discussion of the boycott
has primarily
examined the regime’s decision to launch the boycott, the
staging of it, and the
reaction of the public.
127
We might say, therefore, that the analysis remains focused
on the photographic foreground, that is, on the interaction
between SA troops and
the crowds in front of the shops. But if we shift our focus to the
background to the
shops themselves, the picture becomes more complex. Alerted
by news stories to
the pending boycott in the last days of March, many shops
simply did not open for
business on 1 April. SA troops hung boycott posters on closed
iron shutters and
123 Reichsminister des Innern to Innenministerien der Länder,
13 March 1933, BArch R 3101/13859.
124 Photographs: BArch Bild 146-1970-083-40, Bild 102-
14471, Bild 102-14468. Barkai, From Boycott
to Annihilation, 19.
125 ‘Judenboykott, Tumultschäden,’ BArch R 3101/13860,
13862.
126 Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation, 17–25; S.

Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The
Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, NY 1997), 17–26.
127 P. Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung: eine
Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen
Judenverfolgung (Munich 1998), 30–41; M. Dean, Robbing the
Jews: The Confiscations of Jewish
Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (Cambridge 2008), 25; H.
Ahlheim, Deutsche, kauft nicht bei
Juden: Antisemitismus und politischer Boykott in Deutschland
1924 bis 1935 (Göttingen 2011), 241–62.
Johannes Ludwig describes the response of a single company,
Tietz, in Boykott, Enteignung, Mord: die
‘Entjudung’ der deutschen Wirtschaft (Hamburg 1989), 104–27.
Loberg 699
stood before locked doors.
128
We cannot with statistical precision answer the ques-
tion of exactly how many shops closed and how many remained
open that day. The
evidence remains impressionistic. Postwar memoirs, particularly
from residents of
smaller towns, recall defiantly open businesses and brave
customers who crossed
their thresholds.
129
At the time of the boycott, the New York Times correspondent

Frederick Birchall sent cables from Berlin reporting ‘many’
closures.
130
Karstadt
on Hermannplatz, whose ‘Aryan’ ownership had fired Jewish
employees the pre-
vious day, was the only department store to open in Berlin.
131
Indeed, in advance
of the boycott, the Association of Department and Large Stores
had counselled its
members to close until 4 April.
132
I raise the issue of closures neither to gauge the civil courage of
shopkeepers and
customers nor to measure the extent of public antisemitism in
the early Nazi
period, but rather to highlight the complexity of the decisions
faced by shopkeepers
and to situate their considerations and actions within a pre-
history of Weimar
experiences. The defensive posture of shops that day suggests
that shopkeepers
did not fully trust the ‘discipline’ of the SA. As Michael Wildt
has noted, the
National Socialists had already used the boycott of Jewish shops
as a ‘systematic,
political weapon’ before January 1933.
133

Afterward, they did so with little fear of
legal repercussions as the first months of Nazi rule had
demonstrated. Shopkeepers
perhaps did not know exactly how to categorize these newly
deputized ‘officials,’
but during the April Boycott they certainly did not trust them as
forces of order.
Although shopkeepers had invoked their right to protection
throughout the
Weimar Republic, they had often been disappointed by the
police’s inability to
contain tumultuous public space, much less a police force now
subordinate to Nazi
leaders who embraced the redemptive power of violence against
alleged enemies of
the so-called ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft).
Shopkeepers already
lacked confidence in the goodwill of crowds, much less now
that acts of ‘civil
courage’ could lead to arrest.
Shopkeepers therefore drew upon defenses developed in
response to violent
public space during the Weimar years. They had learned to
weather bursts of
domestic unrest until the state could restore order sufficient to
the established
practices of modern commerce. Both shops and police had
foundered against
more diffuse and persistent looting in the context of broader
economic and political
instability in the late Weimar Republic. And yet the theoretical
principles of
128 See photographs: BArch Bild 102-14469, Bild 146-1976-

135-20. Also: R. Metzger and C.
Brandstätter, Berlin: The Twenties (New York, NY 2006), 380.
129 M. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in
Nazi Germany (New York, NY 1998), 22;
M. Richarz, Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse
zur Sozialgeschichte, 1918–1945 (Stuttgart
1982); Ahlheim, Deutsche, kauft nicht bei Juden, 254–62.
130 Frederick Birchall, ‘Measure Takes Effect Saturday,’ New
York Times (28 April 1933); Frederick
Birchall, ‘Measure is Effective,’ New York Times (2 April
1933).
131 J. Ludwig, Boykott, Enteignung, Mord, 113.
132 Verband Deutscher Waren- und Kaufhäuser to
Reichministerium des Innern, 28 March 1933,
BArch R 3101/13859.
133 M. Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung:
Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz,
1919 bis 1933 (Hamburg 2007), 145.
business and the practical lessons learned from specific
historical experiences
remained an imperfect guide to the present and future of
commerce within Nazi
Germany. Shopkeepers responded to the boycott as another
period of emergency
against which they still had a few defenses, however fragile,
imperfect, and imper-
manent. They drew the iron shutters down over their display

windows until the
boycott ended. This gesture revealed that the previous
assumptions about the daily
patterns and practices of urban commerce no longer held. Yet,
this was only a
temporary solution. In the coming years, pressures would mount
against Jewish
shopkeepers through new methods of legalized discrimination as
well as through
sporadic acts of grassroots intimidation and harassment. On the
night of 9
November 1938, bands of young men would break the glass
again and this time
with the sanction of the state. And, against such acts,
shopkeepers had no defense.
Acknowledgments
For their excellent feedback on this article, I would like to
thank Christian
Goeschel, James Tejani, Tom Trice, Malte Zierenberg, Thomas
Mergel and his
research colloquium at Humboldt Universität, Daniel Morat and
the Berlin
Seminar on Urban History at the Freie Universität, the Cal Poly
Interdisciplinary Writing Group on Culture and Society, and the
anonymous
reviewers of the Journal of Contemporary History. I am grateful
to the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for supporting this
research.
Biographical Note
Molly Loberg is Associate Professor of History at California
Polytechnic State

University in San Luis Obispo. She is currently completing a
book manuscript
on the intersection of mass politics and mass consumption in the
streets of interwar
Berlin.
Loberg 701
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Academic writing
Writing a critical review
What is a critical review?
In very simply terms, a critical review or appraisal is an
academic review of an article that offers

both a summary and critical comment.
Book reviews, movie reviews, critical reviews and literature
reviews all perform a similar task of evaluating
or appraising how well various texts and artistic productions
achieve their goals of communicating with the
reader, or a wider audience. Project reviews evaluate whether
the goals of a project have been achieved.
They are not necessarily based on an appraisal of a text, but the
process of critical evaluation is similar.
As this is a general discussion of what a critical review is, you
should consult your Subject Outline or subject
coordinator to find out what structure and content to include
when completing a critical review as an
assessment task.
Types of critical reviews
Reviews include:
appraisals of the artistic merit of movies or music albums;
assessments of the effectiveness of government programs in
catering for specific public needs;
evaluations of the merit of an academic article or body of
literature to the development of research

and understanding of knowledge within a specific discipline
(Northey, 2005, p. 35).
A critical review is an academic appraisal of an article that
offers both a summary and critical comment on
the content. This makes it different to a literature review, which
examines a body of literature or series of key
academic articles addressing a specific topic of interest. A
literature review is an important part of preparing
to write a full thesis paper (Wallace & Wray, 2006, p.177).
Why write a critical review?
Here are a number of reasons why a critical review is written:
To analyse the text and evaluate its relevance to your academic
needs;
To analyse, describe and interpret a text to show your
understanding of what you have read;
In some university courses, you are asked to write critical
reviews in order to demonstrate that you:
Understand the main points;
Can analyse the main arguments or findings;
Can evaluate the article using relevant criteria which you or the
subject coordinator has selected.

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