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months, they began to campaign even more heavily in the Northwest, appealing directly to the farmers who had been among the first in Germany to feel the full effects of the Depression. Their platform included calling for cheaper artificial manures, cheaper electricity, higher tariffs on imported corn and wheat, and lower taxes. They bolstered their appeal with mass rallies, fully staged extravaganzas featuring dramatic torchlight parades, dozens of distinctive black-on-red flags, and martial music designed to boil the blood and stiffen the spine. On May 5, 1931, Adolf Hitler himself traveled to Oldenburg for a rally in the Pferdemarkt , and a little more than a year later, on May 29, 1932, 48.4 percent of the voters in the state of Oldenburg cast their ballots for the Nazi Party. Though not an absolute majority, that number represented more votes than any other party had achieved. The National Socialists were constitutionally mandated to form a government, making Oldenburg the first state in the country to have duly elected Nazi leaders. The new president of the state ministry was Carl Röver.
    Although it would be months before National Socialism would achieve the rule of law over all of Germany, Oldenburg would prove to be an able laboratory in which to cultivate its culture of violence and thuggery, not to mention its long-held antipathy to what it termed “the Jewish race.” The Nazi imagination was stimulated by a prurient vision of a Master Race that sprang from the sacred soil of Germany, a race ofblond, blue-eyed bodies through which coursed uncorrupted streams of the reddest, purest blood. Years earlier, in 1920, the nascent party had clearly stated its views in its initial twenty-five-point platform. “Only members of the nation may be citizens of the State,” it declared. “Only those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. Accordingly, no Jew may be a member of the nation.” This need for “racial purity” was at the heart of the Nazis’ conviction that they alone possessed the secret and the will to create a superior national culture and a powerful state that would last, in Hitler’s boast, for a thousand years.
    Hitler spoke of the need to “cleanse” the German body politic of the “corrupt” influence of foreign Jewish forces and “to remove from specified positions important to the state those elements that cannot be entrusted with the life or death of the Reich.” Thus was born what came to be known in German as Arisierung and in English as Aryanization: a comprehensive expropriation of all social, cultural, and material possessions that belonged to the Jews of Germany, and their redistribution into the hands of the more deserving Master Race.
    Aryanization was a fancy five-syllable synonym for state-sponsored theft. Among its earliest examples was the forced sale, in the late autumn of 1932, of Alex Goldschmidt’s beautiful house on Oldenburg’s Gartenstrasse, to a Nazi functionary named Heinrich Barelmann. The sale price was 26,000 RM, a sum that represented no more than a quarter of what the house was worth. The Goldschmidts sold much of their furniture, dismissed the cook, the housekeeper, and the gardener, and moved into a small apartment at 35 Würzburgerstrasse, near the railroad tracks a bit north and west of the Pferdemarkt . Having invested more than twenty years of hard work and determination to reach a level of achievement commensurate with the examples set by Levi and Moses, what must Alex have felt at this humiliating and infuriating confiscation of his house, the very symbol of the safety and security that he thought he possessed?
    But it was only the beginning. On Monday, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg, and the blows began falling one after another. On April 1, 1933, the now fully empowered Nazis staged a boycott of