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This article analyses the extermination of Jewish commercial activity in the three cities with the largest Jewish communities of the Third Reich – in Berlin, Breslau and Frankfurt/Main. This analysis aims to change previously held dominant conceptions by characterising the Jewish traders as actively involved subjects who responded with specific business counter-strategies to the persecution process. While by the beginning of 1938 Jewish businesses had ceased to exist in many rural and small urban regions in Germany, Jewish entrepreneurs in the big cities were able to hold their ground much longer and help to secure the economic survival of traders and their Jewish employees, virtually the entire Jewish community, until November 1938. In Berlin, active Jewish businesses can be traced all the way to the end of 1941. The big cities with their significant Jewish population offered Jewish traders an environment which provided much more room to manœuvre and far more opportunities for self-assertion – at least until the beginning of the war – than small towns and rural regions.