wounds. No one was allowed to see his body. A colleague and the family physician who demanded to see the body, on behalf of the victim’s family, were refused. Testimony of Blank:
“In the night between March …. and March …. at 12.30 o’clock, I was awaited at my door by 4 S. A. men. They asked my name, which I gave them, whereupon they said they must take me with them. I was taken in a taxi to …… There they asked me whether I was a member of the Communist Party. I answered that I was not. Then they asked me if I knew anything about the shooting which had gone on in this neighborhood toward the end of February. I insisted that I had had nothing to do with anything of the sort. Besides myself there were four other men with me, under arrest. After another quarter of an hour of questioning, we were put into an old-fashioned police wagon which was guarded by ‘Hilfspolizei.’ (These are the police recruited from S. A. and S. S. Nazi troops to reinforce the regular police). “They took us to ….. (naming a well-known Nazi headquarters in the center of Berlin) which had evidently previously been a warehouse. We were forced to stand with our faces against the wall. I myself stood there from about one o’clock until five-thirty in the morning. We had to stand perfectly straight. In a neighboring room they were beating people. They left the door a little open so that we could hear and threatened us with the same treatment if we did not tell everything.
“RUBBER CLUBS, OX-TAILS AND STEEL STAFFS”
“After a while a Jew about twenty-six years old was brought in. He told me later that he had been arrested while riding a motorcycle, that he had never had anything to do with politics, had never even voted. They cut his hair off with a nail scissors and tore some some of it out. Then the Hilfspolizei (assistant police) quarreled amongst themselves as to who was to beat him. One said: ‘I wouldn’t have brought the Jew at all if I can’t beat him,’ and the others said: ‘You are drunk … go and sleep it off.’ Most of the men smelled of alcohol. Then they beat the Jew. They beat him with rubber clubs, oxtails, and steel staffs. Then they poured raw spirits on his bleeding back. They held a dagger to his chest and said: ‘Now we will stab you to death.’ Then they took it away and said, ‘Wait until morning’.
“They took me ‘for a hearing’ at about six o’clock. Since they could prove nothing against me, they took me into a dormitory, where about forty men were sleeping. All I got were a few kicks and a few blows with rubber clubs. They had a cell which they called the murder-cell. Three men were there. They were beaten from head to foot until they were quite black. One of them kept crying that he wanted to hang himself.
“At seven o’clock an S. A. officer, in charge, appeared. We were given bread and coffee and exercised in the court yard. We had to sing ‘Deutschland Ueber Alles’ and ‘Ich hatt einen Kameraden.’ We were asked if we would defend the Fatherland in case of war with Poland. We said Yes.
“Among the people badly beaten was a man of seventy and a fifteen-year-old boy whose mother was a Communist functionary. In all, thirty men were badly beaten up.
“The next day we were told we would be taken to the police praesidium, and we all breathed more freely. One of the men who was badly beaten had to stand with his face to the wall, and he was told he would be shot. An S. A. man actually shot—into the wall, however. Then the victim was told: ‘Wait until tomorrow’.
“We were delivered the same day at the police praesidium. There we were simply dismissed. A police official to whom we showed our wounds asked how such things could be possible.”
I see no reason for harrowing the reader with such testimony, although if I would I could fill columns with it. The cases have a curious similarity. They indicate, first of all, that the campaign of terror against Jews, Social Democrats and Communists was not, as the government has claimed, acts of individual over-enthusiasm. The victims were taken to established headquarters. The S. A. men who performed the deeds had previously been freed from any possibility of police interference. The tortures were performed according to an established technique. The victims were humiliated, forced to beat each other, forced to spit on the republican (or red) flag; forced to recant their Republican or Socialist sympathies, or to own to sympathis which they did not have; were threatened with death, were then beaten with rubber clubs or steel wands—there is a uniformity about the instruments which indicates that they must have been made available in considerable quantities—and were then either released or turned over to the police. Meanwhile public opinion in Germany was kept from obtaining any information about these atrocities by a servile and censored press, and when news of them leaked abroad through foreign correspondents—and was, in certain instances exaggerated by sensation-loving journals—the German Jews were held to be responsible, and the way was prepared for the second stage of the program: the strangulation of Jewish economic and intellectual life and the decimation of all liberal organizations.
How curiously the facts of what is going on in Germany are distorted for the German public, is seen in the newspaper report of a “Razzia [Raid] in the Ghetto” which occurred this month. The official Nazi newspaper, Voelkische Beobachter, reported it drily: “Today a general raid was made in the Grenadierstrasse and the Dragonerstrasse, in the direction of Alexanderplatz. 120 S. S. men (specially picked Brown Shirt troops) and 20 criminal officials as well as a division of motorcyclists participated. The police posts were divided and closed sections of the streets, and prevented any communication between the residents….. There are many Polish Jews in this section…. The S. S. men undertook a search for weapons, undisturbed by the chatter of these people. Twelve foreign Jews who were here without passports and were in possession of weapons were arrested….. Many illegal documents and 50 meters of red flag cloth were confiscated. The action took place quietly….”
FLAGELLATIONS, TORTURES, DESECRATION
“The action took place quietly.” No German newspaper reported that S.S. men stormed into the Jewish temple, forced the orthodox Jews there to go through humiliating rites, and then destroyed part of the Torah. No German newspaper reported that S. S. men tore off the beards of orthodox Jews, sometimes cutting hunks of flesh from their cheeks, as they chopped off the hair. No newspaper reported the cruel flagellations. When the S. S. troops and police left the Grenadierstrasse it was quiet, and it has been quiet ever since. As an historian said of the Roman conquests: “They made a desolation and called it peace.”
Try now, on the spot, to find out what happened. We have a protocol from the Polish consulate; it contains a name, an address, and testimony that on the day of the raid the man in question was beaten. Go up a dark, unclean stairway of a miserable tenement. Knock at the door of a small flat. It opens an inch. A woman’s dark and frightened face appears in the crack. “Who are you?” she asks. We reply: “Foreign journalists.”
She cries out: “You have nothing to find here. Go away.” The door closes again.
We ring again. The door opens an inch again. “We are looking for Mr. Blank.”
“He is not here.” The voice pleads hysterically. “Please go away.” And the door closes.
We ring again. This time we put a foot in the door. “Please let us in. We will not injure you. We will tell nothing. We come from the Polish Consulate.”
Reluctantly the woman lets us into a wretched room. A wide-eyed child of nine years cowers in a corner. The woman wrings her hands. “I can tell you nothing—nothing,” she says. “My husband has gone away.”
VICTIM TELLS NOTHING
We speak very gently and quietly. We know all about what happened, we only want to verify it with our own eyes. As we speak, a man appears in the door. He is wearing an old dressing gown, and looks very ill. “I am Blank,” he says. “But you must ask me no questions. I know nothing at all. I know nothing about anything.”
“The Polish consulate told us that bad things happened to you,” we say. “We know all about it. We shall not reveal anything you say to anyone.”
“I tell nothing,” he said stubbornly. “But what the Polish consul told you is true. And as he spoke he pulled aside the dressing gown, and for a moment one saw that he was swathed in bandages from his throat to his knees.
“I will tell you nothing,” he said.
Reports of individual outrages continue to come from all parts of Germany, but there seems to be an indication that they have become less frequent than they were in the early days of April and the last days of March. Is this because they have stopped, or is it because people are even more afraid than formerly to report them? I do not know.
TO BREAK CIVIL COURAGE
But if individual acts of violence are continuing, then they must be regarded from now on actually as acts of individual reprisal or common sadism. Because it is clear that the purpose of the tortures has been completely achieved. That purpose was to break civil courage in Germany. It was to throw the fear of a bloody revolution into Socialists and Jews. It was to bring about a universal affirmation of the Hitler government. It was to pave the way for muzzling the press, reorganizing the whole cultural life, including the courts and the schools, all semi-public institutions, and perhaps industrial and financial life as well. And it was to prepare the way for a “cold” boycott of the entire Jewish intelligentzia.
The weapon as such, and regarded purely from a revolutionary standpoint, has been effective and even economical. It has one clear parallel in recent history. At Dinant, at the outbreak of the invasion of Belgium, German troops shot in the public square some hundreds of hostages. This is one of the atrocity stories which a world anxious to forget the late war has put out of its mind. It happens, however, to be no legend, but a fact. The Germans argued that the shooting of the hostages would prevent further bloodshed because it would immediately and at a blow, break civil resistance in Belgium. It did indeed serve that purpose. But it was psychologically unsound because it greatly enhanced the ardor of Germany’s enemies.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
