Holland’s Leaders of All Faiths Sign Anti-nazi Protest

During the last few weeks this country has been the scene of a movement of protest against Hitlerite anti-Semitism. Political associations, Christian associations, liberal associations have all hurled manifestoes of indignation at Berlin. At Rotterdam Protestant pastors, Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis convened in joint session to express the outraged conscience of Holland. On May 9th, the day before the “non-Aryan” books were burned in Germany, they were exhibited for purposes of encouraging their sale in Holland. The Dutch section of the World Union of Churches (a society for the advancement of better understanding between peoples through churches) appealed to the central section of its organization to raise its voice against the German anti-Semitic laws

Finally, a list of seventy-three distinguished Dutchmen and Dutchwomen, representative of the most diverse milieus of Dutch intellectual endeavor, and of whom none is of Jewish origin, signed a protest in which Germany is accussed of bringing Europe back to barbarism of deliberately ignoring the “eminent talents, lofty qualities, and patriotic services of its Jewish citizens,” and of the determination to deprive them of every last possibility of existence. The protest closes as follows:

Among the signatures affixed to this indignant protest were those of many men and women of letters, the editors of the chief newspapers of Rotterdam, The Hague, Amsterdam and Utrecht, thirty-two eminent professors at such institutions as the University of Leyden, the Gymnasium, Lyceum, and University of Amsterdam, the Catholic University of Nimegue, the University of Groningen, the University of Utrecht, the Amsterdam School of Social Work, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the Catholic Seminary of Amsterdam and the School of Advanced Business at Rotterdam.