This is the second part of are port based on a survey of the Third Reich undertaken by a special investigator for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency since the Ministry of Economics issued the widely-publicized orders to ease up in the economic campaign against the Jews. The first part, published last week, outlined the “double-bookkeeping” methods employed in dealing with the Jews of Germany.
A minority in the Hitler cabinet composed of those ministers face to face with the major problems of foreign relations and economics is strongly in favor of relaxation of the discriminatory tactics employed against the Jews. Their motives are a desire to appease disapproving world opinion and diminish hostility to the Reich in international affairs and to revive the country’s badly stricken commerce and industry.
Yet, despite their stand and the frequent orders of the ministry of economics to cease the anti-Jewish boycott in Germany and permit the Jews to retain their positions in the business and industrial worlds, the Nazi regime continues to foster a new front in its war of extermination of the Jews—the so-called “Anti-Jewish Labor Front.”
Every labor paper appearing in the country has received its orders to devote part of its columns to anti-Semitic agitation. This is partly to distract the unemployed workers and to provide them with the convenient scapegoat, the Jew, on whom to vent their dissatisfaction and unrest. It is partly also in line with the Nazi program of imbuing all parts of the population, including the radicals, with the spirit of anti-Semitism.
REACH MILLIONS OF HOMES
These labor publications do not go abroad. They are not sold on newsstands but reach their millions of subscribers through the mails. While a certain amount of restraint has been imposed on editors of the general newspapers which come to the attention of the foreign correspondents in Berlin and which are frequently read abroad, no restrictions are enforced in the labor papers, which are distributed only to members of the unions, to which Jews cannot now belong.
A collection of these publications reveals the utter lack of restraint and the ferocity of the barbaric calls for Jewish blood to which the German workingman is exposed when he reads the publication of his union, the paper which he has been accustomed to reading for years as the voice of his trade union and its leaders, whom he has always respected and obeyed with almost martial discipline.
Issues of the Deutsche Metalarbeiter Zeitung, read by members of the metal workers’ union for fifty-one years, now regularly feature on their front-pages venomous articles blaming the Jews for the World War and Germany’s ruination.
The thirty-six-year-old Textil Arbeiter, read by members of the textile-workers’ union throughout the country, devotes a great deal of its space to articles and cartoons in the style of those in Julius Streicher’s notorious Der Stuermer and informs its readers that “the Jews mislead German girls”, that they “use German blood” and that they are an international menace.
In many of the publications, this anti-Jewish agitation is nothing less than incitement to pogroms. What the effect of this incitement, through constant repetition, on the German laborer may be, is not difficult to understand.
Deliberately or by coincidence, the orders of the Ministry of Economics to cease boycott activities against the Jews have resulted in a wave of terrorism. It is well known that the veteran Nazi leaders, who have been members of the organization for years, look with disfavor and contempt at such “adopted” Nazis as Dr. Kurt Schmitt, the Minister of Economics, and Baron Constantin von Neurath, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. This feeling may well explain a terroristic wave flouting Dr. Schmitt’s orders.
In the region of Darmstadt, the Jewish population was greatly disturbed by the threat of pogroms and was reassured only with difficulty.
In Upper Hesse, several Jews were badly mishandled and young Jews were made the objects of manhunts through the streets as, for the two days of Sept. 12 and 13, a pogrom state existed. Jewish homes were attacked, windows smashed, other acts of vandalism performed and the Jews had to remain off the streets during the daylight hours.
FORCED TO LEAVE TOWN
In many places, an unvarnished ultimatum has been put to the Jewish population to leave town or suffer the consequences.
[The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, on Nov. 8, reported that the entire Jewish population of the town of Neidenberg, in East Prussia, had been ordered by the mayor to leave the community before December 31. “Not a single Jew must remain in the town by January 1,” the mayor declared.]
The writer has obtained authentic information to the effect that the entire Jewish population has had to flee many towns throughout the country. Nor are these families new-comers to the various communities. Jews in the towns and smaller cities usually have resided there for generations. In one town, where ten of the thirteen Jewish families were forced to abandon their homes, all had lived in the community for generations.
More serious in nature is the wave of arrests on the flimsiest of pretexts. Relatives are no longer allowed by the secret state police to visit the prisoners. Information is no longer given out regarding those under arrest, where they are being held or the state of their health. Relatives can no longer even find out if the arrested persons are still alive. No communication is permitted with the prisoners at all.
REARREST THE FREED
Very frequently, the secret political police arrest persons who are later cleared by the state investigation bodies. These people, however, are soon rearrested and are held as political prisoners over whom the civil authorities have no jurisdiction. This writer has it on good authority that the civil court authorities treat Jewish prisoners, even when there are no political charges against them, with more severity than they treat non-Jews.
Among those who have been imprisoned recently are several well-known scientists who have had nothing to do with politics.
A well-known figure in Jewish life in Germany, famed for his studies in Jewish Science, is serving a nine months sentence in a concentration camp because of a letter he allegedly mailed from Dresden to a friend expressing dissatisfaction with the life and the present situation in Germany. The letter was discovered in the mails, which are now being opened and scrutinized. This surveillance of the mails has been extended to include all letters from one city to another within Germany as well as mail for abroad.
Ing. Reinisch, a Palestinian citizen, of Haifa. who proceeded from the last Zionist Congress at Prague to Germany is missing. No one can establish his whereabouts. There is a strong suspicion that he was taken off the train when it reached Germany.
An aged Jewish attorney who spent four months in “Schutzhaft”, relates that Jews under arrest are compelled to carry out the most unpleasant and menial work in the prisons.
Most of the arrested Jews in Berlin-Tempelhof are brought to the jail on the Columbiastrasse, where they are kept under guard by members of the S.S. troops, the Nazi “elite” guard. Here the refinements of torture have been reduced to a daily routine.
The arrested men are question in an inquiry room. If they insist on their innocence, they are taken to another room and savagely beaten by S.S. men. The victim’s legs are locked into a special steel pillory, two S.S. men hold his arms, a wet rag is jammed into his mouth and four S.S. men flog him with thin steel canes encased in rubber sheaths. With these implements a man can be horribly punished and no marks will remain on his skin to tell the story of the beating he took. Many victims die as a result of these tortures. In September, a Jew accused of being a communist was beaten to death in the Columbiastrasse. How many of the Jews who have simply vanished in Germany since the Hitler regime came to power died after treatment such as this may never be known. Despite indications that the persecution of the Jews is abating, many luckless victims are still being spirited away and subjected to attentions such as described here. The use of violence may not now be as well-publicized as in the early days of the Third Reich, but it has become more efficient.
(The concluding section of this report, dealing with the government attitude towards the Jewish organizations and the Upper Silesian situation, will appear in next Sunday’s issue of the Jewish Daily Bulletin.)
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.
