The Jew in Germany Today

(This is the first of four articles on the jews in Germany y the brilliant British journalist, F. A. Voight, for many years Berlin correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, leading liberal newspaper. Mr. Voight had to leave Germany following his disclosures of Nazi complicity in the Reichstag fire and is now stationed in Paris where he surveys the German scene for his newpaper.)

This and the follwing articles are an attempt to survey the tenmonths of anti-Semitic persecution in Germany. Such a srvey is bound to be incomplete. Although it is a matter of world – wide knowledg that persecution (and not only of Jews) has been, and i still going on in Germany the fact is still officially denied by the German government and its representatives. To conceal the fact, an in the hope of securing at least some belief in the denial, the German government takes precaution that fall into three main categories-the suppression of the truth, the denial of the truth, and the victimization of those who tell the truth.

The full truth about the prsecution of the Jews is notand cannot be known. Perhaps it will never be known. The anti-Semitic laws that have been enacted are, of cours on record, an s## are the numerous ordinances and rullings passed against Jews by municipalities, professional assocaitions, clubs, and so on. the in Europe and would alone constitute a persecution of atterrible. kind. While not directly killing a single Jew, they make it impssible for thousands of Jews to live, and it is largely they that have caused the epidemic of suicides among the German Jews.

JUSTICE DENIED TO JEWS

And yet they are only a part of the persecution. The laws that, theroretically, apply to all German citizens, whether Gentile or Jew, in practice give the Gentile every possible advantage. They protect the Gentilce from the Gentile. Thus the a gentile may lebel a Jew with impunity, but not a Jew a Gentile-at least, not if the Gentile is a Nazi. Brown shirts have committed innumerable thefts in Jewish shops-they have habitually asked for cigarettes and other articles at the counter and have received them without payment-while the shopeeper has had not means of redress, It is easy for a Gentile to recover a debt from a Jew, but very difficult or even impossible fora Jew to recover a debt from a Gentile.

In disputes between Jew an Gentile. the law tends very strongly to work against the Jew. Not that justice is never done in Germany (there are some fairmided judges and magistrated left), but when the platintiff or defendant is a Jew justice is rarely done or, when done, it is only partial justice, Often it is crude an consciously malignant justice. The Jew has all the obligations of German citizenship but few of the rights. If, as is proposed he is deprived of that citizenship, he will still have the obligations (he will, for example, continue to pay taxes) and will have even fewer rights. The fiction put forward by the German government is that he will have the status of a foreign resident, but as be will be without the protection of any foreign government he will have no such status. (The next article in this series will appear tomorrow).