Steed Shows Figures Disproving Nazis’ Cry of Jewish Dominance

Wickham Steed, former correspondent of the London Times at Berlin, Rome and Vienna, and finally its editor, explains the true nature of Hitlerism and to what extent it may be a menace to peace in his book, “Hitler, Whence and Whither?” A series of articles, of which this is the sixth, will be published daily in The Jewish Daily Bulletin from the chapter, “Germanism and Jewry.”

It it be claimed that the Hohenzollern Empire was dominated by Jews or by descendants of Jews, the truth is that a few baptized Jews or men of Jewish extraction did hold high administrative or ministerial positions, but that, as a rule, they were debarred from official careers, and, except in Bavaria, were not allowed to be officers in the army.

It was not only during the War that some Jews were promoted to commissioned rank. In the War 12,000 German Jews gave their lives for their country, or 12.5 per cent, of their military numbers as compared with 13.49 per cent. of the German people as a whole, the difference of percentage being explained by the circumstance that the greater part of the German army was recruited from rural districts, whereas the Jews are mainly urban. Altogether 100,000 of the 565,000 German Jews were in the army; 78,000 served at the front, 35,000 were decorated, 23,000 promoted, more than 2,000 (exclusive of army doctors) were given commissioned rank, and of these officers 322, or 16 per cent, fell in the field. Eleven per cent, of the Jewish soldiers were volunteers.

Soon after the War the editor of an anti-Semitic paper at Munich offered a prize of one thousand marks to anybody who could prove that there was even one Jewish family with three sons in the trenches for three weeks. Thereupon a Rabbi of Hanover furnished a list of twenty Jewish families from other communities which had seven or eight sons in the field, some of them having had to mourn the loss of three of these.

CHARGES BASELESS

The pretension that, under the German Republic established in November, 1918, the Jews held leading positions, is shown to be baseless by the fact that in all the German Cabinets, from the end of 1918 up to the advent of Hitlerism on January 30 of last year, there were 250 Ministers of whom two were Jews and only four of Jewish extraction.

The proportion of Jews in the Administration of Justice was 1.2 per cent. Among professors in universities and high schools it was 4.7 per cent.; and if it be claimed that the percentages were much higher in the medical and legal professions, it must be remembered that for centuries the Jews had been attracted to medicine because they were excluded from other professions, just as many of them became lawyers because other learned callings were practically closed to them.

Among actors and musicians the percentage may have been as high as five. Politically the Jews belonged to all parties, except the anti-Semitic parties, but they were never predominant in Parliament. Out of 608 members elected to the Reichstag in July, 1932, there were only one Jew and fourteen of Jewish extraction. Among the Socialist leaders very few were Jews.

INVITED BY LUDENDORFF

The Hitlerite charge that, after the War, thousands of Polish, Russian, and other Eastern Jews invaded Germany and demoralized German trade and economic life by their malpractices, cannot be substantiated in view of the fact that only 12,000 Eastern Jews, out of the 150,000 or 160,000 who fled from Russia or the border States into Germany after the War, were granted German citizenship and acquired the right to remain in Germany. Besides, General Ludendorff himself had appealed to the Polish Jews in his famous manifesto of 1914. The manifesto began “My Dear Jews,” and declared that German banners would bring them justice and liberty, equality of civil rights, freedom of faith, freedom of work undisturbed in all branches of economic and cultural life, and that Germany would develop equal rights for the Jews upon firm foundations–a seductive promise that did not prevent the German Military Command in Russian Poland from deporting thousand of Jews to Germany during the War to do forced labor in the mines, especially in the Ruhr district, where they were obliged to remain.

On many points, though perhaps not on all, this Jewish defense is cogent. Stronger still is it in recalling the services rendered to Germany by men like Walter Rathenau, who organized the German supply of war materials during the War, and Professor Franz Haber, the great chemist who produced nitrogen from the air, without which Germany would soon have run short of explosives.