“The Jewish question is no political side issue to us. It is the Alpha and Omega of the vital struggle of the white nations.”
In the above language, Martin Schwaebe writing in the West-deutsche Beobachter, dispels any doubt that observers may have of the intentions of the National Socialist party with respect to the racial issue.
“There are still people,” Schwaebe writes, “who think that the revolutionary methods of, say, the mutineers of 1918 are the expression of revolutionary desire. They think that shouting and abuse are evidence of power and since these, too, are lacking in National Socialist Germany, they seem to think that there is no further basis for real work.
‘ELOQUENT EXAMPLE’
“The attitude to the Jewish question in these circles is an eloquent example. They think that the Nazis will get rid of anti-Semitism in the same way they will shed their old bad manners. If Jews do not at once again become Cabinet Ministers, the crude forms at present applied against Jews will in time, however, disappear, they argue. The old links are to be restored. The only possible and natural course adopted in issuing orders for protecting economic life, also in the field of the Jewish question, are regarded as concessions and withdrawals. They think that because official quarters have given their consent to Jewish firms changing their names in order to adapt themselves gradually to the fundamentals of the new State and their gradual transfer into German hands, that we have given the department stores our recommendation. People think that they have accepted the new State without giving up their Jewish business friends. Any number of them run away with the idea that anti-Semitism is only a revolutionary passing phase, a piece of straight propaganda which will not last.
JEWS MORE DARING
“At the same time,” the article continues, “we have to record that for months past the Jews themselves are coming forward more daringly. The fact that the National Socialist State, in spite of the crimes committed by the Jews against the German nation, has not placed the Jews under exceptional laws, but has confined itself to reducing their influence to their proportion in the population, seems to them a letter of discharge.
“The term ‘non-Aryan’ has quite a good sound again in many quarters. If you read the announcements in a certain section of the press, you will even come to think it is a recommendation.
“Certainly there has been no attempt on the Jewish side to give up the representation of the theories of Judaism in publicist work. Both in their own Jewish papers and in that section of the general daily press in which they still have an influence, the impression is still created that the Jewish people are persecuted, and that there is a great wrong committed against them. This impression grows stronger when we remember that in some of these papers declarations by National Socialist leaders on the National Socialist race conception and our position on the Jewish question have been simply ignored.
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.
