Returned from a visit to the Rhineland, the Ruhr, Berlin and several provincial German towns, Colonel E. W. Lennard reports that he failed to encounter “a single ‘Aryan’ German who could discuss Jews without hatred or bitterness.”
Colonel Lennard, in a series of articles on his experiences in the Bristol Evening Post, writes:
“To mention the question anywhere is to invite the repetition of statements and statistics that are unmistakably of propagandist origin and from a common source.
“I profoundly distrust most of the biased and one-sided ‘facts’ that everyone tried to thrust upon me as an explanation and extenuation of German treatment of her Jewish citizens. Much of it boils down to the truth that the Jewish one per cent of the entire population possessed better brains or were materially less unfortunate than some of their neighbors in the post-war days.”
As soon as Jews were mentioned, Colonel Lennard relates, the faces of “otherwise charming and reasonable people” would harden and a flood of invective would be loosed.
“The utmost concession (and that by no means general) that I got was that while Jews richly deserved their fate both present or pending, it might have been better, in view of foreign opinion, to have ‘spread it over’ a little, and not to have been so prompt in denouncing and despoiling them.”
The Jewish Chronicle, commenting on the articles, calls special attention to Colonel Lennard’s reference to the fate of the Jews as “Present or pending” and points out that his views are doubly valable because he was in Germany ### a non-Jew moving among non-Jews.
“Jewish observers moving among Jews,” says the Chronicle, “are liable to be misled by an understandable tendency to minimize matters.”
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.
