Dr. Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the Interior, is reported by the Voelkischer Beobachter to have told a correspondent for the Hearst newspapers that the question of whether the Jews will be permitted freely to exercise the suffrage depends on “the further shaping of State citizen rights in the German Reich.”
“The general, equal, direct and secret suffrage will continue to remain valid,” Dr. Frick told the correspondent, according to the Voelkischer Beobachter, “for both sexes of all German State citizens.”
According to the principles formulated for the National Socialist party by Reichsfuehrer Hitler, only Germans may be citizens and only those are German who are of German “Aryan” blood.
“The German Reich is a National State at whose head stands the Leader and Chancellor, Adolf Hitler,” Dr. Frick is reported to have said. “His appointment as Fuehrer of the Reich was confirmed by the German nation in a general and secret plebiscite on August 19, 1934, by ninety per cent of the votes.”
NEW CONSTITUTION WITHHELD
The correspondent asked whether there was any intention to give Germany a new Constitution.
Dr. Frick’s reply was as follows:
“The Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, after he assumed power on January 30, 1933, deliberately held back from consolidating his position immediately through a ready-made Constitution.
“Nor did Adolf Hitler need that, for he himself was at the head of the National Socialist revolution. This movement embraced the entire German nation, and carried through the ideas of Adolf Hitler, who is the creator of the National Socialist movement and of its program.
“Today the government is working to realize the inner political principles of the National Socialist State conception, and is completing along the legal road the new upbuilding of the Reich.
PLAN NEW CHARTER
“Thus, there is growing organically with the advancing development day by day a new bit of the Constitution, and at the conclusion of the four-year term asked for by the Leader, the work will exist complete—at least in the rough.
“The German nation will then have the opportunity to express itself with regard to it.”
Dr. Frick has been one of the most violent anti-Semites in the Nazi movement, of which he has been a leader almost from the start, despite an order he issued a year ago which instructed the chief administrative officers of the Reich and the governors of the several states to see that German Jews lawfully engaged in business were not molested by Nazi zealots.
He first gave Germany a taste of what National Socialist rule would be like when, as Minister of Education in Thuringia, he introduced anti-Semitic prayers as part of the program in the public schools.
Addressing a mass meeting at Chemnitz last month, Dr. Frick warned that the Hitler regime will never relent in its application of the “Aryan paragraph” to the Jews.
“Germany is for the Germans,” he said, “and no difficulties will divert us from exerting our efforts in this direction.”
In September, 1933, it was Dr. Frick who issued instructions that “non-Aryans” were all persons of Jewish descent, even though their forefathers never belonged to the Jewish religious community, and also even if the father or forefather was a convert to the Christian religion.
Just one year ago he urged haste in dismissing Jews employed in public positions, referring to them as “undesirable elements.”
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.
