The metropolitan press and newspapers throughout the country, in paying tribute to Col. Alfred Dreyfus, emphasized his innocence of the espionage charges which resulted in his incarceration on Devil’s Island.
“There never was a particle of genuine evidence against Captain Alfred Dreyfus,” says the New York Times. “Yet he was twice convicted of high treason.
“In 1894 the court-martial of Paris, knowing him to be innocent, found him guilty and sentenced him to imprisonment for life in a fortified place, which an ex post facto law designated as Devil’s Island.”
The New York Herald-Tribune regards the story of Col. Dreyfus as “one of the most tragic in the history of human injustice.”
“At the age of thirty-five,” the newspaper says, “already bearing honors which none of his race had achieved in the French army, he was publicly branded a traitor to his country, convicted of high treason, stripped of his military trappings and sent to Devil’s Island, the most notorious penal colony of modern times….
“The bitterest drop in the Dreyfus cup was the fact, recognized by most of the world, that there was not a scintilla of real evidence against him. Yet he endured the disgrace, the humialation of his family, and the smug hypocrisy of the French officers and courts without losing his self-respect.
“He was the victim of a conspiracy which, most of his countrymen eventually were convinced, was one of the most monstrous ever devised against an individual. Historians have said that it was part of a Germen plot to demoralize the French army by stirring up anti-Semitic feeling in the ranks and in the nation and that Col. Dreyfus was marked as a scapegoat because he was the first Jew to serve on the French general staff.”
Press comment throughout the country in articles and editorials was in the same vain.
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.
