High tension gripped Bucharest today as troops patrolled the city’s streets following receipt of information by the authorities that an army of 5,000 anti-Semitic youths was marching on the capital from the provinces and had reached the city’s outskirts.
Streets in the vicinity of the palace were especially guarded by heavily-armed patrols.
The anti-Semitic army was called to Bucharest by leaders of the various anti-Semitic parties, who are openly urging pogroms against the Jews.
Publication of an undisguised call to pogrom in Universul, conservative and most widely circulated paper in Rumania, stirred a panic in Jewish circles. Fear of the consequences was intensified by the knowledge that the article must have been passed by the Government censor before publication.
Emulating Nazi methods in the early days of the Hitler regime, blue-shirted Cuzists (Rumanian Nazis whose leader is Dr. Alexander Cuza) seized all Jews and Jewish-appearing persons in the neighborhood of the Blue House, their headquarters, dragged them inside and attacked them. Police failed to intervene.
Other Cuzists dragged Jews from buses and trams in the heart of the city undisturbed by police.
Shots were fired in street fights between anti-Semites and Democratic groups, but there were no casualties.
Democratic newspapers charged that present disturbances were financed from Germany and that the anti-Semitic press was acting as paid agent of the Reich to pave the way for entrenchment of Hitlerism in Rumania.
Alexander Vaida-Voevod, head of the National Peasants’ Party, urged closer relations with Germany in an address to a meeting of the Rumanian Front.
“Hitler is the real democrat,” he said, “not those political parties which are financed by Jews to pay them later with concessions.”
Jewish newspapers in Kishinev, reporting attacks on Jews in parks and on boulevards, appealed to local police not to remain indifferent.
Police failed to prevent bonfires of Jewish Democratic newspapers in various parts of Bucharest, including one in front of the Foreign Office and another in front of the German Legation where a mob of youngsters sang German Nazi songs and gave the Nazi salute as the fire burned.
For the first time since the disorders began, foreign papers, mainly French, were seized from newsdealers and burned.
Despite the intensity of the situation, the authorities have granted permission for a Cuzist convention to be held in Bucharest Sunday.
At an emergency meeting of the Cabinet, Minister of the Interior Inculetz reported that anti-Semitic disorders throughout the country were showing no signs of abatement.
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.
