Jewish automobile owners who for the last few months have been increasingly victimized by carping traffic police are now being given special and easily identifiable license plates, it was revealed today.
Several hundred of these plates, which apparently bear numbers between 350,000 and 355,000, are reported to have been given out in the last few weeks. According to unverified estimates, there are some 5,000 Jewish-owned cars in Berlin.
The police campaign against Jewish car-owners began during the fortnight’s anti-Semitic “uprising” here last June. Since that time most of the Berlin police, when stopping a driver for a traffic rule infraction, have made it a practice to ask whether the culprit is a Jew. If he is, there is little chance of his receiving a mere warning. One Jew spent three days in jail because his license plate was bent. A party of four Jews two of them women, were taken directly to a police court when they parked their cars a few feet beyond a “no parking” sign. Others have paid 50 and 100 mark fines for violations which are generally overlooked with a warning and which are punishable at most by a fine of 25 marks or less.
On certain important street intersections, the traffic police have been cracking down equally hard on pedestrians who disobeyed the traffic signals. In one recent case a Jewish woman was fined 30 marks for crossing against the red light, standard fine of which is one mark
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.
