Essener National Zeitung, organ of German Economic Dictator Hermann Goering, declares that Jews and Poles will be expelled from Lodz, Poland, to make it “the great German city in the East” and “the greatest and most important textile center in Greater Germany.”
Admitting that when the war broke out the Lodz population was half Jewish, 38 per cent Polish and only 12 per cent German, the paper nevertheless asserts that “Lodz has always been a German city and the influx of Jews provoked a social declassing of the German population while the Polish State deliberately neglected the interests of this German city.”
To Germanize the city, the National Zeitung states, the Nazis are closing down shops, “which generally are Jewish ones,” and are settling Germans repatriated from the Baltic “to take the place of Poles and Jews who are leaving the city.”
“The transformation of a city of 600,000 inhabitants, half of them Jews, cannot be done in a day,” the paper says, adding that “with every Jew and every Pole who leaves, Lodz becomes more German.”
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.
