Skilled refugee Jewish craftsmen, technicians and scientists should be sought out all over the world and brought to the United States to aid in the national defense, the Washington Times-Herald declared yesterday in an editorial signed by Frank C. Waldrop, foreign and political editor.
The German Jews now exiled developed important minerals such as beryllium, tungsten and magnesium, the editorial said. “It is a cold, official fact that the German Jews were the brains of the post-war research that got German industry moving again and it is on their intelligence that the Nazi machinery keeps in motion to this day.”
Asking what had become of the Jews of Jena, experts on optical instruments, the Times-Herald said: “Hitler tried to keep many of them, even in spite of his general pogroms, but the wild excesses of local Nazis made that impossible. Today the Jews of Jena are scattered around the world. Nobody knows where they are and that is a detriment to our national defense. We are, believe it or not, seven years behind the demand in supplying our army and navy with cameras, field glasses, range-finders and optical equipment. “It would be plain common sense to assemble these technicians from Zeiss and let them make up that shortage.”
The editorial said there was quietly going on a search for a Czech Jew who was the brains of the Skoda munitions works and who had escaped the Gestapo. He is urgently wanted to aid in manufacture of American munitions, but thus far the American Government has been unable to find him, according to the editorial.
Celebrated figures such as Thomas Mann and the Rothschilds are followed by the public eye, but these quiet mathematicians and technicians have been left to crawl into corners and lick their wounds,” the editorial said. “Plainly, it is time to invite them out.”
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.
