A ferocious anti-Semitic campaign, calling for destruction of the Jews in Soviet Russia, was launched by German broadcasters today as part of the propaganda offensive accompanying the Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R. The broadcasts were in the Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian languages.
The Breslau radio, which apparently has been set aside for this special purpose, poured out an unceasing flood of incitement against the Jews in Soviet Russia. The broadcasts gave evidence that Russian White Guardists and Ukrainian nationalists had been carefully trained for the job long in advance.
Russian soldiers were called upon to use their bayonets against the Jews, not against the Germans, who, the broadcaster said, were “coming as liberators of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples from Stalin and his Jewish clique.”
Ex-Commissar Lazar Kaganovich was made a special target of attacks, which charged that he, not Stalin, was the “real boss,” conducting a “Jewish policy.” Ex-Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov was also subjected to violent attack.
At the same time, all German stations broadcast an official warning that the enemy might use Jews and German-speaking Poles as parachutists for sabotage and destruction.
In one of its characteristic quick changes, Axis propaganda, which had been harping on the theme of “Judaeo-capitalism” and “Jewish plutocracy” for almost two years since the German-Russian pact, has returned to an effort to identify Jews with Communism.
“The “line” for the new propaganda drive was laid down by Reichefuehrer Hitler in his proclamation of war on Soviet Russia. He charged “Jewish Bolshevist rulers” in Moscow with attempting to set Europe aflame and declared “it is necessary for us to take steps against this plot devised by the Jewish Anglo-Saxon warmongers and equally the Jewish rulers of the Bolshevist center in Moscow.”
The German radio immediately opened its “crusade against the Bolshevist-Jewish-democratic world menace,” and Nazi-controlled radio stations in Amsterdam, Paris and other occupied cities quickly took up the theme.
The Italian radio not adept as the German at the art of quick-change, did not immediately completely revise its theme. A Rome broadcast restated Italy’s aim as elimination of “the Jewish capitalism of London and New York” and then straddled the issue by saying that the Axis was fighting to protect Europe from “the attacks of Judaism, be it capitalistic or Bolshevik.”
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.
