The Jews Are Merely First to Suffer Under Hitlerism, N. Y. Herald-Tribune Warns

Emphasizing that "from hounding Jews within Germany to hounding all the non-Germans of Europe is but a step, and a step which the Nazis have already taken," the New York Herald-Tribune in an editorial today comments on the tragedy of the Jewish people under the Nazi regime as summarized in a study entitled "Jews in Nazi Europe" issued by the Institute of Jewish Affairs of which Dr. Jacob Robinson is director.

"Here," the editorial says, "is displayed the Nazi technique of anti-Semitism: the initial assaults upon the political, civil and economic rights of the Jews, the appeals to mob violence, the deportations, the ghettos. And here we have the results a pitiful fragment of Jewry, decimated, robbed, deprived of all places in the nations which it has served for centuries, kept at forced labor on rations far below the rest of the population, subject at any time to new indignities, arrests, beatings, slayings. Here is a glimpse of the especial terrors of the Jewish refugees who fled from nation to nation only to find the Gestapo remorselessly on their heels. One may read, too, of callous deportations in which groups of Jews were herded into railroad cars, with far less consideration than would be given to beef cattle headed for the slaughter pen, and shipped to borders which refused them passage or to war-torn regions where no provision was made to receive them. The sum of it all indicates that the fate reserved for the Jews by the Nazis is worse than a status of serfdom – it is nothing less than systematic extermination.

"The indictment thus presented against the Nazi mentality is a terrible one, not because the victims are Jews, but because they are human beings. From hounding Jews within Germany to hounding all the non-Germans of Europe is but a step, and a step which the Nazis have already taken. The savage maltreatment of the Jews was the first ominous sign of the madness that Hitlerism contained within itself; the Jews were merely the first to suffer. That madness must be eliminated, not simply to save what remains of Europe’s Jewry, but to preserve the sanity of the world."