Coditions in Camps for Displaced Jews Again Deteriorating, Jewish Chaplain Charges

The charge that displaced Jews in the German camps in the American and British zones are still ill-treated was made here yesterday by Capt, Robert S. Marcus, a Jewish chaplain serving with the U.S. forces in Europe, and has just returned to New York after twenty months of service overseas.

Emphasizing that he approves “one hundred per cent” of the Harrison report, Cpt. Marcus, addressing a press conference at the headquarters of the National Jewish Welfare Board, said that after publication of the report, conditions improved for a while in the camps, but they have now deteriorated again.

“Conditions are on the downgrade,” he reported, “simply because members of the military government are incompetent and disinterested. Any improvement in the condition of the Jews is the result largely of their desire to help themselves.” He described how eight men were expected to share one loaf of rye bread a day in the camp for displaced Jews at Wildflecken, and how twenty-four men were asked to subsist on a can of coat and watery scup.

(The N.Y.Times, in an editorial yesterday, commented on the fact that the situation of the displaced Jews in the camps in Germany is again becoming precarious because of the approaching winter, especially in the British-controlled Belsen camp. ‘One function of the joint Anglo-American committee of inquiry, whose proposed formation was announced on Nov.13, will be to look into the state of the Jews in Europe,” the editorial said. “Here is evidence for it. Yet something can be done without waiting. The British may still feel unable to admit to Palestine the saddest sufferers among the thirty to forty thousand Jews in camps in western Germany, but if so it is all the more up to them, and to us, to see to it that at least the essentials of life, including self-respect and hope, are guaranteed to these unhappy survivors.”)