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German Government Awards High Decoration to Jewish Leader

July 19, 1954
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Moritz Goldschmidt, president of the local Jewish Community and representative of the British Zone in the directorate of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has been awarded the Federal Grand Cross of Merit, one of Bonn’s highest decorations. The citation particularly lauds his early and outspoken repudiation of the thesis imputing to the German people a “collective guilt” for the Nazi regime.

Other members of the Central Council have, it is known, declined to accept the offer of such decorations. They are not likely to reconsider, now that the Grand Cross of Merit has also been bestowed upon Werner Krauss, the actor who in his anti-Semitic zeal perverted Shakespeare, journeyed to the martyred Warsaw ghetto so as to absorb “atmosphere” for his several roles in Goebbels’ “Jew Suess” film, and has become, in the eyes of Germany’s best democrats, the very symbol for the comeback in cultural life of one of the most eager Nazi propagadists of Jew-Hatred.

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