A German mayor who wrote an anti-Semitic letter to the leader of Germany’s Jewish community resigned after being heavily criticized for his remarks.
Franz-Dieter Schlagkamp, 50, mayor of Senheim village in Rhineland-Palatinate, became the second locally elected German official in three months to resign under similar circumstances.
Schlagkamp complained in an official letter to the chairman of the Jewish community, Ignatz Bubis, of the hostile attitude of Jews against “all Germans.”
Addressing Bubis as “a cursed top Jew,” Schlagkamp wrote:
“When I learn from the media that Jews flew especially from the United States to Hamburg in order to insult the German people; that Jews in Germany want to take up arms to defend themselves against ‘the Germans’; how Germans are being treated in Israel; and that young and hard-working German taxpayers have to put up billions of marks as reparations to the Jewish people, then I am glad there are no Jews in my village of 700 citizens, to disturb the peace with their stabbings.
“I pray to God that we will never receive such citizens,” he wrote.
Although Schlagkamp later apologized for the letter, Interior Ministry officials in the regional capital of Mainz insisted he resign immediately.
Schlagkamp resigned during a village assembly on Monday night.
Bubis said he receives many anti-Semitic letters, but does not reply. “It would be like talking to a wall,” he added.
The affair was reminiscent of an incident last November when the head of the City Council’s Interior Committee of Rostock, in former East Germany, was forced to resign after asking Bubis at a news conference: “You are a Jew isn’t your homeland Israel?”
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.
