Two hundred and fifty-eight Jews have been executed in Berlin by the Gestapo, and their families deported to Eastern Europe, for allegedly attempting to blow up the anti-Bolshevist exhibition now on view in the German capital, according to reliable reports reaching here yesterday.
The Gestapo claimed to have discovered five time bombs at the exhibit on May 27, the reports state. Immediately, they charged a “Jewish plot” to destroy the anti-Russian exposition and proceeded to round up a large number of Berlin Jews allegedly implicated in the “plot.” Although Jews are easily discernible wherever they appear because of the Mogen Davids which they are compelled to wear and are barred from the principal streets in Berlin, including the one on which the exhibition was located, the Gestapo asserted that it had definite proof that the Jews were responsible for planting the bombs.
The arrested Jews were sentenced and transferred to the Alexenderplats police station. Their wives and children were simultaneously confined in the Lawerowstrasse Synagogue, the only one left in Berlin – which is now used by the Nazis as a concentration center for Jewish deportes. Early the next day – May 28 – the Jews were removed from the Alexanderplatz police headquarters and taken by trucks to the S.S. barracks at Gross Lichterfelde, in the suburbs of Berlin, where they were lined up and machine-gunned on masse. Later, when transportation facilities were available, the families of the victims were herded into trains and deported to an unknown destination in Eastern Europs.
Following the shootings, which were not announced in the German press or by the Nazi radio, the leaders of the Jewish community in Berlin were summoned to headquarters and informed of the executions. They were warned that, if “any further Jewish attempts were made to harm Germans,” 15,000 Jews would be shot, 5,000 each, in Prague, Berlin and Vienna.
Disclosure of the executions comes on the heels of the warning by Propaganda Minister Goebbels, writing in Das Reich, that “the Jewish race would be exterminated throughout Europe and beyond” in retaliation for continued Allied bombings of German cities.
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