Max Brauer, Mayor of Hamburg, conferred with West German Chancellor Dr. Konrad Adenauer this week-end on the Hamburg Supreme Court’s refusal to act against the publisher of an anti-Semitic pamphlet. He insisted on stern measures against the author and the publisher of the anti-Jewish tract.
The conference took place against a background of rising protest in the German press and public over additional evidence of anti-Semitic activity. Also against the Hamburg court’s insistence that publication of the pamphlet had not violated the Federal law against preaching anti-Semitism and race hatred because it had not called for a campaign against the Jewish people but had spoken of “international Jewry.”
The Chancellor has already ordered an investigation by the Federal Ministry of Justice of the incident which began with the distribution last year of a pamphlet by Friedrich Nieland, lumber merchant and author of the broadside, and Adolf Heimberg, the printer. The pamphlet denied that 6, 000,000 Jews had been murdered by the Nazis and charged that the world was ruled by “international Jewry.”
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung hit the court decision and said that the pamphlet was a test by “incorrigible anti-Semites” to see “how far they can go. ” The Hamburg newspaper Bild, which has a circulation of 3, 000, 000 published a front page editorial entitled “Alarm, ” which insisted that “something must be done” about the revival of anti-Semitism, including if necessary new laws by Parliament.
Other newspapers across Germany also protested the distinction drawn by the Hamburg court between attacking the Jewish people and attacking “international Jewry.”
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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.
