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Berlin’s Jewish Quarter Like a Beleaguered City

November 8, 1923
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The sections of the city inhabited by Jews, which were the scenes Monday and Tuesday of intermittent riots and plunder today present a most depressing spectacle.

With a cordon of police drawn around the Jewish quarter, the streets have assumed the appearance of a beleaguered city. Crouching behind windows that had been smashed in the course of the rioting, with temporary bars in place of the broken-in doors, many of the residents are barricaded indoors. Others have fled to other and presumably safer sections of the city.

In Friedrichstrasse, the shopping center of Berlin, a large number of shops owned by Jews were plundered by a mob led by anti-Semitic agitators.

The United Trade Council of Berlin has issued the following appeal: “The German Voelkische agitators have incited the working masses to pogroms, spreading terror and horror in the Jewish quarters of Berlin. These Voelkische demagogues have deliberately engineered these disorders in order to justify a reactionary dictatorship. The plunder of Jews serves no purpose. If Cohen doesn’t speculate today, Stinnes and Thysen will do so tomorrow. Only when capitalism falls will the Jewish as well as the Christian speculators be crushed”.

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