“I could see no evidence of an early collapse of the Hitler regime.
“While Jews are no longer killed in Germany, it is made impossible for them to live there,” Wedgwood Benn, British Secretary of State for India from 1929 to 1931, told the Jewish Daily Bulletin.
Discussing British reaction to Nazism he said, “At present, there is no section of political opinion in Great Britain which is other than hostile to Hitler’s anti-Semitic policy. The Fascist movement in England is not taken seriously. Besides Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the movement, is not an anti-Semite.”
Asked about the present British policy of restriction of admission into Palestine of Jewish victims of persecuton in Germany, Mr. Benn declined to answer, intimating that an answer o his part might be political dynamite.
“The boycott of Germany,” he said “depends upon a knownledge of whether the pressure brought to bear on Germany is more important than its effect on the Jews still living there.”
Mr. Benn, who was a member of Parliament until 1927 first for the Liberal party and later for the Labor party, discussed the problem of Hitler and his regime before the League for Political Education at the Town Hall yesterday morning.
Commenting on Hitler’s domestic policies, Mr. Benn declared that “the Nazi program can’t be fulfilled,” and indicated that the German leaders are beginning to welch on their promises. What has been a Socialist movement, attractive to German workers, was now being deflected, he said.
As for the Nazi attitude toward the Jews, Mr. Benn told the audience that Englishmen “cannot understand the medieval return to savage anti-Semitism.” He quoted a line from Lion Feuchtwanger’s recent speech in London, stating that “377 Jews have been murdered in Germany since Hitler’s rise to power. The total amount of punishment for the murderers was four days in prison.”
While he was in Germany, the British statesman said, no one there ever even attempted a philosophical or moral justification of this Jewish policy. “Great domestic issues such as anti-Semitism”, he declared, “concern civilization as a whole.
“We see in Hitler an attempt to rob the world of the only fruits of victory of the World War. It is essential for the rule of justice and right that democracy be reestablished. Hitler is foolish to think that he will make a financial success by a policy of racial persecution.”
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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.
