British newspapers continued today to express indignation over the dismissal of Leslie Hore-Belisha as War Minister and to demand a full explanation.
(A London dispatch to the New York Times today said “some newspapers suggested the possibility that anti-Semitism was to blame (for Hore-Belisha’s removal)–a suggestion for which there seemed to be little support.”)
Lord Rothermere’s Sunday Dispatch spreads fourteen questions across its first page, demanding that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain answer them. Among the questions is the following:
“Is Hore-Belisha the victim of anti-Jewish feeling among a section of his highly-placed critics and is it true that the departure of Hore-Belisha is in any way connected with the whispering campaign against him which originated in social circles rather than in political quarters and spread so high and so extensively that the Prime Minister eventually could not but take notice of it?”
Reynolds News, describing the background of the situation, declares that soon after Hore-Belisha’s reforms started “the then friends of Nazi Germany, many of whom are still in high office, opened a campaign against the new War Minister on the ground that being a Jew he could not be persona grata with the German General Staff, with which they desired ardently to be on good terms.”
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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.
