Communists in East Germany Protest Against “jew-killers” in Bonn

The Fast German Communists, who for the past several years have shied away from public mention of Jewish suffering, are now exploiting it to the hilt in a bitter anti-Bonn propaganda campaign predicated on the case of Dr. Otto Braeutigam, recently suspended as head of the East European desk in the Bonn Foreign Office because of his wartime involvement in the Nazi liquidation of Jews.

Latest point of this propaganda campaign, which in effect benefits Braeutigam and is embarrassing to the West German foes of Nazism, was a protest meeting “against the Bonn Jew-killers and pogrom heroes” held in an East Berlin theater and attended by more than 1,000 people. For the first time since Communist anti-Semitism drove almost all active leaders of Jewish life in East Germany to their dramatic mass flight to West Germany three years ago, a number of intellectuals of Jewish stock had been hand-picked as sponsors.

Those who addressed the audience included Communist novelist Stephan Hermlin, famed actress Helene Weigel and Stefan Heymann, the East German Ambassador to Warsaw. Another speaker was the Rev. Martin Riesenburger, a one-time schoolteacher who now styles his self “Rabbi of the Greater Berlin Jewish Community.”

Two respected Jewish literary figures signed an appeal assailing “the danger conjured up by the Fascist murderers in the Bonn Government.” One is Victor Klemperer, professor of Romance Languages at Halle University, the other Arnold Zweig, nearly blind author and playwright who returned from Israel to East Germany in 1948. At the climax of the 1952-53 wave of Soviet anti-Semitism, the Communists did not await the expiration, three months later, of his term of office as president of the East German “Academy of Fine Arts,” but abruptly ousted him.