Count Ottokar Czernin, who was Foreign Minister in the Austro-Fungarian Empire towards the end of the Great War, died here suddenly to-day in his sixtieth year.
Count Czernin was responsible for the issue of the pro-Zionist declaration by the Foreign Ministries in Vienna and Berlin intended as a counterblast to the Balfour Declaration of the British Government.
Count Czernin was also responsible in negotiating the peace #treaty with the Roumanian Government in obtaining ### extension of the rights of the Roumanian Jews.
Although he was on friendly terms with a number of Jews and employed Jews as his advisers and agents, he was known to be an antisemite of a moderate type.
In 1928 Count Czernin took proceedings against ex-Deputy Robert Stricker, one of the Zionist Revisionist leaders, who is the editor of the Vienna Jewish paper “Neue Welt”, because he had accused him in his paper of being an antisemite and yet at the same time having engaged in business transactions with Jews, using his official position to obtain large sums in commission from them.
I gave Count Czernin three thousand pounds sterling during the war so that he should help me in my contracts with Roumania, where he was Austrian Ambassador, and after the war Count Czernin earned three and a half million schillings on our business transactions. At that time I was his equal; today he is the Count and I am the Jew, Nathan Eidinger, a Jewish merchant said in the course of the trial when he appeared as a witness.-
A large number of Jewish witneesse were #alled, all of them business people with whom Count Czernin was engaged in business transactions. Nathan Eidinger, the most outstanding of them, was in Count Czernin’s political confidence during the war and went with him as Adviser to the Peace Conference of Best-Litovsk.
Count Czernin’s lawyer, Advocate Katz, himself a Jew, contended that Count Czernin had only borrowed the sum of £3,000 from Eidinger, and was now too poor to repay it.
Poor Czernin Advocate Plaschkes ironically interjected. He draws an income of only ten thousand dollars a month from his house property in Berlin.
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