The decision of the committee of jurists appointed by the Council of the League of Nations in Geneva, to give admissability to the Bernheim petition, which will bring up before the Council the question of the treatment of the Jews in German Upper Silesia, and possibily in the whole of Germany, may result in Germany exploring the advisability of declaring the Jews throughout Germany as a national minority.
The suggestion, which was put forward early in May by Count von Freytagh-Lohringhoven, political adviser to Dr. Hugenberg, the German Nationalist leader and Minister of Agriculture and Industry in the Hitler Government, is now being brought up in a large number of German newspapers.
The German press, both in Berlin and in the provinces, is giving a lot of space now to articles dealing with the question of minority rights for the German Jews, and many of them warn the Jews that they will regret it if they decide to accept the status of a national minority. Even with the Aryan paragraph in the new legislation regulating employment, it is much better for the German Jews to remain German citizens of the Jewish faith, they say, than that they should be segregated as ghetto Jews holding the position of a national minority.
SARCASTIC ABOUT POLAND
Germania, the Berlin Centre Party daily, accuses the League of Nations of keeping two sets of books in the matter of minority rights. The Weser Zeitung of Bremen, says that the great powers become advocates for the Jews only in Geneva, and the Taegliche Rundschau, of Berlin, writing in the same strain, waxes sarcastic about Poland’s sudden Geneva friendship for the Jews. The Boersen Zeitung, of Berlin, says that when the matter was transferred to the committee of jurists the League of Nations Council had already made up its mind to turn itself into an anti-German platform.
The Berliner Tageblatt recently published a four-page supplement on the Jewish situation with the purpose of finding means of including the Jewish population in the “New Germany.” The contributions of the Jews to the greatness of Germany were listed in the supplement which also included a number of articles on different aspects of the question and a moving appeal from the Christian mother of two Jewish children.
NEW SUPPLEMENTS COMING
The Tageblatt announces that further similar supplements will be published but the Jewish population regards this sceptically since the paper has made no move to reinstate its former Jewish employees and as yet has invited none of the outstanding Jewish leaders to present their side of the case in the columns of the supplement.
When Count von Freytagh-Lohringhoven outlined the national minority plan in an interview appearing last month in several Austrian papers closely associated with the National Socialist movement, these papers added a note in which they said that they understood that there had already been long and important discussions between Chancellor Hitler and Minister Hungenberg, in an attempt to solve the Jewish question in Germany, on the lines laid down by Count von Freytagh-Lohringhoven.
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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.
