The chief organ of the Hitlerist movement, the “Voelkischer Beobachter”, publishes a vicious attack to-day on Dr. Karl Melchior, the Jewish banker who is acting as German Representative in the Special Advisory Committee now meeting in Basle to enquire into Germany’s case that it is unable owing to the economic situation to continue to meet its reparations obligations.
The Jew, Dr. Melchior, partner and actual head of the bank of Max Warburg in Ramburg, the “Beobachter”writes, is again the German expert at the tribute payment discussions in Basle. The German people as a whole seems to be incapable of appointing a tribute negotiator, so we have to go searching for an international banker whose international business interests in themselves are an obstacle to his proper representation of the German cause.
The Warburg Bank, it proceeds, has financial interests in all the countries of the world, and it has a big branch in the United States, which fact enabled it to do good business out of the war and the inflation. The names Max Warburg and Dr. Melchior stink in our nostrils because they were the makers of the enslavement treaty of Versailles, and of the tribute policy of the present system.
In the same way as after the conclusion of the Franco-German War of 1870-71, we had on the French side Baron de Rothschild, and on the German side the Jewish Baron Bleichroeder, the Rothschild representative in Prussia, settling the amount of the war indemnity, so after the Great War we had at Versailles Max Warburg and Dr. Melchior as the German representatives and the two American Warburg brothers on the side of the Entente. After the war, they settled the fate of the German people, and now in Basle there is this Jew again fixing the amount to be paid by the German people, which in reality cannot pay another penny of tribute.
Dr. Melchior is representing at Basle the interests of the Warburg Bank, it writes, not the interests of Germany.
The accusation has been made repeatedly against the Warburg brothers by the German antisemites and in 1924 Mr. Max Warburg appeared in court against the antisemitic ex-Deputy Fritsch who had accused him and Dr. Melchior of complicity with Mr. Felix M. Warburg and Mr. Paul M. Warburg who were acting as financial experts on the Allied side, and declared that during the war he had not seen his brothers in the United States. He had been called in, he said, as a financial expert to advise the German representatives at the Peace Conference and he had done his duty in that respect as a loyal German.
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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.
