A right-wing West German newspaper commented yesterday that, while there might not be “an incurable general Hitlerism” in West Germany, the fact remained that the two Cologne men who confessed the Christmas Eve desecration of the Cologne synagogue were only 11 years old when Hitler’s Third Reich was smashed.
Der Mittag, of Dusseldorf, said that the anti-Semitism displayed by the two arrested men, Paul Schonen and Arnold Strung, must therefore have come “from second-hand sources,” Noting that the right-wing Deutches Reichs party had expelled the two men as soon as they confessed, Der Mittag said that anyone acquainted with the “political harangues” and the customary practices of the DRP at meetings would hardly be surprised by the desecration acts of its two members.
“The fact that the DRP repudiates all this says little, “Der Mittag added. “Only a year ago, in Cologne, the DRP did not dissociate itself from demonstrations against the showing of Charlie Chaplain’s ‘The Great Dictator.'”
The Neue Rhein Zeitung, a left-wing paper here, commented editorially that, more important than the widespread revulsion displayed over the vandalism, was “the long overdue but ever-postponed self-examination” by the German people. The newspaper stated: “Everybody says these vandals are isolated individuals, mad men. But can any Minister deny knowing that the DRP is a neo-Nazi organization? Yet nothing has been done against it.”
The paper noted similar vandalism at the Dusseldorf synagogue in January 1957, and added that “the Communists were blamed and nothing more.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
