The Vienna edition of Chancellor Hitler’s Voelkischer Beobachter announced today a four-year “death sentence” on Austria’s 200,000 Jews and discounted President Roosevelt’s efforts to aid them.
“We cannot take seriously Roosevelt’s appeal to the world in behalf of the Jews as long as America continues racial quotas for immigrants and continues to forbid Jewish immigration,” the Nazi organ declared.
“In this situation the League of Nations can do a piece of real work by making possible emigration to Madagascar (French island colony off the eastern coast of Africa), to the Gran Chaco (South American territory disputed by Paraguay and Bolivia), or elsewhere.”
The Beobachter promised that every Jew would be thrust out of the country by 1942 with nothing but the shirt on his back, except for old Jews who could not be put across the border, and who would be suffered to remain in Austria to await death.
In terms especially severe, even for this Nazi organ, the paper declared that Jews would be thrown out of business and the professions, but warned Jew-baiters that the program must be carried out legally and without pogroms, with none having the right to be impatient or act without reflection until the program was carried through to the end.
“Those who know the Viennese will not be surprised that the four years in which the death sentence on Jews will be carried out will seem a long time,” the Beobachter said, “but the anger of our people is not necessary. Germany is a righteous State. In our State nothing is done without a just basis, and pogroms are not allowed.”
The paper added that “Viennese Jews have stolen much in these last years and they cannot forever eat their stolen food.”
Jewish ownership of real estate, which is permitted in the Reich proper, will not be tolerated in Austria, the paper asserted, and the Germany-Palestine transfer system (Haavara), whereby German Jews emigrating to the Holy Land can withdraw part of their capital in the form of merchandise, will not be available to Austrian Jews. The article charged that the transfer system “gave the Jews of Germany an opportunity to cheat us by the transfer of machines which were used in competition against us.”
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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.
