The physical condition of the less than 100 Jews who remain in this city, which hada large pre-war Jewish population, is appalling, a correspondent of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency found upon his arrival today. However, the new German mayor installed by the Allies has arranged for an additional allowance of food for them to enable them to recover their strength, if that is conceivable.
One 78-year-old Jew, so popular with his workers that he was permitted to remin as general manager of a huge foundry until 1939, died shortly beforce Allied soldier, broke into a jail here; he had been thrown into a cell because, in a given period, he had been unable to dye more than 12 pairs of shoes, to which work the aged can had been assigned by the Gestapo. Many in recent months were forced to travel afoot to Theresienstadt.
This correspondent spent an hour with a Jewish author of 78, who now advises the AMG in Frankfurt on Jewish affairs. Only a few hours before he had been reunited with his wife, a non-Jewish woman who had fought a heroic battle through the years on behalf of her husband, in which struggle she was aided by the fact of her "Aryan" antecedents and her aristocratic background.
UNWISE TO USE REFUGEES TO RUN NEWSPAPERS, SAYS NEW MAYOR
He said to me that if Nitler had succeeded in anything, it was surely in the extermination of the Jews and in sowing the seeds of permanent hatred of the race. "I feel that the Jews will never again be acocapted as equals in the German community," he added. "I have lost touch with all my prewar friends. We are so alienated from all, that I believe life for the Jews in Germany will never be as it was before Hitler."
In some degree this was confirmed to me by the new mayor, a non-Jew. While he said that he did not harbor any bias against the Jews, he doubted that it would be wise for the Allies to use German Jewish refugees, now in Britain or the United States, in the conduct of newspapers in the Reich, after the war, or in the direction now of psychological warfare in the country.
"After the heavy Allied bombardments, which made so many homeless and destroyed so many families," the mayor said to me, "Germans often said that that was an ordeal for our treatment of the Jews."
The famed Frankfurt Jewish Cemetery has been completely revaged by the Germans, and the mausoleum of the Rothschild family was also flattened by the Nazia. The Jewish synagogue here was set afire in 1938.
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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.