While parliamentary agitation over the Polish anti-Semitic paper, Jestem Poliakem, is being held in abeyance pending the results of personal pressure to halt its publication, another bone of contention has cropped up–the German emigre daily, Die Zeitung.
The editor of the paper, Sebastian Haffner, left Germany in 1938 and the managing editor, J. H. Lothar, in 1936.
The Jewish Chronicle points out that one of Die Zeitung’s recent contributors, Ernest Johannsen, in 1932 published an article in Germany justifying anti-Semitism by claiming that hostility towards the Jews was not a matter of prejudice, but of deep-rooted instinct.
“If anti-Semitism persistently endures in a nation, it is proof that anti-Semitism has relative justification,” Johannsen said. “When cultured men–like Social-Democrats–go so far as to describe the Nazis as a party of homosexuals, the Jews should not be surprised if simple men attribute to every Jew the basest motives.”
The Jewish Chronicle declares that Johannsen, who defended Ernst Roehm, Hitler’s lieutenant until the 1934 purge, against charges of homosexuality, is now writing in an anti-Nazi daily, while hundreds of Germans whom Hitler interned in concentration camps are still interned in Britain and Canada.
A “German Socialist,” in a letter to The New Statesman and Nation, asserts: “Not a single German anti-Nazi with any political responsibility has contributed or will contribute to the paper, more popish than the Pope and which has not hesitated to denounce all Germans as worthy only of despicable pity.”
Sebastian Haffner is the pseudonym of a German writer who was interned last year in the general roundup of male refugees and released from internment to enable him to complete an anti-Hitler book, “Germany-Jeky11-and Hyde,” which subsequently had a wide circulation in England. Following his completion of the book he was re-interned and released again following widespread protests and after his case was raised in Commons. Haffner’s book recommended breaking up the Reich into five or six states which would be integrated in a general European federation.
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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.
