The story that the Budapest-Ostende express outrage near Biatorbagy, in which 22 people were killed, was the work of Jews, which was spread by the Hungarian antisemites (reported in the J.T.A. Bulletin of the 19th. inst.), resulting in the Budapest police confiscating large quantities of leaflets containing the allegation, and arresting a number of people who were engaged in distributing them, has now been taken up by the German antisemites, and the “Voelkischer Beobachter”, the chief Hitlerist organ, publishes a big report repeating the allegation.
Like the Rungarian antisemites, the “Voelkischer Beobachter” starts out by drawing attention to the fact that the outrage occurred on Rosh Hashanah and from this deduces that it was deliberately arranged for that day, because it was assumed that there would be no Jews on the train that day and that the victims would therefore all be Christians. It was Jewry’s New Year gift to Christendom, it writes.
The only clue found was a note near the scene of the outrage, it proceeds, declaring that the train wreck was the work of Communists. The Hungarian authorities in following up this clue have identified the handwriting with that of a notorious Communist named Martin Leipnik, who has repeatedly been in the hands of the police for committing terrorist acts. Leipnik, who was born in Budapest, is a Jew, it continues. Even a Jewish Communist has so much Jewish solidarity as to arrange his outrage for a day when it will not harm Jews. The Jewish mass murderer fixed on this day, because he did not expect that there would be any Jews travelling on that day, and actually, there was only one Jew on the train. Of the 22 dead, only one is a Jew, and among the injured there is not a single Jew. The victims, it goes on, are all poor workers, railway employees, small officials, and a few travellers, for the most part proletarians. When Leipnik’s name came into the story, the paper says, the international Jewish press, which had been giving a great deal of space to the affair, suddenly dropped it, and not a word has been mentioned in these big Jewish-controlled papers that Leipnik is a Jew. The Jews are trying to cover up Leipnik’s tracks. Where is Leipnik, we want to know, it writes. Why has he not appeared, if he is innocent? And another thing, it writes, why have the Budapest police not arrested his parents and all the members of his family, who live in Budapest, and keep them under arrest until it is proved that he was not the murderer.
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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.