German Jews Have Left Their Native Towns Where Their Families Have Been Living for Generations: Comp

In these last few days German citizens have left their native towns in Hecklenburg, in which they and their families have been living for generations, says a call to the German people published in the “C. V. Zeitung”, the organ of the Central Union of German Citizens of Jewish Faith. In the Mecklenburg State Museum hangs the uniform of one of the ancestors of these Germans, a man who fought as a volunteer in the German liberation wars. Is there any fault in them that they have been compelled to uproot themselves, to leave the soil to which they have been attached for centuries? The only reason is that they are Jews, and it is this fact that has made their lives unbearable. The masses of the people are looking for a scapegoat to blame for their present misery, and the Jew has been fixed on as the scapegoat. Ever since the Revolution, groups, leagues and parties have been engaged in defaming the German Jews. The gamut has been run from the lie of the ritual murder right up to cultural antisemitism.

Part of the blame for this state of affairs must be placed at the door of those millions of our German fellow citizens who for entirely different reasons than antisemitism have ranged themselves beneath the Swastika banner. They are seeking a way out of our economic and national misery, and they do not mind that the milestones along this road spell the denial to 600,000 German people of their claim to existence and to equality of rights.

It still seems possible to us to form a united front of decent-minded people extending beyond the party boundaries which will be potent to save Germany from the horrors of civil war and of barbarism. As for those others who are deaf and dumb to all the claims of morality, let them at least reflect on what will happen when once the brutal instincts of the mob are let loose. In the looting which occurred in the Leipziger-strasse in Berlin, shops were demolished belonging both to Jews and non-Jews, and the number of non-Jewish victims of the excesses in the Kurfuerstendann is in excess of the number of Jewish victims. We consider it out duty, the statement concludes, to warn all people to be on guard to protect the public security of all German citizens.