News Brief

German people knew what the Jews had done during the war they would murder us in the streets.

Now it is no longer a secret what the Jews did during the war. If they entered the war at all it was only because they were conscripted. They did it under pressure because they have no fatherland which is called Germany. They saved their lives as war profiteers and schiebers, both during and after the war. . . .

It is probably unnecessary to point out that the Jews lost as large a proportion of their people at the front as did any German city population, and that the German army never offered careers to Jews as it did to non-Jews. The Voelkische Beobachter is fond of taking excerpts from the works of Jewish writers and quoting them in a completely false context. Thus a passage from the papers of Walter Rathenau, in which he ironically warns France that if she hopes to achieve peace by force she will have to destroy every German first, is played up as an invitation to France to destroy Germany! During the one day anti-Jewish boycott headlines ran all the way across the page of National Socialist newspapers with such words as : “The Nation’s Enemy Is Scorned!”

PREFERRED PROFESSORS

Evidences of anti-Semitism in other countries, even in Soviet Russia, are clipped from foreign newspapers and reproduced. Adolf Hitler, speaking to physicians, on their duty for race-hygiene, insists that Jewish intellectuals are giving Germany an anti-German leadership, and the anti-Jewish section of what he says is printed in black-face type. Professors who subscribe to the race theory are invited to contribute feuilltons to the daily press. Thus a Prof. Staemmler writes under the title: “Divide the Races”: “Both species (of Jews) are, to be sure, counted amongst the white race, but they are characterized by certain spiritual peculiarities which have resulted in the fact that the Jews, wherever they may have lived, have acted in a ferment for decomposition. . . .We find it quite superfluous to prove the inferiority of the Jewish race. . . . Just as the Negro and the Chinaman is outwardly and innerly entirely different from us, so is the Jew.”

And against specific Jews—against Einstein, Feuchtwanger, and Emil Ludwig, the National Socialist Press is virulent without inhibition.

The object, obviously, is to make all of Germany Jew-conscious. One newspaper, commenting upon the boycott exults that “from this day onward, every school child in Germany will know the difference between Germans and Jews!”

INTELLECTUALS VICTIMIZED

It is certain that in such an atmosphere the Jewish population, even without special discriminatory laws, would suffer socially and economically. It has already become a matter for apology to trade with Jews. The German who does so must excuse himself: “They are really quite nice people, and I have traded there for years.” But very often it is easier to switch one’s trade to a German store and run no risks.

It must also be said, that even without special discriminatory laws the Jewish intelligentsia would have suffered especially under the present reaction. The National Socialist revolution is aimed not only against Communism but against everything western and international in German life. Unquestionably Communism and the liberal-democratic movement in Germany which followed the war, together with the moderate Socialism of the Social Democratic Party, which is comparable to that of the right wing of the Labor Party in England, derived much of its leadership from the Jews. The fact is not due so much to qualities in the Jewish mind as to characteristics which are absent from the German. The German is curiously estranged from the world, and always has been ; curiously impervious to the psychology of other peoples—German diplomacy is for that reason notorious—and curiously untouched in any profound inner way by those political and social manifestations deriving from the French revolution which we call “western civilization.”

It is quite clear that any attempt in Germany to approach western liberal civilization must have been led by Jews because there were few Germans to take the lead. It is ridiculous to associate the Jews and liberalism-socialism because Jewish leadership is not characteristic of the same movements in other countries—in France, for example, or in England, or in Spain.

BACK TO THE 18TH CENTURY

But Nationally Awakened Germany has not been content to leave anti-Semitism to a worked-up public opinion. The position of the Jews has also been fixed in a series of laws, which have no parallel in civilized countries since the days of the enlightenment. They put the position of the German Jew back to what it was before 1848, indeed to what it was before 1809. He is definitely in the position of an inferior citizen, or of an alien.

It might, by the way, be remarked that the legality of these laws is certainly open to question. The present ministers took their oath to the constitution which still exists, and which guarantees equal rights and responsibilities for all citizens. When some foreign correspondents queried the Prussian Ministry of the Interior how, under the constitution it was possible to pass the discriminatory laws against the Jews, an official replied: “The laws are, to be sure, not in harmony with the constitution, but they presume upon changes in the constitution which are being formulated.” It is therefore to be supposed that the Jews will eventually be constitutionally deprived of rights.

EXTRA-LEGAL EXCLUSION MEASURES

At present discriminatory laws have been passed, dealing with lawyers, civil officials, and students. The object of the laws in each case is redically to reduce the number of Jews already in these professions, to prevent them from progressing to eminence, and to prevent new Jewish candidates from entering them. In addition to specific legal action, unofficial decrees have created the same situation for Jewish physicians, journalists, and teachers. There is therefore not a single learned profession left in Germany, in which a Jew has any hope of attaining eminence, and from some professions he is practicaly shut out entirely.

The laws dealing with civil officials and with lawyers are similar. All Jews who have held civil positions, or have been admitted to the bar previous to August 1914—nearly twenty years ago—are permitted to remain. All Jews who fought at the front—this means front line trenches and not just participation in the war—or who had a father or son killed in the war may also retain civil service positions and are admitted to the bar.

It must immediately be said that the law passed for all the Reich conflicts with orders previously issued in various provinces, and that the Reich law is still, in some instances, being sabotaged.

EXPRESSION OF ANTI-JEWISH ZEAL

Thus, in Bavaria, the courts posted notices that no Jews would be allowed to appear in court, and this applied to every Jewish attorney in the province, while in Prussia the new Minister for Justice, Dr. Kerrl, barred all but thirty-five of the practicing Jewish attorneys, who numbered over two thousand. The Federal Law takes precedence over these provincial measures, but the provincial authorities have the responsibility of administering it. Hundreds of Jewish lawyers who were in the front line trenches long since lost or destroyed the evidence; they must get it again, through a wilderness of red tape. Then their cases must be passed upon, and weeks and months may go by before they are readmitted to the bar. These weeks or months are sufficient to wreck a legal practice irreparably.

Of course the confusion in business brought about by these measures is tremendous. Civil cases which are pending, and in the hands of Jewish lawyers, either have to be postponed, or the lawyers must seek a Christian colleague in whose hands