The misery prevailing among the Jews in the ghettos in Nazi-held Poland is too much even for Werner Schramm, the hard-boiled Nazi official whom Hitler has appointed as leader of the German youth in occupied Poland.
In an interview published in the German press which reached here today, Schramm admits that what he saw in the Jewish ghetto in Mlava, near Warsaw, made such an impression on him that he found it necessary to apologize to the leaders of the Jewish community there for the sufferings which they are undergoing.
“I visited the president of the Jewish Community Council and I told him that I am a sincere member of the National Socialist Party and a true follower of Hitler, whose extermination campaign against the Jews, I explained, is directed exclusively against the Jewish plutocrats of London and Washington.”
Relating his impressions of the terrible conditions under which the Jews live in the Mlava ghetto, the high Nazi official said that there are now 5,000 Jews in Mlava confined in a ghetto surrounded by a rotten wood fence. ”They live within the limits of a very small space in small wooden or half-ruined brick houses with the wind whistling through the walls,” he reported. ”There are four families occupying one dwelling. The children, barefooted and dirty, are in the streets most of the time. The gates of the ghetto are guarded by blue-uniformed Jewish policemen armed with rubber truncheons.”
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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.
