Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party, has been fined 1,000 Marks (about £50) with the alternative of 19 days’ imprisonment, for insulting a Jewish lawyer, Herr Kurt Rosenfeld, who questioned him when he appeared in the Munich Law Court to-day in an action against Herr Werner Abel, a journalist, who had made charges against him in the press of receiving money from foreign sources.
When Herr Rosenfeld, who appeared for Abel, asked him if he could tell the court whether he had received any money from foreign sources, Hitler flew into a rage and shouted very excitedly that he refused to answer any questions put to him by a Jew.
The judge, Dr. Bertram, tried to persuade Hitler to answer the question, but could not pacify him, and finally he sentenced him for contempt of court.
A similar scene took place in the same Court yesterday, when a Nazi member of the Munich City Council, named Weber, who was associated with Hitler in the 1923 putsch, in Munich, was asked by Herr Kurt Rosenfeld if he knew that Hitler had received money for the putsch from Switzerland.
As a German, I have steadfastly refused for the past eight years to give any information to someone who is not an Aryan, he replied. The court fined him 50 Marks with the alternative of ten days’ imprisonment.
In May 1929, Hitler brought a similar action against Deputy Graife, a former Hitlerist Deputy in the Bavarian Parliament, and against Herr Osterhuber, the editor of the “Bavarian Courier”, for having accused him in that paper of having received money from Italy in return for a pledge not to raise the question of the German-speaking Tyrol now in Italian possession if he came to power. Baron von Neurath, the new Foreign Minister, who was at that time Ambassador to Rome, and who had just displeased the democratic press by his refused to receive Emil Ludwig while he was in Rome, was alleged in court to have known of the arrangement. In the course of that action, too, Hitler refused to submit to the discipline of the court, repeatedly shouting that he was being made the victim of an international Jewish conspiracy.
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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.
