Hitler’s Following Recruited from Those Who Are Suffering in Germany’s Economic Crisis and Europe Mu

President Hindenburg’s re-election signifies the rejection of a dangerous experiment, Dr. Alfred Klee, the leader of the Zionist Party in the Federation of Jewish Communities in Prussia, who is now in Paris, attending the meeting of the Council of the Jewish Colonisation Association (Ica), said in an interview with the J.T.A. here. Nevertheless, he went on, the world must realise that the responsibility for the growth of the Hitlerist movement lies at the doors of Germany’s economic distress. The economic position in Germany is terrible, and it is from among the unemployed and the starving that Hitler has recruited his 11 million votes. There are six million unemployed in Germany. There are in Hitler’s camp millions of young Germans who did not experience the hourrors of the war, but see themselves now faced by unemployment and starvation and see no chance ahead of building up any security in the future. Antisemitism is not the child of reason. It is a kind of mystical faith in a superman of the Nordic race Hitler stands to the antisemites as a Nordic Saviour who will bring the millenium by wiping out the Jews, who stand for them as the representatives of capital.

There was talk during the election campaign of a sort of St. Bartholomew’s Night in which all the Jews in Germany would be massacred. Those fears proved to be unfounded, but we must not think that the danger is over, and return to a period of calm. We must continue to stand on guard.

There is not only political suffering among the Jews of Germany, Dr. Klee went on, but a tremendous economic suffering. The middle-class has been wiped out. Entire branches of economic activity in which Jews occupied a prominent position are going out of existence. The greater part of German Jewry has been completely proletarianised. They are ready to do any work, but there is no work open to them. Many branches of economic activity in Germany are completely closed to Jews on account of antisemitic feeling.

We must be able to count on the help of the Jewish philanthropic world organisations, Dr. Klee said. Our Jewish Communities in Germany are doing all they can, but they have no funds. Their contributions have sunk to almost nothing, because of the economic distress. Not only the smaller communities, but even some of the larger are now fighting for their very existence. As the head of the Subsidy Department of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Prussia, I have seen for myself how terribly these communities have to fight to keep themselves alive.

We hope that President Hindenburg’s re-election will usher in a durable period of development in Germany, which will be to the interests of all Europe, Dr. Klee concluded. We hope also that the present Prussian Government, which contains men like Otto Braun, the Premier, Karl Severing, the Minister of the Interior, and Grzesinski, the Berlin Police President, men whose names and character are a guarantee of the maintenance of democracy and of social progress, will remain in power after the Prussian Parliamentary elections in Ma#We Jews are optimists enough, he added, to hope in a better future. We have survived Titus and Torquamado, and we shall survive the present anxious period, which, bad as it is, cannot be compared with those terrible days, though it certainly is serious enough to demand the whole of our attention and all our work.