Former Editor, the Berlin Vossische Zeitung
The world has hardly recovered from the news of Lessing’s murder in his Marienbad villa, and already public opinion everywhere has been excited by the threats aimed at Einstein’s life. It is reported that the German Nazis have placed a price on his head. While he was alive Lessing had modestly refused to be compared with Einstein, but the Lessing affair and the Einstein affair are one.
To the Nazis there is not any distinction in mental calibre. They only know that there are Jews who must be exterminated. What these Jews have done and are doing is for them a matter of supreme indifference. For most of these folk who have restored the Wotan cult and who are trying to drive the latest type of high-powered automobiles straight into the primeval forest have not at all any understanding of mental achievements. The Voelkischer Beobachter, Hitler’s own paper, makes that very clear in a headline, “The Relativity Jew Einstein.”
The Belgian government’s anxiety, which it manifested by posting police guards day and night, outside Einstein’s home in the little seaside resort where he was staying, was justified because from the Nazi point of view, Einstein is no more than a name on a list of proscribed persons which included Lessing and thirty-three German citizens who had been deprived of their citizenship by the German government.
There is a real Fehme organization—semi-official murder gang—whose task is to exterminate the enemies of Nazi-ism who are living abroad. It isn’t the business of the Fehme to pick out its victims according to their place on a list, but it strikes against any of them according to whether they happen to be at hand. Czecho-Slovakia is a small state with a great many Nazis, so that the first attempt was made there, but it is certainly only the first attempt which will be succeeded by others; at least, that’s the intention.
It will depend upon the alertness of the governments of the countries which have accorded hospitality and asylum to the refugees, how many and which of us are to go the same way as Erzberger, Rathenau and, now, Lessing.
The important British press has warned the Nazis what will happen to Germany’s international relations if any attempt is made against Einstein, but the British press seems still to have missed the mentality of the German Nazis. Dignified warnings leave them quite cold and what appeals to them is something of their own type, and I think that the secretary-general of the French League Against anti-Semitism got much closer to that at a Paris meeting attended by 10,000 persons who came to hear the famous French lawyer, Maitre Giafferi, deliver his speech for the defence, which he was not permitted to deliver in Germany, at the Supreme Court of Leipzig at the trial of the alleged Reichstag incendiaries. He told Germany that if a hair of Einstein’s head is touched, the French people will seize all the thousands of Nazis now living in France and hold them as hostages. The medieval and barbaric idea of seizing hostages has become a real thing again in Germany and the Nazis may indeed fear that the French will take a page out of their own book and exploit their advantage by holding the German Nazis in France as hostages if the need arises. And if such action is taken in France it may be followed in other countries.
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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.
