Jewish Cemetery Desecrations in Germany Now Total 119: Some Had Not Been Reported Before: New Method

The number of Jewish cemeteries desecrated in Germany in recent years is not 101 as was recently estimated, but 119, some of the cases not having been reported at the time, the “Isiaelitische Familienblatt” reports.

The desecrated cemeteries which must be added to the list, it states, include those situated at Schneidemuehl, Aschaffenburg, Bovenden, near Goettingen, Harburg, Hoch-Neukirchen, Klein-Krotzenburg, Loswenberg, Plauen-Tannenhof, and Kretzenburg.

A new method, the paper adds, has now been adopted by the vandals, of setting fire to the fences surrounding the Jewish cemeteries and letting the fire spread into the cemetery proper. Two such outrages have recently occurred, it states, at Freistett, near Kehl, and at Ziegenhain, near Cassel. The cemetery in both places was surrounded by pine-treas many of them over a hundred years old. These were set on fire. The fire-brigade fought vigorously to put down the flames, but before they were subdued, a great part of the cemetery garden was destroyed and many graves near the fence were damaged. Two youths were seen trying to escape from the scene at Ziegenhain and they were pursued by the gendarmes and arrested.

General Freiherr von Schoenaich, who after the Great War in which he was one of the German Commanders, became a leader of the pacifist movement, has written to the “Israelitische Familienblatt” that having just returned from Palestine where he has seen the young Jews building up a better community of people, he is filled with shame to see how in Germany Jewish cemeteries continue to be desecrated.

I have always felt that the desecration of Jewish cemeteries is a disgusting thing and a disgrace to civilisation, the General writes. The only modifying circumstance is, perhaps, the fact that the perpetrators, mostly young people, grew up during the war without parental guidance, their fathers being absent at the front, and that they therefore ran wild and lost all sense of decency. When I was in Palestine recently I saw how young Jews from many nations, carried there by sentiments of noble idealism, are building up a new and better Community of human beings. What I saw in Palestine makes me blush the more for the degradation of our own people which leads to the desecration of Jewish cemeteries. Unfortunately, I must confess that when I was abroad there were many things done by our countrymen which made me feel ashamed of them. If I had not, because of other reasons, become a pacifist, the General concludes, I would have become an opponent of war because I realise now how war inevitably makes brutes of men.