Jewish Chief of Police in Cologne Says Post-war Germany Will Not Be Barren of Jews

The belief that the German people are deeply indocrinated with anti-Semitism was expressed here today by Carl Winkler, the German Jew who was appointed chief of police in Cologne by the American military authorities. This holds good for a considerable proportion of non-Nazis, he said today in an interview with the correspondent of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

A mild little man, with small graying moustaobe, Winkler despairs of the revival of a German Jewish community, believing that Hitler has succeeded in his aim of wiping this out. However, he thinks that eventually many Polish and Rumanian Jews who settled in Germany and then fled to France, will some day return, and with other surviving Eastern Jews will re-build Jewish communities despite anti-comitism. He does not believe that Germany will be barren of Jews for centuries, like Spain after the Inquisition.

“The Jews who migrated to America and England will return to claim their property, but when they see Cologne, they’ll leave again,” the Jewish Chief of Police predicted. “If it were possible to leave, I’d go myself, on foot, if I could.” Exhibiting a yellow Jewish star, he continued; “I never went out in the street, not wanting to submit myself to the shame of wearing this. The Nazis constantly added restrictions such as forbidding Jews to ride on trams and reducing rations. Finally they placed such childish restrictions as forbidding Jews the use of electric irons. In January, 1944 we were given five days to leave our homes and assigned to single rooms for each family in designated Jewish houses.

“Last September 12, the remaining 300 Jews, all of whom, were inter-married, and their families were commanded to register at Fort Mungersdorf. Half complied and they were deported, although their wives and children were freed. The other half, who had refused to comply with the order, hid and thus perhaps 150 of the original 18,000 Jews remain. Of the remaining, only a half are religious Jews, the others are converted to other religions.”

Winkler came to the job although he was enfeebled by months of tension hiding in basements from the Nazis and the Allied bombings. A high civil servant since the early days of the Weimar Republic, he presided over the police in the Number One district of Berlin from 1927 to 1929. Then he went to Cologne as vice-president of police until 1933 when Jews were banished from office. Because he was married to an Aryan, Winkler was not deported to the East in 1941. He was put into forced labor, however. Since he was too ill to work in a factory, he was given buttons to sew on uniforms at home.