red, white and black flag flies from every building, while the French tri-color is seen almost nowhere except at the offices of the French mining directors.
The Bahnhofstrasse, main avenue in this city, and its adjacent streets are illuminated in the evenings with myriads of small, colored lamps, which give a festive air to the business section. In contrast with this holiday atmosphere is the attitude of many of the city’s residents, who foresee a dark future.
DEUTSCHE FRONT DRIVE
With France virtually out of the picture, antagonism is confined to the rival Deutsche Front and status quo camps. The former group is the noisier, with its weekly meetings, its daily papers, its illustrated weeklies, its humorous publications and its radio exhortations, all of which prophesy a ninety-eight per cent vote for a Reich regime.
Numbered among the status quo proponents are Liberals, Democrats, Socialists, Communists, and, since recently, many Catholics, all of whom have found new courage in formation of the German League for Christian-Socialist Community.
In an interview with Johann Hoffman, former member of the German Reichstag, both of whom are leaders in the above organization, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reporter was told of a terrorization campaign being waged in the Saar by the Deutsche Front, aimed both at the Jews and at all other supporters of status quo.
JEWS LONG RESIDENTS OF SAAR
Outstanding Jews in Saarbruecken and other communities and high officers of the present government, who are working under supervision of the Englishman Geoffrey Knox, president of the government commission, confirmed these reports.
Of the 5,000 Jews, comprising 0.6 per cent of the 830,000 inhabitants of the Saar, 47.5 per cent reside in Saarbruecken, which contains seventeen Jewish religious congregations.
Jews were already living in the Saar Basin the thirteenth century. In 170 the Jews of Saarbruecken formed 0.3 per cent of the population.
Not many Jews are engaged in the professions here. Of the 440 physicians only thirty-six are Jewish.
SPIRITED ACROSS BORDER
Jews in the Saar belong largely to the middle class. They are manufacturers, shop keepers, and, in rural sections, cattle breeders. All are having a difficult time at present. They receive anonymous letters and frequently lose their jobs. Several of them have been taken across the German frontier by force in curtained automobiles.
Jewish landlords are unable to collect rents and non-Jews are ordered to go to “Aryan” instead of Jewish physicians and lawyers. But there is no important, organized anti-Semitic agitation, as it is part of the tactical plan of the Deutsche Front to treat the Jews as a negligible quantity.
Hermann Roechling, Nazi industrialist in Voelklingen, and Jacob Pirro, both Hitlerite leaders in the Saar, deny the “Aryan” paragraph will be enforced here after January 13, but little confidence is placed in their pledges or in declarations made by Baron von Neurath to Baron Aloisi.
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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.
