Nazi Cruelty Against Foes Continues Unabated

Special Correspondent of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency who has recently returned from an investigation of Nazi Germany

Principally on the strength of atrocity propaganda, the world nineteen years ago massed its men against Germany and carried out the most disastrous war of history. Today Germany finds herself fighting to overcome reports being circulated abroad. The effects of the atrocity propaganda of 1933 promise to be quite as catastrophic as those of 1915, when Germany was damned in the eyes of the world as a nation of “Huns” following reports of the Belgian atrocities.

By her own stupidity Germany is less able to refute atrocity propaganda today than she was during the World War. Until the Nazi authorities radically change their policies of secrecy, intrigue, and suppression of freedom, the world has every right to believe every rumor emanating from Germany and to some extent to use its imagination regarding conditions in that country.

The National Socialist officials of Germany have severed all connections with the foreign press, making it impossible for correspondents to verify reports. The Nazis have instituted a death penalty for persons who tell the truth about conditions in Germany. Both the German press and the corps of foreign correspondents are restricted from reporting frankly and thoroughly all German news. Approximately twenty thousand persons in Germany have been imprisoned without trial because it was alleged that they or their relatives had dared speak or speculate on conditions in Germany.

WILD RUMORS SEEM PROBABLE

Certain facts encountered by this writer in Germany make the wildest rumors about conditions there seem factually possible—if not probable. Talking with twenty foreign correspondents, I heard from each one stories, well supported by evidence, which could not be dispatched by them to their respective newspapers. A number referred to the “suicide” of a prominent non-Nazi in Koenigsberg concentration camp as typical of conditions in these vile prisons. Nazis naively had announced that this person had committed suicide “by shooting himself 37 times”, after doctors had extracted the lead from the cadaver.

During my stay in Germany I had been allowed to go though concentration camps. The Nazi escorts were courteous, and with few exceptions they showed all parts of the prisons. But it was not until I had met released prisoners that I learned of the true conditions existing there.

A Jew, released from the Sonnenberg Zuchthaus, substantiating his stories with testimony in the form of documents and body mutilations, revealed many things I had missed during a visit to this political prison. Jews in this prison had been forced to humiliate themselves in unspeakable ways before other prisoners; they were given chores in the filthiest parts of the camp; they were used for purposes of sport by their storm-trooper guards. At times they had been forced to stand facing the prison wall while their guards tested their markmanship by seeing how close they could shoot without actually hitting the prisoners. If the prisoner was hurt or killed by gunshot wounds—the guard’s markmanship was considered bad.

SEALED COFFINS HIDE TRUTH

I had been allowed to see only eight of forty patients in the Sonnenberg Zuchthaus infirmary. When questioned by the guards, the patients declared that they suffered from stomach and heart ailments. One little fellow, his nerves shattered, reported that his illness had come from “natural causes.”

From authoritative sources it was learned that many of those who “die” in concentration camp are sent home in sealed coffins. Persons breaking the seals to examine the bodies are threatened with imprisonment.

Nazis themselves have admitted that a number of prisoners, trying to escape from concentration camp, had been shot in flight. Released prisoners state that many in concentration camp had been shot while walking about the yard and their cases reported as “shot while escaping.”

Also reported by their Nazi captors are scores of suicides within the walls or barricades of concentration camps. The relatives of one such victim told me that a large majority of these cases were pure fake. In this particular case, the man had been promised his freedom a few days before his death. He had talked with his wife and daughter shortly before his scheduled release and appeared extremely happy at the prospects of being free again.

“PNEUMONIA” AND A ROPE

Three days later the body was delivered in an unsealed coffin to the home with the explanation that he had died of pneumonia. Investigation disclosed marks of a rope encircling his throat, and when representations were made to concentration camp officials, the matter was curtly dismissed with the announcement that he had “hanged himself in his cell.”

Atrocities committed against foreigners in Germany are seldom reported. Considerable furore has resulted abroad from assaults on American citizens in Berlin, only because Germany does not yet feel as though she were in a position to defy Washington. Austrians, Poles, Dutch, and others, however, are nationally too weak to protest against maltreatment and they must take in silence what they are given.

The German press and the German people are kept in absolute ignorance of the attitude of foreign governments toward Nazi Germany. Thus, when three Americans were beaten recently by brownshirts for having failed to give the Nazi salute, the German press carried not a line of ensuing complications. The German people are allowed to know even less about incidents involving their own nationals or citizens of weaker states.

Nor are all the attacks against Americans, British, and French aired either in Germany or abroad. It has not been announced, for instance, that two American sailors were arrested by brownshirts at Bremerhaven for having failed to act like Nazis; nor that a Jewish American citizen (although he speaks little English) was arrested and beaten as a German Communist in Hamburg; nor that another American Jew was dragged from his bicycle in Hamburg on July 4 and his American flag trampled upon by Nazi hoodlums. Apologies were made for all these insults, but as yet no measures have been taken to prevent their recurrence.

Since March more than eighty Jews have been patients in the hospitals of Breslau, many of them for injuries incurred in “falling down stairs.” Doctors in many parts of Germany have told me that they are forced to sign documents declaring that victims of Nazi punishment had “fallen down stairs.”

RECIPE FOR LITERARY SUCCESS

While the consequences of Nazi action against Jews and political enemies are carefully kept secret, the attitude of the Nazis is quite openly expressd. To become a succussful writer in Germany today it is necessary only to villify the Jew. Germany is fairly littered with pamphlets of all descriptions, newspapers and books denouncing the Jew in the most scathing manner. Many newspapers sell purely because headline writers abuse the Jew in their largest front page print.

The heartlessness of Nazis toward the Jew is typified in a recent edition of the Ost Deutsche Post, which carried a brief announcement of the suicide in Glogau of the Jewess Mendelsohn, who killed herself immediately following highschool graduation because of the taunts of her classmates. The head line read: “Zur Nachmahung Empfahlen” (Recommended for Imitation).

Behind an impenetrable cloak of secrecy the Nazis in Germany are doing as they see fit with those who displease them. Undoubtedly thousands of the “greul propaganda (atrocity propaganda) rumors that find their way into the foreign press have no substance in fact; but it must be remembered that even more startling facts are being kept secret by the Nazis.

VICTIMS FEAR TO TALK

The effectiveness of Nazi news suppression was brought home late in July when I went to Nuremberg to get the true facts of a reported arrest of 300 Jews. Interviews with ten of the arrested Jews proved fruitless, when each in turn either refused to see me or to state that there had been an arrest. They were poor shivering creatures, too terrified to discuss the weather. Later, in conversation with Julius Streicher, self-asserted “anti-Semitic fanatic” and leader of the national oneday boycott of Jews, and Stormtroop Leader Obernitz of Nuremberg, it was admitted that 160 Jews had been rounded up by brownshirts, marched outside the city, and questioned for five hours, after which all had been released.

A few weeks later Jews who had been among those arrested in Nuremberg secretly narrated in Berlin how they had been marched out of the city and forced by burly stormtroopers to sing Nazi songs, dance, eat grass, dig up roots with their teeth, and climb trees. Two had fallen from the trees, it was said, and suffered broken legs.

To this day the world cannot be sure of what happened in Nuremberg. Until the Nazi reign of terror is lifted so that all Germans will feel free to speak the truth, until the newspapers are unimpeded in their reporting such news (German newspapers did not mention the arrest) and until constituted authorities of the German government are created to examine such cases, the world must place as much credence in the atrocity reports as in “official” statements of Nazi Streicher and Nazi Obernitz.

MANY FEAR TO TALK

Nor is Nuremberg the only city in which Jews and others are too terrified to talk. Old friends whom I had known previously in Germany and many persons to whom I carried letters of introduction begged me not to quote them in articles on Germany; others refused to discuss the situation; and still others refused to see me at all in my capacity as correspondent. Only in the utmost privacy would a few Jews whom I had known for years talk politics.

The attitude of Jews in Germany is distinctly similar to that of people I had seen during the recent Southern California earthquake—people who shuddered and shivered with each tremblor, marvelling that they had survived for so long—yet sleeplessly fearful that the next shock would bring their homes tumbling down on their heads. A half dozen Jews have remarked to me, “If I ever get out of Germany, I shall spend a full week in blessed sleep. Since March, nights have been a hideous nightmare.”

Having seen Chinese slaughtered in wholesale lots and having seen Chinese cities wiped out in Japan’s undeclared wars in Shanghai and Manchuria, I am no longer impressed as I should be with individual atrocities. After China, the fact that the non-Nazi head of Ford’s plant on the Rhine was forced to come to Berlin and humiliate himself before the high Nazi potentates, or the fact that a German girl employee of the American Eastman Kodak factory in Germany was sentenced to prison because she testified in favor of an ousted Jewish girl co-worker, or the fact that Herr Margolina in Breslau was branded on the head with the swastika, or the fact that a woman was sentenced by Breslau courts to eight months imprisonment because she had told neighbors that she had seen Margolina in the hospital, or the fact that a Jew was dragged from a table next to mine in a Kurfurstendamm cafe and turned over to brownshirts because he was overheard disagreeing with the Nazi policy toward the Catholic church—none of these isolated incidents is, by itself alone, greatly impressive.

THE REAL ATROCITIES

The great tragedy of Germany lies in the more subtle, but infinitely more powerful, general influences. The atrocity of Nazi rulers in forcing their subjects to read newspapers that fairly stink with lies and propaganda; the self-inflicted atrocity of the German people in allowing themselves to be intimidated into the surrender of all their inherited rights to a small perverted political clique; the atrocity of bludgeoning out of existence all religions, expressive of humanity’s most profound emotions, and substitution of a God whose creation is based on inter-racial and international hate; the atrocity of forcing the youth of a country to be educated to a love of war, inequality of human beings, national selfishness, and surrender of personal rights to the government; the atrocity of destroying a fine culture and art to be replaced by the fetish of a single person, whose lineage is as common as clay and whose finer instincts are concentrated in a sadistic impulse for power through violence—these are the real atrocities in Germany.