Notes on Germany

There are still non-suspect witnesses in Germany, or at least such as the Nazi government cannot suspect because it itself has permitted them to come forward as witnesses.

One of these, the Frankfurter Zeitung, has publicly disclosed that, far from subsiding, the boycott movement against Jewish enterprises, Jewish doctors and Jewish lawyers has been intensified. Dr. Hans Luther, German Ambassador to the United States, on his return to America from his leave, spent in Germany, tried to belittle the atrocities committed by German sadism against the Jews. He could not of course deny them. But he thought he could draw a veil over them with the assertion that the Jewish question was not the central point in the German revolution, but only one of the many problems which the German people is trying to solve.

It is true that there are a great many problems which await solution under the Third Reich, but since the solution of these other problems is more than those now in power in Germany can achieve, they are throwing themselves more heartily into the attempt to solve what they call the Jewish question.

Apart from the Munich broadcasts into Austria by means of which it is attempted to incite the people against the Dollfuss government, the Jewish question has in fact been pushed into the very centre of the so-called national revolution.

It is characteristic of the intensification of the anti-Jewish movement in Germany that every month more lawyers who had originally been placed on lists of non-Aryan lawyers who were to be permitted to continue their practice are being struck off those lists.

Among those who have recently been struck off the list of lawyers is Erich Kochweser, who was for many years leader and deputy in the Reichstag of the Democratic Party. Kochweser is not of the Jewish faith; he is a member of the Protestant communion, but he did have a Jewish mother, and his Jewish heritage therefore outweighs the fact that his wife is the daughter of a General and that even under the Kaiser he held office as Lord Mayor of the city of Cassel.

But Herr Kochweser would probably have been thrown to the dogs even without the inconvenient admixture of Jewish blood in his veins. For human victims are being sacrificed daily, and not only to the race theory. The success of the National Socialist policy requires that every one who may become an inconvenient competitor to the mediocrities who have been clustering around the National Socialist organizations must be removed.

THE BRIGHT IDEA

It was an excellent idea, therefore, not to stop with Jews but to attach the yellow badge even to those large numbers of baptized Jews and even those born and reared as Christians who have had one Jewish grandparent in order to get rid of them.

It would have been safer to go still further back, to great-grandparents, but who then would have been immune? Even the grandson of the founder of the German Empire, Prince Bismarck, has discovered to his consternation that he and his brother, who is one of the supreme leaders of the Nazis, had a Jewish great-grandfather. He had always thought that his ancestor was a true-blooded Anglo-Saxon Lord but now it is definitely established that this lord, who was, on the maternal side, a member of the Vonarnum family, was head of all the Jewish communities in England.

The number of non-Aryans against whom action can be taken has been almost exhausted. So now the reserves are being called up in the form of Communists and Socialists who are also full Aryans. The new policy is to strike against everyone who does not visibly sympathize with the Nazi movement.

Not only Kochweser, who was once federal minister of justice and federal minister of the interior, but even harmless members of the Catholic Centre Party have been shoved out of the Civil Service or have had their names struck off the lists of lawyers permitted to practice. Which is a practical illustration of the state of justice in present-day Germany. There’s no revolt among German intellectuals against Jewish persecutions. They have themselves been made to feel how things can be run once the groundwork of equality and legality has been cut away.

The Social Democrats went to a Reichstag that had been deprived of its legal mandate with the nullification of the Communist mandate. They, the Social Democrats, were the next victims, and after them the Centrists and the German Nationalists were pounced upon.

Herr Kochweser and his colleagues thought they would escape, that only Jewish Communist lawyers would be struck off. Now they will complain. They might have thought a little sooner of their maternal ancestors to whom the conceptions of justice and peace were not merely fine-sounding words.