Notes on Germany

The Nazi party has had its conference at Nuremberg. It was the biggest gathering of its kind ever known in Germany. Reading about oxen roasted whole in public and a banquet at which half a million persons sat down reminds one of Goethe’s account of the coronation of the Emperor at Frankurt which he attended as a child. But standards were lower then. The vast numbers and the huge expenditure at the Nuremberg conference are reminiscent rather of the condition of the United States at the peak of its prosperity. Except that no party in America would dare, as the Nazis have done, to pay for their party conference, estimated to have cost more than ten million marks, largely out of the state treasury. It is openly admitted that the sum of from four or five million marks required for putting up halls and tribunes came out of the unemployment insurance fund, on the ground that it provided productive relief work for the unemployed. The rest was raised almost entirely by the use of blackmail, for the collections of so-called voluntary contributions are nothing more nor less than blackmail and bribery.

The number of persons at Nuremberg during the conferences was exactly the number of Jews there are in Germany. About one percent of the German population was assembled at Nuremberg. Jews constitute about one percent of the German population, and this one percent, of which ten percent has already crossed the frontiers of Germany, were the crux of all the speeches made by the present rulers of Germany.

The criminal, as every criminologist knows, can never get his crime out of his mind. He is constantly dwelling on it. He has always the desire to talk about it and often, dreaming or waking, he betrays himself by this constant thinking on his misdeed. It was so at Nuremberg.

Hitler, Goering, Rosenberg kept harping on the Jews. Goebbels asserted once more that the Jews are behind all the row being made against Germany the world over. He and his party comrades and, unfortunately, millions of the German nation, are still unable to comprehend that it is the injustice of the thing that is turning the world against them, that there is such a thing as world conscience, that the massacre of defenseless minorities is still regarded as a crime and that people still feel that states which are capable of making brutality and injustice maxims of their internal government constitute a danger to the entire world because the fear is inevitable that Germany will use the same methods against other nations that it is employing against its own subjects.

The same Goebbels said that his speech would have the most dangerous consequences for the Jews, for other nations too would learn from Germany to ponder Jewish problems. Goebbels is most skillful in exploiting the fear complex of certain Jews who fear public discussion of the Jewish question. But Jews need not fear world-wide discussion of the Jewish question. Indeed it will be an advantage for them. For the first time people have learned, as a result of this public discussion, what a vast part the one percent of the Jewish population in Germany has played in a population of sixty millions. For the first time the world has found out what a disproportionately large section of those Germans who raised Germany to international fame in all branches of art, literature, science and sport are Jews, whose community has had the right to participate in the life of the country as full citizens for less than a hundred years. Nazi-ism itself was put into practice for the first time in Germany by the Jew Ferdinand Lassalle, as La Stampa, official organ of Mussolini, recently revealed.

World discussion of the Jewish question already has achieved a great moral success. For example, the Italian charge d’affairs appeared at Prague at the Zionist Congress on behalf of Signor Mussolini and was officially welcomed. The official Italian Telegraphic Agency, the Agenzia Stefani, reported the Zionist Congress at length and through these reports the Italian press obtained for the first time a picture of Jewish persecution in Germany.

Fools do not seem to see the approaching retribution; they do not observe that their words are having quite a different effect on the outside world from that which they desire them to have. But Psalm 94 remains as true as ever: “For the Lord will not cast off His People. Neither will He forsake His inheritance. For right shall return unto justice.”