Following yesterday’s bloody clash between Berlin police and Jewish demonstrators–the second in two days–distributors of the British ### “Oliver Twist,” today indefinitely withdrew the movie from circulation in this city “as a matter of expediency,” About 25 Jews were injured, four of them seriously though to be hospitalized, in the melee which followed Jewish protests against the ### which has been labeled anti-Semitic.
In London, leading Jewish organizations, including the British section of the World Jewish Congress, urged British authorities to withdraw the picture in which begin, a Jewish character, is portrayed in a manner calculated, the organizations aid, to provoke renewed anti-Semitism. The Congress in its letter to the Foreign Office pointed out that the “German people, steeped for 12 years in Hitler’s doctrine ## Jew hatred, will not understand that Fagin is merely a figment of Dickens’ imagination.”)
The British-produced movie, which has previously been banned in the U.S. and French zones of occupation, was described as “poison for the Germans” by a group of prominent Germans, including Lord Mayor Ernst Reuter, in a petition handed to the British military government authorities here. The letter urged that the film be recalled.
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