Ousting of Jews from Reich, Austria to Be Completed in 6 Weeks, Washington Reports

Within four to six weeks there will be no more Jews left in Germany or Austria, except for some thousands of military age used as slave Labor and those held in concentration camps, according to information received by the United States Government today.

With Austria virtually emptied of its pre-Anschluss Jewish population of 200,000 and with comparatively few of the pre-Hitler Reich Jewish population of 550,000 remaining, the seven-year process of ridding these territories of their Jews is nearing completion, comprising one of the greatest forced excuses of modern times.

Germany’s systematic liquidation of its Jewish population has been pushed to unprecedented lengths within the past few weeks, according to official reports reaching Washington.

Every night, night after night, sealed trains have been pouring across the border from occupied into unoccupied France, loaded with German Jews stripped of virtually all their possessions and near starvation. An almost equal number of sealed trains have been shuttled into Nazi-occupied Poland.

It was this endless dumping of refugees into unoccupied France that prompted the two recent efforts of the Vichy Government to obtain aid from the United States in resettling refugees in the Western hemisphere. And it was because the United States realized that to accept responsibility for the refugees would be to play into Germany’s hands that the French appeals were rejected.

The situation in unoccupied France, already desperate when French Ambassador Gaston Henry-Haye handed a note to Secretary of State Cordell Hull a month ago, has grown more chaotic day by day, according to advices reaching Washington.

The Vichy Government is powerless to halt the stream of trains, packed with a miserable human cargo, across its borders. The trains are loaded and sealed in Germany, then shuttled across occupied France into the unoccupied zone. When the Vichy officials break the seal on their side of the border, they find them jammed with German Jews, who in the last few months have consisted almost entirely of old men and women and young children, those of emigration age having already left for the most part.

The French have persistently made efforts to send the trains back across the border into German-occupied territory, but the Nazis have refused to accept them.

The refugees are being crowded into concentration camps in unoccupied France where conditions have been indescribably miserable for many months. The French Government has been allowing nine francs a day for the subsistence of each refugee, but because of food shortage it has been able to distribute only four francs’, worth of food per capita in most of the camps, according to reports reaching here.