Chief Rabbi Hertz, in a broadcast today over the BBC network, predicted that anti-Semitism will lose its influence in the new world after the war, and urged that post-war punishment for the atrocities committed on civilians and soldiers should be confined to the Nazi leaders only, and should not be imposed upon the entire German nation.
“Wholesale condemnation of any race, of any people, is inconsistent with a rational approach to the great human problem of how to deal with the enemy peoples, that will face us after the war,” the Chief Rabbi said. “It is true, we cannot in justice condone and we shall not condone the stubborn inhumanities of the Nazis, or the unspeakable cruelties of the Japanese, in Hong Kong and after Hong Kong. But punishment must be confined to the bloodstained leaders who conceived, and the dehumanized agents who carried out these devilish crimes. The argument, that, for example, millions of German nationals have long approved those doings of their rulers does not justify vengeance upon the entire German nation.
“We must remember that the Germans have gone through the greatest school of brutality in the world – the German army. The task therefore facing us is nothing less than their systematic reschooling for membership in human, as opposed to military society. It is a hard task and it will prove a weary task, remedies have been proverbially slower than diseases but it is the only road that will lead to enduring peace,” Rabbi Hertz concluded.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
