Stand on Jewish Dp Camp Becomes Political Issue in Bavaria

A Bavarian parliamentary committee on refugees today visited the Foehrenwald Camp for Displaced Persons, where the last remaining 2, 000 Jewish DP’s in Germany reside, to inspect the conditions under which these Jewish survivors of Nazism live.

The DP situation has become an important political issue in this state as a result of the request of the Bavarian State Secretary for Refugees, Prof. Theodor Oberlaender, for extraordinary powers to “create order in Foehrenwald.” The Joint Distribution Committee and the Central Council of Jews in Germany, meanwhile, have intervened in the situation in an attempt to keep Prof. Oberlaender’s actions from working new hardships on the DP’s.

Herr Oberlaender, a Sudetan German who was a high ranking Nazi official in occupied Czechoslovakia and Russia during the war, is understood to contemplate such a drastic step as slashing governmental subsidies to the camp whose inmates have no independent income of their own and depend on German relief. He has also intimated that he would like to supplant the Jewish camp police with German policemen and turn over the best building in the camp to non-Jewish refugees of German origin.

The Secretary for Refugees also wants to oust “illegal” DP’s now residing in the camps. These “illegal” are chiefly Jews who immigrated to Israel and then returned to Bavaria in an attempt to proceed to the United States or Canada. Meanwhile, some dissension in the camp between the “old” DP’s and the “illegal” is playing into Prof. Oberlaender’s hands.