The Week in Review

Hitler’s Drite Reich appears to be heading straight for an economic debacle. All the news available indicates that despite their seeming contempt for the anti-Nazi boycott in progress throughout the world, Nazi leaders have at last come to the realization that their persecution of the Jews and their destruction of the German labor organizations has led to the ruin of their foreign trade.

For the first time since the Nazis came into power, Adolf Hitler, despite his almost pathological hatred for everything Jewish, intervened and told a meeting of Nazi governors of the various states that he would not permit local Nazi troops to carry on individual campaigns against the Jews.

Other national leaders have also spoken out against the actions of local groups and warned the “150 per cent Nazi” that they were ruining the German economic structure.

But at the same time the national leaders are attempting to halt the agitation against the Jews, local groups, particularly in the Nuremberg region, where Julius Streicher, notorious anti-Semite, reigns supreme, are whipping up sentiment for new attacks on the Jews.

In Gunzenhausen, which is forty miles from Nuremberg, a pogrom broke out. One Jew was so brutally beaten that he hanged himself in desperation, while another Jewish resident was found with four knife wounds in his heart. The excuse for the pogrom was that a Jew had expectorated on a storm troopers’ uniform. The Jewish residents of the town were so terrorized that they refused to give any information on the pogrom.

German Jews are fearful that as the economic situation in Germany becomes worse they will be the sufferers for it. They fear pogroms and capital levies on the grounds that they are responsible for the anti-Nazi boycott.

PALESTINE

Jerusalem was the center of in terest for the Zionists of the world last week. The Actions Committee of the World Zionist Organization met there to discuss present day Zionist problems.

The sessions of the Actions Committee were featured by sharp criticism against the immigration policy of the Palestine government and criticism in the Zionist movement, which has led to open conflicts in the streets of Palestinian cities between the factions. All the speakers pleaded for unity in the Zionist movement.

The municipality of Tel Aviv appointed a special committee to confer with the Zionist factions and to work out a plan whereby all clashes among them would be avoided. The Tel Aviv city council appealed to the population to keep cool.

AUSTRIA

Acting on a report submitted by a special committee, the city of Vienna decided to eliminate from Austrian libraries the works of noted Jewish writers, including Schnitzler, Werfel, Feuchtwanger, Wasserman and a number of others.

The new Fascist constitution for Austria will include vast dictatorial powers for the head of the corporative Austrian state, it was announced. Prince von Starhemberg once more told American newspapermen that “force will not solve the Jewish problem in Austria.” He also expressed his dislike for numerous clausus against the Jews.

However, the movement to eliminate Jews from professions or to reduce their numbers to the proportion of Jews in the general population continues unchecked.

THE REST OF EUROPE

The Polish Jewish economic organization issued a declaration stating that the signing of the Polish German trade treaty was no reason for the cessation of the anti-Nazi boycott. They called attention to the tragic situation of the German Jews and called for the energetic prosecution of the boycott.

The World Revisionist Union in Paris announced that it had ordered Palestine adherents to withdraw from the Vaad Leumi, the Jewish National Council of Palestine, because the organization, it was alleged, was “dominated by a section practicing violence.”

A provisional committee met in the home of Lady Asquith in London to discuss plans for establishing libraries in London and other European cities for the works of the German authors whose books were burned in the Nazi bonfire in Berlin.

THE UNITED STATES

From Washington comes the news that a number of important conferences are going on at the State Department on the subject of German trade and the money owed the United States by Germany. Ambassador Dodd is in Washington participating in the conferences.

It is thought that a trade treaty may be negotiated between the United States and Germany and that the American government will ask the Germans to end their persecutions of the Jews and the labor movement in order that the boycott against German goods might end.

A special committee of forty-eight prominent American men and women, appointed by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, brought in a report urging special consideration for German refugees within the limits of the existing laws. The committee stressed the American tradition of asylum for those fleeing from religious and racial persecutions.