To-day After War is over We Jewish Soldiers Who Fought for Germany During War Find We Still Have to

To-day, after the war, we Jewish soldiers who fought for Germany at the front, find that in spite of everything we still have to fight for our most elementary rights as Germans, Dr. Leo Loewenstein, the President of the Federation of Jewish Ex-Soldiers in Germany, writes in the official organ of his Federation, “Der Schild”, in connection with this week’s celebrations of the 60th, anniversary of the foundation of the German Reich.

On this day, Dr. Loewenstein says, we German Jews must be clear in our own minds what it is the Reich requires of us and to what extent we have given what is required of us to the Reich, and on the other hand, what we have a right to require from the Reich. We realise that we Jews are a small minority in Germany. We number only .9 percent. of the German population. It is a subject for pride, therefore, that we can claim that at all times we have done much more than was required of us for the welfare of the Reich. In the most difficult days, during the war, we gave our blood for Germany. Yet we have had to defend ourselves against the base calumnies of the Hitlerists, who accused us of shirking, and we had to produce statistics to prove that 12,000 Jews laid down their lives on the battlefield for Germany. The leadership of the country is being taken over now by the generation that fought in the war, and its representative is now the head of the State. It is our hope that this will result in restoring the spirit of comradeship of our German people now so divided against itself – that community of all for all, that we once knew at the front.