The Jewish people will lose the fight against the “regeneration of Nazism” unless it enlists allies outside the Jewish communities, Simon Wiesenthal, the war crimes investigator, said here. He was less worried about the numbers of Nazis in the world than about the lack of anti-Nazis, he told the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
Wiesenthal aimed his warning mainly at American Jewish leaders who, he claimed, had scoffed at his calls to remember not just the six million Jewish martyrs but members of the other European nations who fell victim to the Nazis racial persecutors. “They told me I also remember the Gypsies, Poles, Czechs, Dutch and others who were murdered.” he said.
“Our big mistake since the war was to ignore the victims among other nations, and to reduce the atrocities of the war merely to a problem of the Nazis against the Jews, instead of trying to form a brother-hood of victims we treat the other peoples who suffered like ‘Shabbos goys’,” he added.
Referring to the present resurgence of anti-Semitism, Wiesenthal said it was reminiscent of the 1920s rather than the 1930s. But this was no reason to belittle it, he warned. In the 1920s, people made the fatal mistake of ridiculing Hitler’s National Socialists, who seized power a decade later. Today, there are neo-Nazis in jail in West Germany and anti-Semitic literature is flooding Europe from the United States, where, due to the liberal U.S. Constitution, it is produced and printed in six languages, Wiesenthal stated.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
