Cleveland Rabbis’ Assault Irks Consul, Who Sought to Whitewash Nazi Rule

In statements issued to newspapers here, Rabbis Barnett R. Brickner and Abba Hillel Silver sharply attacked Dr. Hans Borchers, German consul in Cleveland, who attempted to justify Nazi outrages against the Jews.

Rabbi Brickner flayed Dr. Borchers as a “Hitlerite and a paid Nazi propagandist. Dr. Borchers, in his attempt to whitewash the Hitler regime seeks to deny what even the German government itself has admitted, namely the plan to reduce the Jews to second-rate citizenship,” said Rabbi Brickner.

“If Dr. Borchers were not a Hitler sympathizer, he would never have been named to replace the German Consul General in New York even temporarily,” continued Rabbi Brickner. “He is a paid propagandist and any statement he makes is bound to be colored.”

Dr. Borchers states that no action has been taken against the Jews as such. He says that most of the Jews removed were Communists or Socialists. Was Oscar Wassermann who lost his post as head of the Reichsbank a Communist. Were the professional and business men who were deprived of their livelihood radicals? There is no doubt that the Nazi party has ousted the Jews from office and put in its own followers.”

In his comment on Dr. Borchers’ statement, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver said, “I was shocked at the gross misstatement of facts contained in the interview. When Dr. Borchers says ‘no action against the Jews has been taken’, he is voicing either ignorance or something much worse. If he has no copy of the Reich ###, I will give him my copy. I hope that they will not come as too great a shock to his strangely innocent heart and mind.

“These laws decree that all Jews in Germany shall be dismissed from all government positions, from all civil service posts, from the state railways and from the Reichsbank. They deprive all lawyers of the right to practice unless they fought in the World War, or lost their fathers or sons in the war. If a man was too young to go to war or was not “fortunate” enough to have his father killed in the trenches, he is denied the right to practice law in Nazi Germany. These are the laws, not the acts of a ‘few irresponsible persons’.”

In his original statement to the Cleveland press issued upon his return from New York Dr. Borchers characterized the anti-Semitism of Hitler as a political housecleaning for the welfare of the German people. He insisted that the emphasis upon the Jewish question was most extraordinary and was not understood by the German people. He asserted that the dismissed Jews were Communists and Socialists and that if any excesses occurred, the perpetrators had been punished by Hitler. Dr. Borchers also stated that photographs showing that outrages had been perpetrated against the Jews were plain fakes.

When the indignant statements of the Cleveland Rabbis were called to his attention Dr. Borchers answered by charging them with “constantly bringing—to put it mildly—a distinctly one-sided picture before the American public, to discredit the present German government.”