(This is the sixth, and last, of a series of articles by Miss Thompson under the general title of “Hitler, the Menace,” based on personal observation and research in Germany.)
If floggings, beatings, and acts of individual violence are alone considered atrocities, then it must be stated that in Munich—and this fact is not universally true of Germany—the German National Revolution has proceeded with relatively little bloodshed. As far as I have been able to find from investigations in Munich, not more than perhaps twenty cases have occurred of personal violence against socialists, communists or Jews, and they all happened during the early days of the rising. I do not include several alleged communists “shot while trying to escape” from the Dachau concentration camp.
But the relative absence of violence in Munich is perhaps due to the fact that the National Revolution has no need whatever for it there. Bavaria was conquered by an extremely clever coup d’etat. That prevarication played a great role in accomplishing the conquest of Bavaria is another matter. Bourgeois standards of morality are not accepted by National Socialist leaders who believe with the communists that the end justifies the means. If it was necessary for the conquest of Bavaria to assure the Bavarian prime minister that no infringement of Bavarian rights was contemplated—and this only a few hours before all Bavarian rights were removed—the Hitler government had no hesitation in doing so.
Today the whole of the political, social, economic, and even intellectual life of Bavaria is in the hands of the Nazi government. It has taken only a few short weeks to accomplish by force and intrigue what centuries have not accomplished by discussion. And indeed, the unification of the German Reich is the trump card in the hands of the Nazis. The end of German particularism is greeted even outside Nazi circles, as a great historic step in the direction of progress.
NOT ONE UNCO-ORDINATE
The conquest has been complete. The Nazi government has not only occupied the political and police administration, but they have put under dictatorship all the Chambers of Commerce, and other employers’ organizations, the Trades Unions, the professional organizations of the so-called “free” intellectual callings—teachers, physicians, lawyers, musicians, stage artists—and the press. On March 5th, when the elections established the Nazis’ “legal” power, they had really a cell organization which penetrated into every trade and professional group in the country. While the police and the political authorities were taking over the state and municipal governments, these trade and professional organizations of Nazis were arbitrarily dissolving the executives of all of the professional organizations, clubs, and vereins, and putting them, until reorganized according to Nazi taste, under complete dictatorship. There is not today in Germany a single institution, public or private, which has freedom to express itself otherwise than in complete affirmation of the National Revolution.
Here in Munich it is forbidden to give out any statement regarding the ### in prison. It is known that there are 1,500 alleged communists in a concentration camp at Dachau near here. These communists are mostly charged with crimes which they might have committed if they had ever come to power. Already, as in Russia, one sees a complete shift away from the ideals of bourgeois justice. The Landsberg prison is full; some official let it leak out that there are in Munich, four hundred non-socialist (or, as they always say here ‘Marxist’, that being a term to cover everything liberal, democratic, pacifistic, or socialist) prisoners, including many editors of the conservative Muenchner Neuste Nachrichten, Prince Rupprecht’s former political adviser, Baron Aretin, and Dr. Gerlich, prominent Catholic, and publisher of Der Grade Weg (The Straight Path).
The estimate of the best-informed Munich newspaper men, who have put their figures together from reports of separate raids, and from what they know of the capacities of the Munich prisons, is that in Munich and its immediate environs, there are probably five thousand political prisoners.
Why these people are arrested is seldom made clear to them. All of the arrests are in violation of the constitution, which curiously enough is still legally in effect in Germany, and to which all of the ministers of the Nazi government took their oath. That hundreds are the victims of denunciations, perhaps made from reasons if personal malice, is certain. Dr. Falckenberg, the director of the Munich Kammerspiel, was, for instance, arrested and discovered later that the reason was because he had received some time ago a letter from a colleague in Russia. He had been denounced as a liason officer between Russia and Bavaria!
MISUNDERSTOOD WITTICISM
Dr. Sielmann, a Munich X-Ray specialist, never active politically, but a Jew, was arrested. He is certain that the arrest was due to denunciation. He was afterward released. The grounds for arrests are sometimes laughable. Three high-spirited and tactless young people had their photographs taken together, one of the boys with his hair plastered over his eye and a little moustache stuck on in imitation of Adolf Hitler. All three were arrested, as was a young woman in a shop to which they took the snap for enlargement, and who refused to undertake the work. She was later released, but {SPAN}###e{/SPAN} three young people are still in jail.
The conditions under which all these thousands of prisoners live are not atrocious unless it seems an atrocity to be arbitrarily deprived of freedom, held without trial and often without even the chance to consult a lawyer, under conditions of extreme discomfort. The Bavarian prisons are not modern. The political prisoner is usually confined to a cell often no larger than six by nine feet, which contains a wire bedspring with a thin and not clean mattreses, often no bed linen, and a water closet. The light is set so high and is so weak that it is impossible to read for more than a few hours a day. There is no chair and no chest of drawers. The prisoner is often allowed to have food sent in, at his own cost, but he is usually allowed to see even his wife only very occasionally, and in the presence of a guard. He is luckier if he is imprisoned with another person, because then he has a larger cell and companionship. And prison has made some strange alliances. A monarchist count may be put in the same cell with a former communist functionary.
NO ANTI-JEWISH ATROCITY?
The Prussian Minister of the Interior, Captain Goering, says that there are between forty and fifty thousand political prisoners in the Reich. None of them is guilty of a crime for which he could be imprisoned in any democratic or liberal country. On the contrary, they represent a very high level of pre-revolution capacity and character. But their incarceration is not regarded by the German government as an atrocity.
It is also not regarded by the German government as an atrocity that every Jew in Germany, six hundred thousand of them, is daily humiliated, branded as a potential traitor, described as of inferior blood, and threatened with the withdrawal of his entire means of existence, and that for thousands this threat is already an actuality.
The basis of the persecution of the Jews in Germany must be made clear to the outside world. The Jews are not accused of impeding the national revolution. The measures taken against them are in no sense comparable to the measures taken against the Social Democrats or the Communists. The action against the Jews rests on a theory maintained by the National Socialist Party for thirteen years, and incorporated in the twenty-five points of the original program, which was published in February 1920, and has never been withdrawn. The articles dealing with the Jews are number 4 to 9, and are as follows:
4. Only he can be a citizen who is one of us. (Volksgenosse). He alone is regarded as one of us, who is of German blood, regardless of his re-religious confession. No Jew, therefore can be regarded as one of us.
5. The right to determine the direction and laws of the state can only be granted to citizens. We demand, therefore, that every public office, whatever its character may be, and whether in federal, provincial, or municipal administration shall be occupied only by a citizen.
6. He who is not a citizen lives in Germany merely as a guest and stands under laws governing aliens.
7. We demand that the state be required in the first instance to secure work and a means of existence for its own citizens. If it is not possible to nourish the entire population of the state, citizens of foreign countries are to be expelled from the Reich.
8. All further immigration of non-Germans is to be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who entered Germany since August 1914 shall be expelled.
9. All citizens are to enjoy equal rights and responsibilities.
OFFICIALLY STILL CITIZENS
The actions which have been taken against the Jews since March 5th are in perfect harmony with this program. Officially, the Jews have not yet been deprived of citizenship in the German state. Practically speaking, however, they have been, because they certainly no longer enjoy equal rights with other members of the population. They are definitely in the position of aliens, and this is regardless of the length of their residence in Germany. There are Jewish families who have lived on German soil for seven hundred years, and for seven hundred years have played a role in the economic and cultural life of Germany, contributing to its science, its art and its-commerce. Today they are, de facto people without a country.
The anti-Semitic party program has been justified during fourteen years of National Socialist agitation on the basis of a racial theory propounded chiefly by a Frenchman, Gobineau, and an expatriate Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, that the Jews are an unassimilable people, that they are an eugenic menace, an intellectual menace and an economic menace. There is supposed to be such a thing as a Jewish geist or mentality, which is the result, not of environmental influences, but of tendencies inherent in the Jewish chromosomes, and therefore incorrigible.
WHAT JOSEPHUS FOUND
It is needless to say that the racial theory of which this is a part has not been accepted by an eminent scientist in the whole world. It is needless to point out that Josephus, writing of the Jews before Christ, attributed to them characteristics which are directly opposite to those attributed to them by Nazi “scientists” today. Josephus described them as a warlike people, greatly desired as mercenary soldiers, and disliked for their arrogance and pride of race. But intellectual arguments are quite out of the question with National Socialists. The incorrigibility of the Jew is a dogma of the National Socialist revolution; it has already been announced that the Chamberlain-Gobineau race theory must be taught in all the schools and colleges.
I remember asking Bertrand Russell once why, in view of his general sympathies, he did not declare himself a communist. He replied, “Because the communists think that the atom is a little bullet of matter, and I am very much afraid it isn’t.” The National Socialists, including their leader Adolf Hitler, think that mental and spiritual values inhere in transferable racial characteristics and although the vast majority of the scientific world are very much afraid that this is not so, it is the basis at this moment of a policy.
THE POPULAR ASPECT
There are, of course, other elements in it. The masses are not won to anti-Semitism by biological theories, but because they have been told over and over again that the Jews, by reason of their intriguing ways, their superficial cleverness, and their absence of patriotism have won for themselves the fattest positions in Germany, and that when the Nazis came in the Jews would fly out and good Germans would get their jobs. The anti-Semitism of the masses is the primitive anti-Semitism of the man-in-the-street economist who says: “All the money which has disappeared must have gone somewhere—the Jews have it!” As far as anti-Semitism exists among the proletariat, it has been fanned into flame and is artificial. Among the peasants it is the result of propaganda indicated by an official Nazi order issued in 1931: “The natural antagonism of the peasant to the Jew must be worked up to a white heat”.
Amongst the intellectuals, where the competition with the Jews has been really acute, and where strained relations between Jews and non-Jews are also partly the fault of Jews, who have been too guilty of nepotism and have tended to make cliques, even as the Christians have, there has always been genuine anti-Semitism—kept in check, however, by the ideas common to most of the civilzed world.
SEES NO ABATEMENT
Anti-Semitism, under National Socialism, has been ruthlessly exploited for fourteen years, during which an unceasing propaganda has played upon the instincts of envy, self-aggrandizement, inferiority-feeling, and aggression. The spirit of National Socialism is above all a fighting spirit, which has not yet been given an opportunity to turn itself loose upon the outside world. It therefore eats inward, and to anyone who knows Germany it is not surprising that the Jews should be among the first victims.
And he is an optimist who believes that the forces of race hatred, supported by pseudo-science and with the machine of a powerful state behind them, will readily abate.
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.
