Twenty years ago Europe, awakening dully out of the heavy sleep of public tranquility and prosperity, began to be aware of the steadily growing rumble of the drums of war. We are back once more in the ominous, uncertain days of 1913. The tom-tom is beating again. The shad#w of fear is enshrouding Europe. Men and women are asking not “will war come?” but “when”? But whatever doubts there may be of the time and place there is none as to the identity of the incendiary who aims to throw the brand into the gunpowder. Germany is planning a new disturbance. The so-called “National Revolution” in Germany is a monstrous lie. The so-called “New Germany” is a myth launched to hoodwink the world. The so-called new democracy of Germany is a falsehood.
“Deutschland erwache” — “Germany, awaken” is but a blatant half-truth—a raucous shout, to rouse the mob and befog its unthinking mind The truth is “Germany reawaken”. Hitlerite Germany is none other than the blustering, blundering, aggressive, cruel Prussianism that sent the world of 1914 to its doom. Underneath the brown shirt beats the blood of the Teuton savage bequeathed to the descendants of Attila the Hun.
THE JEWISH ROLE TODAY
In this revelation, the Jewish people emerge as the prophets who called on the world to witness the rising of the Beast Destroyer and called for its destruction. For this is indeed a moment, not of disquiet for the children of Israel but of jubilation. There is tragedy and poetic justice in the work of Hitler, for in seeking to destroy this great people of ours, he has not only re-united Judea as never before, but he has imbued us with courage, vigor and determination. In two short months, the face of Jewry has miraculously changed. It has lost the cringing, cowed aspect of the Ghetto and has regained that look of bravery and racial pride that bespoke the magnificent and virile people that were our ancestors.
The Jewish people has awakened to the realization that this anti-Semitic war Hitlerism has declared is not merely a local conflict with the Jews of Germany but is a challenge to mortal combat with the Jewish people as a whole. There must be no mistake about this. We Jews are facing what may be the final conflict in the age-old war against our people. It is the last death-grapple with the beast of anti-Semitism; it is a fight to a finish. We either destroy anti-Semitism now, for good and all—or we perish.
The issue in this struggle with Hitlerism is plain. It concerns not merely the bestial attacks on the Jewish minority in Germany; it concerns not only the economic and political extinction of these 600,000 Jews—it concerns the barbarous doctrine of anti-Semitism which seeks to brand the Jew as a being of inferior grade, as a second-rate citizen—unworthy of the ordinary basic rights of citizenship, unworthy of a place in the body politic and body economic of civilized states. It concerns the savage efforts of unscrupulous and irresponsible agitators to incite ignorant and inflammable mobs to wreak vengeance for all ills on the innocent Jew. It concerns the unspeakable outrage of branding the Jew as the eternal scapegoat for every national and international evil. The “scapegoat Jew” mania must be expunged, once and for all, from the records of history. These are the issues we are fighting.
The innumerable records of murder, violence and insult, the suppression and extinction of the Jewish professional classes, the economic obliteration of the Jewish commercial classes—these are known to all who have watched and studied the Nazi campaign against the Jews since and before their advent to power. I do not propose to attempt to discuss the despicable campaign of lies that go for argument in the Nazi propaganda against the Jews. I content myself, at this moment, with an observation on the specious plea of the Hitlerite fanatics, that the outrages on the German Jews are the sporadic and irresponsible manifestations of a desperate people in the throes of revolution. That is as blatant a falsehood as ever emanated from the lying mouth of a rabid anti-Semite.
In the Spring of 1932, in the town of Neustadt am Aisch, Swastika sentinels stood before the Jewish shops and noted down the names of those who bought there for a social boycott.
In Hitler’s notorious autobiography, “Mein Kampf”, he holds the Jews responsible for the spread of Socialism and venereal disease—an association born of true German Kultur.
An official Nazi proclamation declared: The Jew is the cause and beneficiary of our national slavery. He ruined our race, rotted our morals, hollowed out our way of life and broke our strength.
“The Jew is the tapeworm in the human organism and it is our duty to exterminate him”, is a statement by that charming Nazi aristocrat, Count Ernst zu Reventlow.
Der Sturmer, a Nazi publication, penned this delightful piece of prose as far back as October, 1931: “The Jew is a born ravisher of races. Thousands of years of in-breeding developed the mongrel race of curs which we see before us in the contemporary Jew. He is driven by his blood and by his inborn abnormal sensuality to ravish non-Jewish women and girls”. And it added this fine peroration: “When Jewish blood spurts from under the knife then all is twice as good”. Herr Captain Herrman Goering, referred in an Italian newspaper to the Jewish “decomposing, anti-national, international or at best non-national influence to the detriment of the German people”. Deputy Bauer of the Prussian Diet said that “the third Empire (of Germany) will treat Jewry like plant lice”.
Herr Alfred Rosenberg complained that the Jewish majority were robbing the innocent Nordics of their blonde hair and blue eyes—the hallmarks of mental superiority and moral courage. At the same time, he complained that the Jews steadfastly refused to become “ech# Deutsch”. What are the facts?
It is an undoubted fact that the Jews of Germany were fast becoming assimilated. Their birth-rate was lower than that of the rest of the population. In 1928, for every 100 marriages between two full-blooded Jews, 50 were between Jew and Aryan. An expert has calculated that by 1970 the number of Jews in Germany would be reduced from 564,000 to 264,000. These are but a few examples of the pernicious propaganda that masks the whole dogma of unbelievable malice and ferocity designed to crush and overwhelm the Jew. Anti-Semitism as “an instrument of national policy” is the political creed that threatens to spread fom the Brown Houses of Germany to a thousand European towns and villages. That is the menace that faces the Jewish people—that is the plague that must be fought and conquered.
Anti-Semitism is no longer an academic doctrine to be met by argument. It is crude, base, and blatant race persecution which must be met and fought ruthlessly and without qualm and without fear of the consequences.
And God be praised, we have at long, long last found the way and means to destroy the demon that has afflicted us for so many bitter centuries. We have found the weapon to attack the savage in his vitals. We have tried reason, we have tried protest, we have tried pleas for justice. But anti-Semitism is still with us and against us, strong and savage as ever. Now we have found and essayed a new weapon—the economic weapon. Whoever is the Jew who first thought of the economic ostracism of Germany is the unknown hero who merits an unperishable place in Jewish history.
The heroic Nordi#s of Germany boast that they are a practical people. So be it. We shall meet them on that ground, for we too are a practical people. I proclaim with all the vigor at my command that the economic embargo on Nazi Germany must be pursued with relentless determination not only by informal and indiscriminate effort but as the united—and official—action of the whole Jewish people throughout the world.
Nor must we shelter under the wings of other victims of Nazi oppression. We must stand alone and fight alone.
Their struggle is for the right to hold a political principle—ours is for the right to live and the common decencies of ordinary citizenship. By our firm determination and united will, we shall earn the respect of our friends and the discomfiture of our enemies. With the high and solemn purpose to stand fast for the plain justice of our demand that the Jew shall be permitted to live in peaceful citizenship not by sufferance but by human right, we must go into this battle as one man. I say in all solemnity that we can win this fight with the Hitler hordes and by the measure of our success in proving that anti-Semitism is bad business and cannot pay, any enemy of the Jewish people that hopes to raise the banner of anti-Semitism, swastika or any other, will think twice before he dares.
Therefore, I say, ostracize Nazi Germany, ruthlessly, relentlessly, unswervingly. The Nazis shriek “Let Judea perish”, but we shall yet cr# in triumph—Judea is invincible and imperishable!
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.
