Former editor-in-chief Vossische Zeitung
The Hitler Government is using queer arguments for creating public opinion abroad. It made a statement in London that the persecutions are not directed against the German Jews but only against the Polish and Russian Jews who recently had been making themselves very much at home in Germany. As if Polish and Russian Jews are not human beings! The people of Germany forget that other nations still have some feeling for civilization and human dignity.
But this argument happens also to be untrue. Actually the strangest situation exists in Germany now, the Polish and Lithuanian Jews, whose Governments do not allow them to be molested, being privileged in comparison with the German Jews whose welfare is a matter in which foreign Governments and—I hope for the present—the League of Nations are not concerned to intervene.
Against these German Jews cynical, cold-blooded and cruel persecutions proceed. From press reports we see that 6,000 Jewish doctors in Germany are breadless and deprived of every opportunity to earn a living. The way in which the undiminished and continuing boycott of Jewish business is working is demonstrated by the typical fate of the Hermann Tietz stores.
This enterprise, founded by Oskar Tietz, famed over Germany as a philanthropist, employing 12,000 people in Berlin and the provinces, is not a public company but was carried on by members of the Tietz family as a private undertaking. The banks owned by the State refused to extend any credit and it could not pay its way. The Tietz sons and the son-in-law, Herr Zwillenberg, were cleared out and now the firm continues as an Aryanized enterprise with the aid of State credits.
The Leonard Tietz Company in Cologne was dealt with in a similar way. These are not isolated instances; the same thing has happened to Jewish enterprises throughout Germany.
Worse still is the fate of thousands of Jewish employees in Germany. Where they are not already dismissed, the Nazi cells are demanding their dismissal under threat of a strike. They get no protection whatsoever from the trades unions which must not enroll Jewish members and large numbers of Jews who were members of the trades unions before the Nazi regime have all been expelled.
A great many of these poor people have no choice but to fall burden on public charity but the State does not give assistance to Jews and Marxists. The same State appears to consider the attempt of Jewish workers to go abroad as economic treason. So we must at any rate conclude from the imprisonment of forty Jewish doctors who did nothing more than organize themselves into an aid bureau to help their colleagues, whose bread was taken away, to emigrate to other countries.
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.
