Jewish Stores Closed, Thousands More Made Jobless in Germany

Hundreds of Jewish stores are liquidating their business because they are unable to cover running expenses and thousands of Jewish employees are being thrown on the streets. Unlike the non-Jewish employees, they get no state relief, since they have been expelled from membership in the trade unions. Even such Jewish members of the union, numbering hundreds, who belonged and paid dues in the unions for forty years, have been expelled.

These aged Jewish unemployed, for whom the only recourse is begging, are in addition exposed to additional danger under the projected “parasite law” recommending sterilization of charity-seekers in the same way proposed for mental defectives.

The details of this law are as yet unknown, but today’s papers announce that a memorandum to this effect is now in the hands of Rudolf Hess, assistant to Adolf Hitler in command of the Nazi Party.

The order issued a few days ago by the Minister of Economics, Kurt Schmitt, not to discriminate against the Jews in commerce, is of little value, as long as the Nazi party itself continues the discriminations, it is apparent. Since the German government departments are no longer state organs, and the Nazi party has no intention of abandoning specially built up machinery for the ruination of Jewish trade and the expulsion of the Jews from business or even the modification of these activities, such decrees as those of Dr. Schmitt’s, seem destined to be of little effect.