Berlin.
Der Angriff, the newspaper owned by Propaganda Minister Goebbels, recently announced that the Nazis, who had been occupied by other, more important matters, were again returning to the Jewish question “with renewed zeal.” That, it goes on to explain, is not entirely because the Nazis wish to return to the Jewish problem again and again, but because the Jews are forcing them to. The well known Goebbels logic elaborates this theme.
But if there had been a respite for the Jewish community, it is to be regretted that its members were pot informed. For they had no surcease from the steady, persistent sniping at their position, from the perpetual attacks by Nazis major and minor, from the thousand and one harassments that are their lot. And someone should certainly have told Herr Streicher there was a rest period, for he did not abate one jot from his campaign to exterminate the Jews and drew upon himself a veiled, delicate rebuke from Dr. Schacht’s council for national economy for pestering Jewish shopkeepers.
THE CITIZENSHIP LAW
And it was in this period of apparent inattention, according to Dr. Frick, Minister of the Interior, that the cabinet worked on the new citizenship laws which will give Jewry the status of “German subjects” but not German citizenship and will keep Jews out of the military arms of the country. Likewise, it was in this same period that the Reich press chamber’s president is sued the vaguely-worded decree that may mean the suppression of the Jewish press in Germany.
Herr Goebbels may have been too busy with Danzig, the new army and replies to the Stresa resolutions and subsequent League Council statements to worry about the Jews, but his colleagues under the swastika certainly were not.
At any rate, the Jews of Germany are now advised that Dr. Goebbels is again giving the Jewish question the benefit of his attention.
“We are now going to deal again a little more vigorously with the Jewish question during the next few weeks,” proclaims Der Angriff under the sensational headline, “New anti-Semitic drive.” “We know that the Jews will immediately shout that there is a new anti-Semitic wave. We also know that certain other well-meaning but inexperienced Germans will say; ‘Why don’t you leave the Jews alone? They have been excluded from everything.’
REASONS FOR NEGLECT
“The result will be,” Der Angriff forewarns its readers, “that we shall seem to be merely engaging in anti-Jewish hostility for the sake of tradition, because we don’t want to leave the Jews alone. The fact is,” it apologizes, “that in the last few months we have been able to deal with the Jewish question only as a side issue, because there were other more important questions. That does not mean, though, that the Jewish question has disappeared.
“It is not a question that depends only on us,” the paper asserts defensively. “The Jew himself would not wish it to be settled. It is in his interest that it should be talked about and conceived as a problem. Nothing would hurt him more than to have it considered as a side-issue, as something of no moment.
WHAT JEWS WANT
“The Jew wants to have the Jewish question, and he would always bring it up himself. He only puts a condition. It must not be beneath the proper level. Ritual murder, the Elders of Zion, Jewish cultural Bolshevism, rapacity, jobbery, all these things must be left aside. Blonde girls will be left alone by Jewish men, and the rest is scientifically untenable.
“We have not forgotten the Berlin Police President, Isidor (Dr. Bernhard Weiss), or the cultural level of Piskator, Lion Feuchtwanger, Georg Bernhard, Leopold Schwartzschild and Magnus Hirschfeld.
“We have a very definite attitude on this question and there can be no question of a new wave, or waves of anti-Semitism when we consider the relations of the modern German to the modern Jew.
ALWAYS ANTI-SEMITES
“There have always been anti-Semites, and there is hardly a German philosopher who has not made critical observations about the Jews,” the article observes. “But things changed completely when National Socialism came into power. An entire nation, an entire State has decided on the Jewish question with legal effectiveness.
“It seems as if it is the Jews outside who are working against anti-Semitic Germany that has provoked them. Of late the energy of the Jews has been directed towards obtaining legal decisions on non-German soil against the German ideology, as at Cairo and Berne.
“The second method is to use the churches on behalf of the Jews, with Jewish propagandists, particularly in England, working up the churches against German new heathenism.
“Faced by such a situation, there can be no question of any new anti-Semitic wave.” Der Angriff explains. “There is a state of tension between Jews and Germans, the end of which cannot be foreseen. We for our part have made a clear demarcation from which we shall not retreat. It depends entirely upon the Jews how matters are going to develop in the future. It is not only the Jews in Germany, who are now keeping quiet, that are responsible, but those who are making a row in the various stations to which they have emigrated.”
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.
