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The first eye-witness account by an American on the anti-Jewish riots in Berlin was related yesterday to the Associated Press by Varian Fry, editor of the Living Age, who is now visiting Germany.
The story, as related by the Associated Press, reads as follows:
“I was informed at about 8 o’clock last night that there was an anti-Jewish demonstration in the streets. I hurried out and presently heard shouting toward the east end of Kurfuerstendamm Boulevard.
“When I got there I found a large crowd lined up on both sides of the street, forcing each car which came by to run the gantlet, stopping all cars in which Jewish-looking men or women were riding, and dragging out the Jews and beating them up.
“I saw one man brutally kicked and spat on as he lay on the side-walk, a woman was bleeding, a dirty tear-stained face, a man whose head was covered with blood, hysterical women crying, men losing their temper at the police or the Storm Troopers being kicked or dragged off, women begging their men to keep out of the fight and crying and pleading.
POLICE DON’T INTERFERE
“Nowhere did the police seem to make any effort whatever to protect the victims from this brutality. Occasionally they attempted to clear areas for motor traffic to get through or to prevent the crowds from collecting in front of certain apparently favored cafes. That was all.
“All along the Kurfuerstendamm the crowd raised the shout ‘Jude!’ whenever any one sighted or thought he had sighted a Jew. The cry sent the crowd converging on the poor victim, who was asked for his identification papers.
“It he could not prove himself a good ‘Aryan’ he was insulted, spat on, roughly handled, and sometimes knocked down, kicked and beaten.
CROWD SHIFTS
“The cry ‘Jude!’ would be raised at another point and the crowd would hurry off to a new victim.
“At times a chant would be raised—I can’t remember the German, but the chant was something like ‘Get the hell out—Blood-Running—Noses—The best Jew is a dead Jew”—precisely like a Christian liturgy, with leader speaking the lines first and the crowd chanting them over again, line by line, after he had finished.
“Everywhere the people were in holiday mood. In fact, one German youth said to me: ‘This is a holiday for us.’ Old men and young men in striped trousers and men in shirt sleeves, boys, Storm Troops, police, young girls of the domestic servant type, well-bred women, and even some women in the forties and over—all seemed to be having a good time.
“This morning, as I walked along Kurfuerstendamm, to inspect the broken windows, I passed in half an hour eight or ten persons, three obviously Jews, with bandaged heads, bandaged hands, and fresh, clean slings of plaster over their noses…
“This was a sight I had never seen in Berlin before. It pretty obviously was connected with last night’s circus.”
If you’ve got something to sell, an excellent way of selling it is through the columns of the Jewish Daily Bulletin. Call Ashland 4-3093 for rates.
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.
