Dr. Ernst Wilhelm Meyer, for sixteen years a member of the German diplomatic service, revealed last night that he resigned last May as First Secretary to the German Embassy in Washington, a post he held for six years, because he could not stomach the Nazi Government’s “fundamentally anti-German and anti-Christian” deeds and destruction of the Jewish minority.
“Hitler and his regime have betrayed what I know to be the lasting interests of German Fatherland,” Dr. Mayer declared at a dinner in the Town Hall Club tendered to him jointly by the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America and the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work.
He asserted that National Socialist anti-Semitism was in no way “a German or Nordic achievement worthy of national pride,” because “on the contrary, it is the disgraceful opposite of German and Nordic for the Government and ruling party of a State of almost 70,000,000 inhabitants to drive a helpless minority of less than 500,000 to destruction.”
“Nothing in this part of National Socialist gives evidence of moral or racial strength,” he declared. “If they were racially or morally strong, they could not have aroused the lowest human instincts in the masses and led in the performance of the most dishonorable actions. Nobody will deny that racial antagonisms exist. But it is an ancient idea that the difference between man and beast is that man can in some measure control his emotions. Everybody knows that the German Jew has been deeply devoted to Germany and has been a devoted and useful citizen of Germany. To deny this means ignorance or lying.”
Anti-Semitism, Dr. Meyer told his churchmen listeners, is a part of the “deceit and cunning and falsehood” by which the Nazis seek to make Christianity deny its first principle. Quoting the German Evangelical church letter submitted to Hitler in June, 1936, that the Christian injunction to love one’s neighbor still stood for the Jew against the Nazi anti-Semitism, Dr. Meyer declared, “Not knowing this Christian principle of love, National Socialism adds to the misery of Jewish refugees and an ever-increasing misery of Christian refugees.”
Dr. Meyer’s address marked the first time a former German diplomat has publicly denounced the Hitler Government.
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.
