Resistance by Germans to Anti-semitism Cited in Private Reports and Magazine Articles

Jews, particularly skilled workers, are being reemployed in Germany because of the labor shortage, according to a release of the Friends of German Freedom entitled “Inside Germany Reports.” The organization, whose chairman is Prof. Reinhold Niebuhr and treasurer Adolph Held, is located at 112 East 19 Street.

The Jews are subjected to various indignities, the report states. An eminent scientist in one place is addressed as “the Jew.” A newspaper notice in Wuerttemberg declared Jews would be employed in road construction, separated from Germans, paid by the hour and brought to work in special buses.

Nevertheless, the report declares, there are many instances of sympathy shown to the Jews by Germans. Many emigrating Jews have left with the good wishes of the German neighbors and the hope that they would some day return. One official of a Government emigration bureau wished a Jewish woman luck and said the separation of families “can’t go on and one day all of this will come to a bad end.” One peasant promised to protect the furniture of an emigrating Jew until the owner returned.

Cases of sympathy with Jews are also reported by Nora Waln, the Quaker writer, in a leading article, entitled “Looking Through the Mulberries,” in the current issue of the Saturday Evening Post. She tells of an “Aryan” youth who insisted on erasing anti-Jewish signs despite Nazi warnings, a German youth who defied the Nazi boycott against Jews, as a result of which act his uncle was deprived of a city office and heavily fined; German school children who were deprived of a teacher who permitted them to kneel to a “non-Aryan” playing the part of Jesus in a Christmas play, and who vowed eternal hate for their new Nazi-approved teacher.

Miss Waln declares that ” in their anti-Semitism, as well as in other teaching, the Nazis have dragged their children down to the lowest debasements. No stories can exaggerate the crimes against the dignity of man committed to my knowledge, and named as virtuous; crimes against those on whom they are committed, crimes that sear with even greater evil the youth led to commit them. Truly, as more than one German has said to me, “By anti-Semitism they press a thorn of hate into the German heart to fester a cancer there which destroys all German greatness.”