An estimated 250,000 Jews have been wiped out by military operations, executions, disease and starvation in Nazi Poland, the World Jewish Congress charged today in a 15-page “Jewish White Book.”
The document, which records anti-Jewish barbarism since outbreak of the war, is supplemented by five pages of documentary evidence. The record contains the darkest narration ever known in Jewish history.
The White Book reveals for the first time that after the Munich bomb attempt on Chancellor Hitler’s life the Nazi leaders completed plans for large-scale anti-Jewish pogroms throughout the Reich but suddenly cancelled them upon the advice of the Soviet Ambassador.
Other charges contained in the document are: More than 500 Jews are still under arrest in Germany in connection with the Munich blast. Numerous Jews in the old Reich have been imprisoned in concentration camps and executed since hostilities began. All Palestinian citizens in Germany have been imprisoned and their families interned in a Berlin hotel where they are being provided with food by the American Embassy. Jews are prohibited from appearing in the streets after eight p.m.
The food situation for Jews in Germany has become catastrophic as they are forbidden to acquire certain foods which may still be bought without ration cards by non Jews. Danzig Jews are forbidden to appear on the streets after midday and have been ordered to leave the city by January 1, 1940. Jews in Vienna are given three-day prison terms as “mild punishment” for appearing on the streets after four p.m. Austrian police are systematically raiding street cars, buses and automobiles in a hunt for Jews. Jews in Bohemia-Moravia are forbidden to appear on the streets after noon. A ban on their use of street cares was rescinded when the Czech population demonstrated its sympathy by boycotting that mode of transportation.
The White Book also charges that Jews seeking to emigrate from the “protectorate” are forced to fill out 15 questionnaires and are subjected to beatings and humiliation by Gestapo officials while waiting. The victims include women who are allegedly beaten and put in solitary confinement cells when they dare to protest against physical maltreatment in the Gestapo waiting room.
Reviewing the inhuman treatment of Jews by the Nazis in occupied Poland, the document asserts that at least 80 percent of the remaining 1,250,000 Jews in the Nazi territory have been reduce to complete beggary. The White Book estimates that a majority of the 40,000 Jews who attempted to escape from Warsaw during the Nazi bombardment were killed by Nazi bombs in the suburbs of the former Polish capital. This is in addition, the document states, to 30,000 who perished in Warsaw during and after the Nazi occupation.
The White Book charges that cities populated chiefly by Jews were burned down completely, that Nazis executed 400 Jews in the public market place of the township Lukow, that a similar execution took place in Kalushin and other Jewish populated towns, and that uncounted numbers of Jews died as a result of torture inflicted by Gestapo agents while working on forced labor projects. The document dwells lengthily on the Nazi plan to set up ghettos and on the Lublin “reservation.” It charges also that German soldiers are forcing Jews from the “reservation” into neighboring Soviet Poland.
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.
