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Rumanian Paper Urges Jews in Europe Be Held As Hostages for Allied Air Raids

February 25, 1943
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A suggestion that “all Jews in Europe should be held as hostages” for Nazis and pro-Nazi elements killed in Allied air raids on Germany and German-dominated countries, has been advanced in an editorial published in the Rumanian anti-Semitic newspaper Porunka Vremi, according to a broadcast from Bucharest.

Declaring that “the bombing of European cities is nothing but a diabolical plan of international Jewry” the organ of the anti-Semitic Iron Guard urges that the Allied Governments be warned that ten Jews will be executed for each “Aryan” killed during air raids and that 100 Jews will be executed for every non-Jewish building destroyed. “Only in this way can our lives be protected,” the paper writes.

A neutral traveler who reached London today and whose reliability is vouched for by competent quarters, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the reports of Nazi atrocities on Jews are not only true, but are often understatements.

“The actual situation of the Jews in many parts of Europe,” this observer said, “is wholly beyond description.” He emphasized that he made this statement on the basis of talks with persons who returned from Germany, and from Nazi-occupied countries in Western, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as on the basis of conversations which he had with Gestapo men who boasted cynically of their experiences in exterminating Jews. “There is not the slightest doubt in many circles that when the war is over, no matter how it will end, there will no longer be any Jews in Europe,” the informant declared.

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