No Need to Amend German Constitution to Deprive Jews of Rights Says Organ of Hitlerist Lawyers’ Asso

There is no need to amend the German Constitution in order to deprive the Jews of their rights in the country, Government-Councillor Deputy Ernst Hill-debrand, one of the Hitlerist members of the Reichstag, contends in the new issue of “Deutsches Recht”, the organ of the Nazi lawyers’ association.

To avoid foreign complications at the beginning of the Nazi regime, he says, instead of adopting ruthless measures against the Jews and changing the Constitution in such a way as to shut out all Jews from its advantages, as has been suggested, which might rouse foreign protests, it would be enough to draw up lists of all the Jews in the country and to decree that all people whose names appear on the lists, giving some reason for their appearance other than the fact that they are Jews, are automatically declared to be no longer subjects of the German State, and are consequently disfranchised and excluded from all Stato-service. Reassuring explanations would be given to foreign public opinion, and then when the position of the Hitlerist Government had become firmer, the Government could proceed to deal with the Jews as ruthlessly as it wished.

THE HITLERIST SLOGAN “GERMAN CITIZENSHIP IS OPEN ONLY TO MEMBERS OF GERMAN RACE”.

If we are asked how we Hitlerists are going to deal with the Jews when we are in power, our answer is to point to paragraph 4 of our Party Programme, which states definitely that “no Jew can be a German” (Volksgenosse), the chief Hitlerist organ, the “Voelkischer Beobachter” explained a few months ago. Our definition of the Jew is that the Jew is alien to the German in race and blood. It is, of course, difficult to define the Jew in cases where the Jewish element has invaded non-Jewish elements and has caused a certain admixture of Jewish racial elements. Where the Jewish blood goes back further than the parents or grandparents on either side, we must leave it where it is, with the hope that gradually this Jewish infiltration will be absorbed and will disappear. But in general, we shall act up to the declaration contained in our Party Programme, that “German citizenship is open only to members of German race”.

Others who are not citizens may live in Germany, it wrote, but only as our guests and under the provision of Aliens Laws. The recognition of the Jewish element as a minority in German life will have to be followed by a new type of citizenship rights, to regulate the position of this category of inhabitants, and similarly of other national minorities, like Lithuanians, Poles, Danes, etc. The population will have to be divided into Germans on the one hand and residents of the country on the other, and we shall enforce in regard to them the communal laws of medieval legislation.

In practice this will mean that everyone belonging to the German State, whether German or Jew, will so far as the outside world is concerned, be under the power and the protection of the German State, and in this respect will enjoy equal standing. In internal affairs, however, the Jews must obviously hold inferior rank in matters of citizenship and social position.

Their equality of rights, so far as the outside world is concerned, will have the purpose of making impossible foreign reprisals, which might otherwise come about as the result of the storm which would be roused against us by world Jewry. The Jews will logically be restricted in their citizenship rights. They will not have the right to vote or to belong to political or administrative bodies. They will certainly not be allowed to bear arms, but in time of war they would be drafted into labour battalions. On the basis of the Constitution, powers will be introduced from time to time to regulate the position of the various categories of residents, including the Jews, in the matter of freedom of movement, freedom of occupation, freedom of association and meeting, the right to attend schools which are not maintained exclusively by their own funds, the direction or publication of periodicals in the German language, and the right to acquire land.