Life at the Stuttgart camp for displaced Jews, where one Jew was killed and four wounded on Friday during an alleged black-market raid by German police, has returned to normal following the issuance of an order by Lt. Gen. Joseph T. McNarney, European Theatre commander, forbidding German police from entering Jewish DP camps under any circumstances.
The displaced Jews, UNRRA officials, voluntary relief workers, end even local American military officials hailed the McNarney order, and pointed out that it would relieve the major sore spot–use of German police against Jews. In conversation with a Jewish Telegraphic Agency correspondent, one American officer attached to the occupation forces stranded up the situation as follows: “If the military government hadn’t granted permission to the denned Germans to enter the camp, there would have been no trouble, and nobody dead at the Stuttgart Jewish DP camp.”
An investigation was launched yesterday by local American military officials into the conduct of the raid. A board of five officers met all day behind closed doors. Although it is reported that carbines carried by the German police are being examined by ballistics exports in an effort to find out who had killed Samuel Denziger, the Polish-Jewish veteran of Oswiecim, no official statement from the inquiry board is expected until after it reports to American Army headquarters at Frankfurt. It is considered likely that the inquiry will result in arrests among the German police.
The Stuttgart police commissioner, Dr. Kerl Weber, defended the actions of the local German civilian police and expressed the opinion that his department had suffered a “loss of prestige, because it had not been permitted to complete the raid begun at sir a. m. Friday. He told newsman here that he wished the military government would permit his police to return to the camp and take up, where they were forced to stop, following the fatal shooting. He also deplored the blow to his prestige re- sulting from the funeral cortege of twenty-five truckloads of displaced Jews, which made its way through the city to the Bad Constatt cemetery Friday afternoon.
Danziger is survived by a pregnant wife and two children, all of whom managed to live through four years at the Oswiecim death camp with him. Three of the wounded Jews, Salek Weinstein, Emanuel Finkelstein, and Schimon Wildfouer, were also concentration camp veterans. The last casualty among the DP’s has not yet been identified.
U. S. TROOPS EXPECTED TO BE WITHDRAWN FROM CAMP TODAY
Immediately after the attack, American troops of the Fifteenth Cavalry Division were rushed to the camp, which consists of a number of apartment houses in the southwest section of the city. Yesterday the number of guards was reduced and it is expected that all American troops will be withdrawn by tomorrow.
Yesterday morning camp inmates were still aroused over the raid and its aftermath. Small knots of Jews were standing around heatedly discussing the soldiers and armored cars used by patrolling troops. One of these groups buttonholed the Jewish Telegraphic Agency correspondent and indignantly demanded to know “why the guns of the armored cars are pointed at us? We aren’t criminals,” they shouted.
At that moment the officer in charge of the troops in the vicinity arrived and the DP’s took up their complaint with him. He immediately ordered the armored cars turned around. Shortly thereafter he out the number of sentries down to eight, and sent the cars away.
Military officials as well as UNRRA workers and the Jews all agreed that the DP’s had been getting along well under normal American supervision. They pointed out that other searches had occurred, without German police, and that disorders had never resulted.
Bearing out the assertion of all witnesses that the incident was conducted like Gestapo raids in the heyday of Nazism, Miss Hazel Dobson, an UNRRA nurse from Canada, said that the German police arrived armed with carbines, rubber truncheons, and police dogs, Fels Friedman, a Jewish girl from Radom, Poland, a former inmate of Oswiecim, told Newman that she had recognized one of the German policeman as a guard at that horror camp. Miss Friedman swears that she could identify him again, given the opportunity. One of the DP’s told of having heard a policeman say “your day is over and soon we’ll take over again.”
Mayer Gutman, chairman of the DP’s camp committee, pointed out that an American military police sergeant accompanying the German police attempted to get them to withdraw after the first volley of shots, but was not able to do so. One American soldier, Gutman added, grabbed a carbine away from a German policeman who was attempting to fire it at a Jew. Gutman also insisted that the local German newspaper, the Stuttgarter Zoitung, had helped instigate the raid by terming the camp a “black market center.”
The shooting occurred, according to witnesses, after a twelve-year-old Jewish boy was handcuffed and dragged out of a house into the street, where the DP’s had already been assembled in accordance with orders issued over the camp loudspeakers by the German police. As the boy was driven into the street, the crowd hooted at the police, who thereupon began to beat the Jews with rubber truncheons. Danziger was one of those heathen and knocked down. When he arose, he was shot through the head without warning.
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.
