"These Individuals!"

"The civilized world stands revolted by a bloody pogrom against a defenseless people. Every instinct in us cries out in protest against the outrages which have taken place in Germany during the last five years and which sank to new depths in the organized frenzies of the last few days. . . . If you saw a gang of cowardly ruffians set upon a helpless man in a public street and proceed to beat him, you wouldn't long remain silent. If you saw a fanatical mob pillage and burn a church or a synagogue you wouldn't long remain silent. If you saw a brutal band drive helpless families from their own homes, you would speak out, and promptly."

Thus last week outspoke New York State's defeated gubernatorial candidate, Republican Thomas E. Dewey, and was joined in vehement indignation by Democratic Senator William H. King of Utah who proposed that the U. S. forthwith break off diplomatic relations with the German Government.

Outspoke ex-U. S. President Herbert Clark Hoover: "The blame is squarely up to the political agencies in power [in Germany]. These individuals are taking Germany back 450 years in civilization to Torquemada's expulsion of the Jews from Spain. They are bringing to Germany not alone the condemnation of the public opinion of the world. These men are building their own condemnation by mankind for centuries to come."

One, Two, Three. But no active head of State,* and no No. 1 official associates of any head of State chose to speak out last week against "these individuals" who shocked an almost shockproof world with a display of deliberate and unprovoked mass cruelty.

"These individuals" are four. Adolf Hitler is the World's No. 1 anti-Semite by temperament and conviction, whose intimate friend Julius Streicher publishes Der Stunner, the grossly fanatical No. 1 anti-Semitic newsorgan of the world. No. 3 Nazi Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels is a part-time virtuoso of antiSemitism, using his Ministry for Propaganda & Public Enlightenment alternately to incite and to calm German anti-Semitic mobs. And No. 2 Nazi Hermann Wilhelm GOering is a ruthless German activist who signs the most drastic anti-Semitic decrees and has them legally enforced by the courts, the police and the army.

"I Am Not A Dog!" The Fuehrer was beside himself last week because a Polish Jew, once a resident of Germany, had put two bullets into Ernst vom Rath, third secretary to the Germany Embassy in Paris. Herr Hitler immediately sent his personal physician, Dr. Brandt, to Paris accompanied by the eminent German specialist, Professor Georg Magnus of the university at Munich.

Four blood transfusions failed to save Ernst vom Rath. He died in a coma without being able to understand a message from the Fuehrer promoting him to First Class Embassy Counselor. The assassin, Herschel Grynszpan, meanwhile told his French jailers: "Being a Jew is not a crime. . . . I hoped President Roosevelt would take pity on us refugees. . . . I am not a dog. I didn't mean to kill. I lost my head."

"Mobs" and Mobs. Nazi bigwigs have often said off the record that if a Jew should ever assassinate the Fuhrer, "next day not a single member of the Jewish race would be left alive in the Reich." Last week only a handful of Jews were reported killed in the avenging of Ernst vom Rath. But in every part of Germany mobs smashed, looted, burned Jewish property.

The purpose was to wreak final ruin on a section of the German population which had already been systematically persecuted to the brink of ruin.

Synagogues were everywhere fired or dynamited. Numberless Jews of both sexes were beaten by mobs from the Baltic to the Brenner and from Sudetenland to the North Sea.

The complicity of the German Government was proved by the fact that in most cases police made no effort to restrain the so-called "mobs." These consisted mostly of young Germans who drove up in cars.

Heavy boots of the sort worn by party members when in uniform gave a good clue to the identity of the window smashers and firebugs.

The synthetic "mobs" were in some cases joined by genuine mobs but these were mostly Germans who simply grabbed what they could after Jewish shop fronts had been smashed by the "mobs." Some mobsters tossed Jewish goods out of smashed windows to passersby with guffaws and cries of: "Here are some cheap Christmas presents. Get yours early!" Not all German Aryans countenanced this depravity. Said an Aryan Berlin housewife despondently as she watched Aryan children making off with the contents of a Jewish shop: "So that is how they teach our children to steal!".

A few poorly-clad men jogged the elbow of a New York Times Berlin correspondent and whispered: "The German people do not approve of such treatment of the Jews." Bad Neighbor Policy. The harsh, explosive epithets in which the German language is rich, were heaped, together with obscenities, upon Jewish men, women and children in every part of the Reich.

They were spat upon, cuffed, nose-jerked, kicked and given black eyes. The atrocities stopped short of rape or firing squads.

Some Jews were so affected by the Nazi terror that, notably along the German-Netherlands frontier, they pitifully got down on their knees and crawled some distance, wailing and lamenting, to supplicate Dutch frontier guards to let them in.

These guards were adamant in every case, on instructions of Her Majesty's Government, for The Netherlands has good reason to fear Bad Neighbor Germany.

Damage & Indemnity. In Germany, insurance companies reported damage claims of more than $5,000,000 from Jewish policy holders in Berlin, more than $4,000,000 in Vienna. The New York Times estimated that total damage to Jewish property in Germany "may possibly reach one billion marks" ($400,000,000). The Times thought that the Jewish community this week, after all depredations, still owned property in Germany worth perhaps four billion marks ($1,600,000,000) and, before Hitler, may have owned 20 billions.

But the spoliation did not end with the three-day pogrom. At the Air Ministry in Berlin last week, Air Minister Goring signed, as Economic Chief of the German Four-Year Plan for Self-Sufficiency. decrees providing: 1) that Jews of German citizenship as a community pay to the State a billion marks indemnity for the assassination of Rath; 2) that the State confiscate whatever is payable to Jews by insurance companies for damage done last week; 3) that Jewish owners of damaged premises must repair them at their own cost; 4) that after Jan. 1, 1939 Jews be excluded from "operation of retail shops, mail-order houses and independent exercise of handicrafts. . . . Jewish shops operated in violation of this order will be closed by the police" [and presumably turned over to Aryans]. He planned ultimately to move into ghettos all Jews who can or must tolerate life in Germany. And Jews were also forbidden to go to theatres, concert halls, art galleries, public schools, high schools, universities.

In Paris, when the assassin of Rath heard of these decrees, he vowed in anguish: "I will pray every Monday for forgiveness for what I have done to my people." In England meanwhile Lord Rothschild said that nothing short of the execution of the Jews of Germany could be worse than what has now been done.

Let Jews Starve? In Frankfort, where the assassin once resided, every male Jew between the ages of 18 and 60 was taken into custody. The same was done in certain other German cities. With many Jewish breadwinners torn from their families, with many of those families hungry, Der An griff, personal organ of Dr. Goebbels, coldly noted: "Noticeably large is the number of Jewish women with many children who ask for relief. . . . Our laws give even a foreigner the right to relief. . . .

[Jewish] progeny and their [obscene synonym for "females"] become a burden on German funds."

By holding the Jewish community of Germany in a state of general inability to earn a living wage, Nazis obviously hope to force the international Jewish community to remit to Germany huge enough sums in "good money" to keep their Jewish relatives in the Reich from going too hungry or too cold. The dollars, pounds, francs to be secured by thus "shaking down the whole Jewish race" (as some Nazis term it) are wanted to pay for such vital imports as Germany cannot get by barter deals. The Schwarze Korps, influential Nazi newsorgan of Adolf Hitler's personal Elite Guard and the Blackshirt Storm Troops, has openly hinted at the burgeoning of this gangster-blackmail scheme for several years.

"Intellectual Originators." Referring to the assassin, Der Angriff libelously insinuated: "It is no coincidence that Grynszpan took the same line followed by Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Alfred Duff Cooper and their associates!"

Der Angriff went on with a long list of "the intellectual originators of the crime'' which included, strangely enough, certain French Rightists like Henri de Kerillis but not the French Jewish Socialist on whom Nazis usually vent spleen, Leon Blum. Obvious reason: Blum and his Socialists last week had not broken with French Premier Edouard Daladier, one of the Munich "Big Four."

In Paris the Jewish aunt and uncle of the assassin were arrested and it was revealed that just prior to the killing of vom Rath they were held under arrest for five days on suspicion of harboring an undesirable alien. Their papers were seized and the French Surete Generale probed to discover who really were the "intellectual originators" of the crime--if any.

Meanwhile, French editors were not behind those of Britain and the U. S. in denouncing German pogroms in the strongest possible language and showing they felt even that to be inadequate. It was suggested that Charles Augustus Lindbergh and other Aryans who have recently received high German decorations ought to send them back to the Fuehrer.

Funk No. 2? The Great Powers plainly funked when Germany was permitted to dismember Czechoslovakia. On the issue of Jewish persecutions in Germany, Funk No. 2 raised its head this week. Typically funking was a statement issued by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England: "Would that the rulers of the Reich could realize that such excesses of hatred and malice put upon the friendship which we are ready to offer them an almost intolerable strain!"

*Britain's Neville Chamberlain did say: "No one in this country would seek to defend the senseless crime of the murder of vom Rath, but at the same time there will be deep and widespread sympathy for those being made to suffer for it."

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