Commonwealth and Foreign
FIVE YEARS OF PERSECUTION
By W. G. J. KNOP FIVE years ago, on April 1st, 1933, the official boycott of German Jews came into force, and the world learnt with horror of the measures adopted against all Non-Aryans, whether they were Jews by religion or not. Today after five years the systematic repression of Jews in Germany, so far from diminishing, has entered into its most cruel and destructive stage.
To the foreign observer the outward and visible signs of what is going on are not so obvious as they were. The crude notice-boards and slogans have practically disappeared, and if Streicher's Stfirmer is still offensively in evidence, it is often dismissed as an isolated case of fanaticism and bad taste. In point of fact a new machinery of systematic persecu- tion is working so efficiently that the Jews today are to be pitied not so much for isolated outrages perpetrated against individuals as for the absolute hopelessness of their position.
Nineteen thirty-three was a year of violence, accompanied by preliminary anti-Jewish legislation and dismissal of Jewish officials. By widespread propaganda the ground was prepared for the Nuremberg Decrees of September 15th, 1935, which, though they established the definite subjection of the Jewish community, at least promised to fix a limit to progressive persecution and to provide a known basis upon which Jews and Aryans could regulate their relationship. On all these points Herr Hitler was explicit, and his speech left no doubt that at any rate the bare right of existence would not be denied to Jews who observed the conditions of the new decrees. Like so many other assurances, these solemn promises soon proved to be worthless. However, the holding of the Olympiad in Berlin in 1936 brought another temporary respite in the more obnoxious forms of persecution, while economic con- siderations resulted in the maintenance of a certain tolerance towards Jewish employers and business men.
With the resignation last November of Dr. Schacht from the Ministry of Economics and the advent of Field-Marshal Goering as economic dictator, the cause of German Jewry received its death blow. Schacht had possessed both the insight and the courage to exert his influence in the direction of moderation. But moderation has no place in the Nazi scheme of things. So nothing more nor less than the systematic elimination of all non-Aryans from any possibility of earning a bare livelihood is now in progress. They are to be driven into such a position that they will be forced to emigrate.
Emigration has of course taken place already on a very large scale. Thus since 1932 the number of German Jews has been reduced from 560,000 to 350,000. But both from the point of view of the conditions attached to leaving Germany and because of the unwillingness or inability of other countries to add to their numbers of refugees, the difficulties of the emigra- tion problem have become virtually insurmountable.
Although emigration is officially encouraged by the Nazis, it is in practice made as difficult as possible. No emigrant may take more than ten per cent. of his capital abroad, while forfeiting the rest. In spite of this, many Jews are prepared to emigrate at all costs, even where it means abandoning a life's work and preparing for a life of extreme material misery. , In so short a survey it is impossible to give any adequate idea of the distress of these 350,000 survivors.
To begin with the children, it is being made steadily impos- sible for Jewish children to obtain the same facilities for educa- tion as Germans. Where they are not definitely excluded from classes, they are admitted under conditions which make their lot very hard to bear. Jews who can afford it attempt to equip their children by sending them to be wholly or partly educated abroad. Here, however, the new passport regulations place them in a terrible quandary. Children sent abroad are con- sidered as emigrants, and in almost every case are stopped at the frontiers if they return to visit their parents or are imprisoned for infringement of the law which forbids the return of emigrants to Germany. Should parents resident in Germany wish to visit children abroad, the procedure is even more complicated. Usually passports are only issued to Jews for purposes of emigra- tion, in exchange for a written promise that the bearer will not return to Germany on pain of imprisonment. This promise is extracted on every pretext, and non-compliance is punished by detention in a concentration camp until such time as arrange- ments have been completed for emigration.
Those who are unable to emigrate because they cannot find a country to grant them refuge are not only subject to the mental torture which life in Germany means to every Jew, but they are faced, sooner or later, with the prospect of material destitution. Until November last it was the Jewish civil servant and scholar, the professional man and the artist who felt most heavily the hand of anti-semitism. Since then the numerous Jews engaged in industry, banking and commerce have been the object of an official campaign which demands the transfer of all Jewish business into Aryan hands. According to a recent Government decree, the purchase-price paid for a Jewish business must indude no allowance for " good-will." Since, moreover, the authorities fix the price quite arbitrarily in favour of the Aryan purchaser, the Jews are faced with the alternative of selling our at a loss of often as much as 6o per cent., or of going into liquidation which involves almost as great a loss.
Barred from the civil service, from the professions and all public posts, from cultural life and now also from private business, Jews who cannot emigrate may, if they are wealthy, live in retirement on their capital ; for the less fortunate there is at present the aid of Jewish charitable institutions. But Jewish capital in Germany, though considerable, is dwindling. In five years it has fallen from Rm. I2 milliard to something like Rm 7 milliard, and it cannot be depended upon indefinitely to cope with the problem of the more needy Jew.
Jews cannot even count on such slender protection as existing legislation affords them. Judges exercise discrimination before the law on the ground that all Jews must be in the wrong a priori, since they are without exception fundamentally corrupt and wicked. Even so, many cases exist of the Gestapo over-ruling court decisions on the grounds of over-leniency towards Jews.
One of the most pathetic features of anti-semitism in Ger- many is the amount of evidence which goes to show that it has no roots in any widespread conviction among the German people, but that it is effected by the all-powerful Nazi extremists with the active collaboration of the Gestapo. The system of local police spying, local denunciation and party pressure, which forces members to sign a declaration that they will conduct no transactions of any kind with Jews, makes it impos- sible for the ordinary man in the street to risk the trouble which inevitably follows incurring the displeasure of the authorities. Whatever the public may think at heart of the Stiirmer picture, of scheming, race-polluting Jews threatening the very existence of Nazi Germany, it is these standards that one has to accept as the basis of anti-semitic activity.
The addition of 19o,00o Austrian Jews to the 350,000 unfor- tunates still left in Germany only serves to make more formid- able still the problem of emigration. The lot of the Austrians is likely to be even more harsh than that of their German brethren, since the suddenness of the contrast between the full rights of citizenship and complete humiliation is aggravated '- the fact that the machinery of persecution was ready and r, - fected.
But the tragedy of German Jewry does not end with the Jev, themselves. The German nation itself has been engulfed by the wave of barbarism which broke over the heads of the unfor- tunate non-Aryans. 1,500 University scholars, 2,200 doctors, 2,700 artists and architects, chemists, physicists, mathematicians and engineers have been dismissed and most of them have gone into exile. In them German Science, art and learning have suffered an inseparable loss, which, together with the stifling of all freedom of thought and research, has relegated Germany to a state of semi-civilisation. No nation can afford, with impunity to deprive itself of thinkers of the calibre et Einstein and Haber, the Nobel prizewinner and inventor of ti]C synthetic ammonia manufacturing process, of authors such Stefan 'and Arnold Zweig and Lion Feuchtwanger, of acto-s such as Elisabeth Bergner, producers like Max Reinhardt, and musicians such as Fritz Kreisler and Brim° Walter, to =nun only a few of the most celebrated names.
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