THE NEW BARBARISM T HIS week's outbreak of barbarism in Germany
is on so vast a scale, is marked by an inhumanity so diabolical and bears , marks of *official inspiration so unmistakable that its consequences internal and external are as yet beyond prediction. Internally there is suffi- cient evidence of the pity and disgust inspired in the ordinary, decent German citizen to make it both un- reasonable and unjust to draw an indictment against a nation for crimes that are to be laid at the door of a party. That is the more to the credit of the German people, in that Dr. Goebbels, whose apologia for what is happening is repulsive in its cynicism, is able through his control of the Press to disseminate utterly distorted accounts of events which have aroused the horror and reprobation of the civilised world. Mr. Hoover may have exaggerated when he said there had been nothing like it since the tortures of Torquemada—Russia might pro- vide some parallels—but there will be few purists dis- posed to insist on a meticulous precision of comparison in such a case. President Roosevelt's condemnation is, in view of the restraint his position imposes, even more impressive than his predecessor's.
It is true that Jews in Germany have not been formally condemned to death ; it has only been made impossible for them to live. Their crime is that they are of the same race as a frenzied boy of seventeen, who, dis- traught by the sufferings inflicted on his parents by the Nazi rulers of Germany, shot a member of the German Embassy in Paris. Nothing but unequivocal condemna- tion can be pronounced on political assassination by civilised men. It is only people of the type of the Nazi leaders who condone and even glorify it. They have exalted to heaven the murderers of Rathenau and Erzberger and Dollfuss, and their own record in the matter of assassination is too pertinent to be ignored at a moment when a political murder is being taken as a pretext for a mass-persecution that throws Germany back to the level of the Middle Ages. The so-called " blood-bath " of June 3oth, 1934, was simply a mass- massacre—of women as well as men ; General von Schleicher's wife was shot with him—without semblance of trial. An assassination only becomes an outrage when its author is a Jew, and if he is a Polish Jew it is on Jews, not on Poles, that a vengeance which strikes the innocent alone is visited.
What form that vengeance has taken has been recorded in the British, French and American papers, if not in the. German. On Thursday morning of last week, twenty-four hours after the death of Herr von Rath from the Polish Jew's bullet, by an obviously concerted plan—whether attributable to the Government or to the Party is immaterial—Jews were beaten up, Jewish shops were wrecked and looted, Jewish synagogues were set on fire throughout what is now known as the Greater Reich—for one result of the annexation of Austria and Sudetendeutschland is that Jews in those areas can now be subjected to the treatment to which their co- religionists in Germany proper were always exposed. When that had continued for some fourteen hours Dr. Goebbels imposed a veto, and the Government itself took the situation in hand. It began with arrests and consignments to concentration camps on an extensive scale. A reign of terror set in. Jews everywhere fled from their homes and hid shelterless and foodless in woods. By Monday the first set of anti-Jewish decrees had been promulgated. A collective fine equal to about L84,000,000 is imposed on the Jews of Germany —much to the benefit of the Government's precarious financial system. All the damage done to Jewish premises by Nazi mobs is to be repaired at the expense of Jews ; but Jews will not be able to use the premises so repaired, for they are to be excluded from all economic activity in Germany from the end of the year onwards. No Jew may attend any public entertainment, no Jew may attend any German university, no Jewish child may attend any German school—but no Jew apparently may emigrate, or if he does he will go without a penny to support him or start him in a new life elsewhere. It is recorded that Jews who tried to escape from Sudetendeutschland were compelled to crawl on all fours over the frontier and were then sent back by the Czechoslovakian authorities at the behest of the Germans. Not one of the half-million victims is guilty of anything but the crime of being a Jew.
For the world outside Germany two problems baffling in their magnitude and complexity are presented. One is the age-long problem of evil. Never before in living memory, or for generations before that, has brute force divorced from every canon of morality been erected into a national policy on a scale comparable with this, and there are no precedents to determine the attitude to be adopted towards it. No foreign Power can do anything for the Jews still in Germany.. Any attempt to do that, even any expression of opinion on what has happened, may well make their lot worse, though silence would inevitably be interpreted as indifference or condonation. Even the protest our own Government has made is prompted, not by the pogrom itself, but by the outrageous charges brought by the controlled German Press against certain_ British public men, and the American Government, while indicating its judge- ment plainly by calling its Ambassador home, has refrained from official protest. In view of this impossibility of helping the victims of the Nazi terror so long as they remain in Germany, the impulse of most normally- minded people would be to reduce to the minimum of strictly official relations all contact with a country whose rulers apply the methods of barbarism in the midst of a civilised continent. To a large extent that must happen, for the events of the past week have obliterated the word appeasement, for the present at any rate, from the political vocabulary—a bitter and wholly undeserved reward of Mr. Chamberlain's en- deavours.
But that is only one problem. The other is how the Jews who have escaped from Germany, and those who may yet be expelled, may be helped. Execration of Nazi methods is dishonest and hypocritical unless every possible step is taken to give succour to the victims of those methods. As a whole the problem may be insoluble, but something at least can be done to alleviate suffering, and the duty to do that is a solemn charge on civilisation. A totally new effort on a totally new scale is called for. The Evian Conference of last July has led to nothing. Palestine could only accommodate a few thousands of Jews at the outside. The United States is receiving some and could take more. Australia is receiving some and could take more. The Indian States are receiving some. It is incredible that in the vast spaces of the British and French Empires and on the North and South American continent there should be no room for a singularly industrious and resourceful people. The four African territories of Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika and Northern Rhodesia have between them a white population of less than 40s000. Is there no room for any Jewish settlement there ? The question must be faced at once and resolutely, and, if necessary, at some cost, by countries like Great Britain and the United States and France in the name of humanity. Ultimately they will be enriched, not impoverished, by the harbourage they offer, though that should not be the operative motive. And there can be little doubt that hundreds of thousands of Germans who have watched the pogroms with a shame and disgust as profound as our own would view any move to help the victims of their rulers with thankfulness.
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