GERMANY AND THE JEWS
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I was surprised to find, in the pages of The Spectator of April 28th, such a timid and illogical defence of National Socialism as that offered by Herr von Dewall. His arguments cannot possibly convince the impartial foreign observer.
"The German youth," he writes, "German idealism, are wholeheartedly in the movement. Could that be if it were a semi-barbaric movement, if it had no higher ideals than the baiting of Jews, the suppression of labour, and the brewing of trouble on Germany's frontiers with the aim of creating a new war ? "
Idealism and youth, especially German idealism and
German youth, are particularly apt to aberrations ; the whole charm of German romanticism, of Wagner, Holderlia and Nietzsche, even of Goethe, lies in their Gothic semi- barbarism, in their wondering and childlike approach to the Greek and Latin ideals. We have already experienced the Great War and German militarism, both pure products of German idealism and youth ; and Jew-baiting has been, for nearly two thousand years, a distinguishing feature of German history.
All these, though fully endorsed by German idealism and youth, are far from attaining the ideals of European humanism. German idealism and youth therefore appear to be essentially semi-barbaric. Mr. George Sylvester Viereck, proud .of his morganatic. Hohenzollern blood, points out sarcastically in the New York Press that all extant descriptions of recent Nazi atrocities tally exactly with those circulated during the War as having been perpetrated in Belgium : the gouged-out eye, children's hands lopped off, &c. He there- fore deduces that these reports are false and puts them down to mere propaganda. I, however, am equally prepared to deduce that they must be true : in both cases the offender is the same nationalist-mad allemand moyen ; and the more smoke I see, the more I am prepared to believe in the existence of fire.
One must not forget either that Jewish persecutions coinciding exactly with those recently rumoured in certain papers have already been known to happen, only a few centuries ago, on German soil. The elite of Germany may have progressed since then, but the masses today, repressed
and depraved by war, -inflation, crisis-and. the -conditions of German industrialism, do not differ so very much from those of the middle ages ;- the German writer Jean Paul once wrote :
We have the everlasting Jew (the wandering Jew) ; where is the everlasting Christian ? " We Jews,. embittered by history, have failed to recognize any type of Everlasting Christian ; but we know well the everlasting Gentile, or `" Aryan." He is the type that, ten years ago, in the White Armies of Russia, put whole villages of Jews to the sword ; who, today in Germany, intends to boycott and starve the Jews out of existence. He is the Slav who, not yet broken in to the Mediterranean discipline of Christianity, fears the Jew because this last offers an older and less absolute alterna- tive to his newly-acquired faith ; less absolute because, a native to these fields, he no longer needs fixed landmarks. The population of East Prussia, Silesia and Mecklenburg, strongholds of Nazi violence, is mainly Slav ; the Berlin neighbourhood was originally colonized by Wends, and these too are Slay. One must not forget how much Charlemagne and the Teutonic Knights laboured to impose Christianity on these recalcitrant tribes which now wish to abandon the Old Testament in favour of Odin, Wothan, fairy-tales and sagas of Wagner opera.
I therefore tend to see, in this new Nazi movement, only another outbreak of East European, German or Slav, bar- barism and cruelty. The presence of renegade Galician Jews within the party (Goebbels, alias Gobeles, and Milch, alias Melech ?) only confirms me in this belief. We Jews have already been faced with Jewish Inquisitors and perjurous informers ; and we are acquainted with the views of such Jews as Otto Weininger, who begin by attacking Judaism and end in suicide. Through my position as a social worker amongst German Jewish emigres I have met men and women whose condition is a living proof of the many rumours of the past few weeks ; yet they fear to express themselves openly in the Press, lest they bring harm on friends and relatives who have remained in Germany. In the past England has reacted magnificently towards Armenian massacres and Jewish persecution. It is strange to note her present apathy, her readiness to accept the quibbling arguments of those who wish, for personal reasons, to affirm their own fidelity to the Nazi cause ; the way the British Press, on the whole, ignores the recent developments of German anti-Semitism, the ?lumen's clausus in schools and universities, &c. Even if some few Jews are responsible for certain aspects of Germany's present financial plight, yet the German nation as a whole declared the Great War and lost it. Today they refuse to accept the consequences of their own crime and folly ; piling crime on crime and folly on folly, they lay the whole blame on the minority of Jews, who represent only 1 per cent. of the German population and, even if their influence is out of proportion with their numbers, can, at the most, sway but 5 per cent. of German opinion.
In view of the vast number of these refugees who are already in Belgium, Switzerland and France, I feel that it is absolutely imperative that the League of Nations should immediately consider offering them some measure of pro- tection, such as the Nansen Passport granted to White Russians and Armenians.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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