THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS THURSDAY, AUGUST 24, 1933 HITLERISM AND THE JEWS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21578, 24 August 1933, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS THURSDAY, AUGUST 24, 1933 HITLERISM AND THE JEWS

The Zionist Congress now sitting in Prague is exercised over Germany's treatment of the Jews. It has reason to be. There has lately been a revival of official persecution. The proof of this is too circumstantial and too well authenticated to be brushed aside. In the Nuremberg incident reported to-day is a very shocking addition to the evidence. But it does not need particular happenings of this ghastly sort to carry into every open mind the conviction that deliberately brutal maltreatment has been the imposed lot of many of these unfortunate people. A considerable number of them fled the country at the first Nazi onslaught, among them, as will be loug remembered, Professor Einstein. His scientific genius had given much additional lustre to Germany as the home of many a brilliant toiler in intellectual research. The Nazi regime threatens to put an end to all that. Horribly tragic is the fact that, merely because he is a Jew—for by no stretch of imagination can he be deemed an enemy, in any sense, of the country he has been compelled to leave —he is a refugee in England and his German home', a ruin under the looting hands of Hitler's miscreants. Equally tragic, however, is the plight of those without means or opportunity to leave. They perforce remain, to be baited and beset—to give point to the Nazi infatuation for a Teutonic exclusiveness in , the land seized by intrigue and held by terror. After the first onset of this infatuation there was ground for hope that foreign protests, particularly those made by British leaders of thought and action, would constrain Hitler to desist from this ruthlessness. That hope has died, killed by the renewal of foul deeds. Intervention is difficult. A show of reason can easily be made for a Government's rigour against any it damns as interloping aliens. Excuses —it would be a travesty of language to call them explanations—can be manufactured by standardised production. Propaganda of denial can be readily organised where personal liberty to speak and write the truth is under iron censorship. Yet "murder will out," and the revivaf of this crime against humanity is v bound to provoke repressive censure.

Something is to be said for the view that many Jews suffering early in the German "terror" were not victimised more than other objects of the intimidating Nazi policy. They were made to feel the weight of Hitler's terrible displeasure because, as "intellectuals," they were in alleged sympathy with anti-Nazi movements, Socialist, Communist or pacifist. The "terror" was painstakingly directed, in order to impress all sorts and conditions of folk in Germany with the futility of resisting the new regime. A shrewd cunning was in the excessive publicity given by the Government department of "propaganda and enlightenment," under Dr. Goebbels, to the boycott against Jews in business and professions, so that the fierce administrative purpose of Hitler should be made to appear more ferocious, if possible, than it actually had become by that time; and foreigners naturally interpreted this anti-Semitic "drive" as the chief aim of the "terror." As a matter of fact, it was but part of the universal intimidation Germany was to know. Communists had long been subjected to it; Jews were the next group selected for suppression; but everybody was meant to understand that to do so much as appear to be lukewarm about the Nazi programme was to incur loss and violent injury, and for this purpose the Jews, plainly outside the sacred Teutonic circle of the ideal German nation, served particularly well as chopping.block. But this sinister selection of them was neither new nor temporary. Hitler preached his antiSemitic dogma at the very beginning of his German career in politics. Official Nazi publications propounded it everywhere, even in the quaint English of the Nazi newssheets sent to this country. The Jews —not some but all of them—were to be driven out again to the "desert," to die where they belonged. And this attitude has not been moderated. Hitler confessedly intends it never shall be. So Jews have been removed from public offices, from professions, from business, from every kind of employment, their means of livelihood taken away, their dwellings sacked, their lives made a burden; and, as the Nuremberg incident shows, utter ostracism has become their portion. To be a Jew in Germany has amounted to becoming a shelterless prey to every sort of obloquy and torture. That this description of their plight is no exaggeration is proved by recent events in Upper Silesia, where Hitler has been frankly eager to exert his strength. The League Council had before if last month a petition from the Jewish minority there, a petition appealing for protection in pursuance of tho League's obligations. One by one, the non-German members of the Council joined in condemnation, complete and scathing, of the heartless persecution revealed by convincing inquiry. A reiterated reminder was given of the German Government's promise of fair treatment to this Jewish minority, as a covenanted undertaking and the only reply vouchsafed to the rebuke was Hitler's explanation that German laws had been applied in Silesia "by accident," a naive admission that Jews were being persecuted in Germany and that only in regions under League surveillance like Silesia could the outside world do anything to hinder it., That world will be convicted of a numbed conscience and a weak heart if its , efforts to check organised inhumanity stop at wordy -protests.