THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS MONDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1937 ANTI-SEMITISM IN GERMANY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22916, 20 December 1937, Page 10

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS MONDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1937 ANTI-SEMITISM IN GERMANY

In Germany, this Christmas, it will j be better to have been sent to | prison than to have been born a Jew. j This is the Nazi way of thinking. The Government has resolved on a Christmas amnesty for political prisoners in concentration camps, for men imprisoned without trial and for those awaiting sentence. Twelve hundred will be released in accordance with this decision, which betokens a remarkable spasm of goodwill. But the goodwill is as partial as it is spasmodic. Side by side with this unexpected clemency is the launching of a new antiJewish campaign at Nuremberg, where this harsh policy has had many a notorious expression. A particularly shocking instance there, in August of 1935, aroused a resentful protest from other countries. The present revival of persecution, again under the direction of Herr Streicher, infamous for his antiSemitic "drives," is in keeping with his evil reputation. It is aimed at the livelihood of Jewish shopkeepers in the city. Their premises have been invaded by gangs of Nazis, who have chased out customers and roughly handled such of them as attempted to complete their v Christmas purchases. The shops are now placarded with notices warning customers that they enter at their peril. As Herr Streicher has a passion for thoroughness, there will doubtless be an extension of this campaign throughout the Reich. His renewed activity in oppression has its opportunity in the fact that many Jews have been allowed to remain in Germany, but •neither they nor their sympathisers •can take any comfort from that: those that remained when the oppression was at its former height were too poor to fly from it, and in this fact is proof of the brutality of the new onslaught. It is a cruel blow at the defenceless. The circumstances of this outburst make it unusually revolting. Much of the merry-making associated with Christmas has its origin in Germany; the Christmas tree, for example, was widely transplanted thence, British countries owing their adoption of it to the German custom of long observance. All the more atrocious, therefore, is this Nazi using of Christmas as an occasion for racial violence. No justification for this particular assault can be pleaded on the ground that it is jncongruous for observers of a Christian festival to buy from Jews. Christians gratefully remember that their Founder was the son of a Jewess and their Bible the gift of Jewish writers, and no so-called "Aryan" philosophy of race has dared, for all its foolish extravagance of argument, to lay hands on these established items of universal knowledge. Nor, whatever twists that philosophy has been given to make it serve a national programme, has it been tender about Christian scruples. Anti-Semitism, in spite of certain pleas that it rests on a need for protecting Germany from exploitation by nefarious Jews, is at bottom a blatant assertion of the "racial purity" of which J?azi politics have made so much since the very beginning of the National Socialist Party. Hitler's earliest manifesto is still on record, and it selected—as every subsequent enunciation of national policy has selected—the Jews as outstandingly and most despicably alien. No sooner was Hitler in power than he gave this part of the policy savage embodiment in oppressive measures. A reign of terror was begun. To make Germany a country uncongenial to Jews, even to maltreat them, was a purpose so terribly manifest that a large number of them fled at the first onslaught. It will never be forgotten that among those refugees was Professor Einstein. His scientific genius had conferred much additional lustre on Germany as the home of many a brilliant toiler in intellectual research; but, merely because he was of Jewish birth, he was compelled to seek sanctuary abroad —in England—while his house was being reduced to ruins by Nazi miscreants. Calmly and completely he disproved the fictitious charge that he had conspired against the Government. Not a shred of it remains. Yet he had to suffer with the rest. This experience, which has made his case against the Nazi regime so telling, has been especially noteworthy because of its evident relation to a plan to rid Germany of all "intellectuals" likely to withstand the new ban on individual freedom. Men such as Einstein would have been a bulwark agfeinst the effort to dragoon the nation into acceptance of political slavery. Others of his kind were similarly forced to escape, in the interests of their own service to the world; to have stayed would have been to surrender more than opportunity for this—they would have had to sacrifice ideals of freedom, and it was better to go than to be physically obliged to submit. Hitler's original declaration was that Jews, all of them, were to be driven into "the desert," where they belonged. His. method was to remove them from public office, from professions, from business, from every kind of employment. Their means of livelihood was taken away, their dwellings were sacked, their lives were made a burden. Social ostracism and political disfranchisement were inflicted. Even their children were subjected to humiliation. Some Jews, it was found, culd not be removed without an actual deportation that would have invited trouble beyond the Nazi Government's bearing at that time. Short of that everything hurtful was done, and, as it was, a chorus of foreign denunciation was raised, sufficient to constrain a moderation\ of the brutality. But this has reappeared at intervals, and the violent deeds at Nuremberg prove the spirit of hatred to be very much alive.