NS-Frauen-Warte, December 1938: article about reactions in Germany and abroad to the November pogroms1‘Die armen Juden!’, NS-Frauen-Warte, no. 13, 2 Dec. 1938, p. 407. This document has been translated from German. The journal was published every two weeks as the organ of the National Socialist Women’s League. It had a circulation of 1 million copies in 1938.
‘The poor Jews!’
The agitation of Jewry against National Socialist Germany surges and tumbles incessantly in waves of hatred that surpass anything ever seen before. The Jew Grünspan’s murder of Legation Counsellor vom Rath, which according to the murderer was directed at Germany, has finally put an end to the magnanimous patience of the German people and its leaders.
The spontaneous manifestations of outrage all over Germany and the measures taken by the Reich government, which prove to world Jewry that its weapons can also backfire, have unleashed, especially in the Western democracies dominated by Jewish influence, a new, unparalleled storm of agitation and defamation directed at Germany, a storm that reveals the true aims and intentions of the Jews and tears the mask from the murderer’s face of international Jewry.
Thus, the American newspaper New York Daily News dared to publish a letter from the Jew Max Rosenberg in which he suggests in all seriousness that ‘ten or twelve professional killers serving life sentences be freed on condition that they assassinate Hitler and his associates’.
Apart from the fact that such things are allowed to be published in a country that, including its leader, goes along with those who get most wrought up over the ‘barbarism’ in Germany and yet is accustomed to the horrors of lynching and other ‘cultural phenomena’, the criminal predispositions and characteristics of the Jews have hardly ever found expression more publicly and shamelessly than in this proposal.
Nonetheless, Volksgenossen are repeatedly to be found who, when faced with broken windowpanes and Jews under arrest, shake their heads in regret and incomprehension and dare to speak of the ‘poor Jews’ who, they say, were really not at fault after all.
These peculiar contemporaries of ours – who have the struggle of the Führer and the National Socialist Movement to thank for the fact that they can live, work, and earn a living in security and that the otherwise inevitable Bolshevism has not done away with the bourgeoisie in Germany too, to the same or an even greater extent than it has in Russia – have for the most part very quickly forgotten, in the safe security of the Third Reich, that the traitorous Jews, during the period when they held sway, smashed a great deal more than a few windowpanes where the German people were concerned. They have also forgotten that the contribution of 1 billion [Reichsmarks] that was imposed on the Jews in Germany amounts to a beggar’s penny in comparison with the gigantic theft of Germany’s national wealth that was perpetrated by Jewry over the decades, particularly during the period from 1918 to 1933.
The unpaid debit account of the Jews with regard to the German people is so vast that it can never be settled, even if one were to confiscate all the Jewish assets still present in Germany, however substantial they still may be. For the debt that Jewry has incurred in Germany is unrecoverable, and even the most concise description is unable to specify it with anything approaching accuracy.
The criminal instincts that spew forth from Jewry to a special degree, more so than from any other race, instincts whose acting out is virtually elevated to a commandment by the Talmudist religious doctrines, according to which every crime against Christians is permitted – spiritual carte blanche for all crimes – gave rise to conditions that enabled the Jews for decades, indeed for centuries, to enrich themselves at the expense of the German people above all others, by all available means.
But the Jews not only sought wealth, which already entails power and, in conjunction with political leadership, represented the strongest weapon in the fight for Jewish domination of the world. To achieve this goal, the people had to be robbed of all moral concepts that preserve the state, and here the Jewish ‘bearers of culture’ began their corrosive activities, intended to wear down the moral strength of the German people in particular. The ideal of rootlessness, the infinite candour with which Jewry dared to proclaim its ‘mission’, and the diabolical cynicism with which it asserted its claim to dominance emerge from a poem by the Jewish writer Paul Mayer that was published as early as 1913 in the journal Aktion.2Dr Paul Mayer (1889–1970), writer; an editor with the publishing house Rowohlt and literary advisor to the publisher Ernst Rowohlt, 1919–1936; emigrated to Mexico in 1939 and to Switzerland after 1945. The literary and political journal Die Aktion, edited by Franz Pfemfert, was published from 1911 to 1932, at first weekly, and from 1926 sporadically. It served as a forum for expressionist art and literature and at times reached a circulation of 7,000 copies. ‘Ahasvers froehlich Wanderlied’ appeared in Die Aktion on 29 Jan. 1913, p. 140. The poem has two more verses, which are not quoted in the NS-Frauen-Warte. The poem is admittedly no longer obscure, but, in its programmatic eagerness to make a statement, it cannot be evoked often enough:
Ahasuerus’s Merry Wanderer’s Song3This is an allusion to Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. The term refers to the thirteenth-century myth of a Jew who taunted Jesus on his way to the cross only to then be condemned to wander the earth until Judgement Day.
See, I am the rootless one, / not wedded to the world around me, / no homesick dream’s narcosis / sends my heart dropping to my boots, / for I am steeled by sorrow.
If you drive me from your doorsteps, / I am still the most in favour, / your cries of envy ring out shrilly, / for I drink from your springs / and weigh your values in the balance.
The smooth skins of my soul / hide what I, while begging, suffered; / but my spoils are piling up, / and your sweethearts shout for joy to me, / to me, the reject of the alien desert.
Mouth agape, you puff your reefer / for respectable digestion, / but I am a clever sensor, / and I provoke you into vices / for my very own uplifting.
And thus I play the games / of my seasoned wantonness, / strange, quite subtle, / ultimate aims concealed from you, aims of my Asiatic blood.
Since 1913, a great many of these strange, quite subtle aims have become visible in the world, and we are no longer deceived. All that remains is to look back and shudder.
Fraud, unscrupulousness, exploitation, stock-exchange capers and political corruption on the grandest scale, civil war, filth and rubbish, the triumph of immorality and degradation of women to soulless sex objects, the destruction of the family, the abysmal deterioration of taste, culture’s path into the gutter, and, again and again, crime in every form, murder as a political weapon, these are the achievements of Jewry for mankind and in particular for the German people, which least of all peoples has cause to indulge in inappropriate stirrings of sympathy. Forgetfulness is one of the human attributes on which the guilt-ridden most readily place reliance. For Jewry, however, it is a miscalculation that must never again be repeated.