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WHEN DEFEAT
MEANS VICTORY
By FRIEDRICH WOLF
C ^ONTHAin to popular belief, not all Jews of
j high position were degraded in Hitler’s
Germany.
Certain members of t lie Warburg family, for
instance, have been awarded the title 'Honorary
Aryan,” by the Third Reich.
Many of Hugenburg’s editorial writers—men
who write pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic articles
are Jews.
On the other side of the fence—behind barbed
wire—the victims.
What distinguishes these victims of Hitlerism
from the “Honorary Aryans” of Israel? Simply
this: that this second group of people put the
integrity of their professions above the medieval
Jcultur of the Hitler regime.
Essentially, Hitler’s drive against the Jewish
professional class amounted to a conversion
The author oj this article one oj Ger
many’s outstanding dramatists—now •
an exile—is known throughout the
world through his
plays 44 Professor
. Mamlock"Sailors
oj Callaro,” “Cy-
ankali” and “Flor-
idsdorj.” He is
now on a short visit
in this country jor
a lecture lour. This
article, presented
exclusively in The
Southern Israelite
is most timely in
view oj Germany's
scrapping of the
Versailles Treaty
and the impending
danger o f a Europ
ean military con-
jlict.
A gentle hint in a German town
[that Jews are not wanted there.
of permanent economic bankruptcy. He argued
that the professions were overcrowded, that the
Jews had usurped posts worthy only of Aryans,
and that once the Jews were eliminated from the
professional life of Germany, it would then be
possible for German doctors and lawyers to earn
a decent living.
This argument was covered
with a liberal dose of cultural
garbage—"such as the canards
that Jewish doctors were unfit
to heal Aryan ills (like Goer-
ing’s addiction toTmorphine,
for instance), and that Jewish
lawyers were always looking
for opportunities to sell out
their clients.
Basically, however, Hitler’s drive against the
German Jewish professional class rested on
economic arguments. He told a starving medi
cal profession, for instance, that there were too
many doctors in Germany—and that only the
elimination of Jewish doctors would solve the
economic problems of the profession.
It happens that, on a population basis, there
never were enough doctors in Germany.
And Hitler, preparing to drive still lower the
national average income of the German people,
was consequently attacking the already below
standard income of the medical profession.
Now Nazi economics, by lowering the in
comes of the population, does not improve the
conditions of the professionals who expected
to benefit by the removal of Jewish professional
competition.
Hitler is not interested in the welfare of the
German professional class any more than he is
in the welfare of the working or lower middle
classes. Hitler’s masters are the very small
circle of munitions makers, financiers, and large
industrialists who are attempting by terror to
prevent their historically ordained doom.
This is a terror aimed against all those ele
ments of the population within and without
Germany who threaten the continued exist
ence in power of the present German rulers.
Internally, these rulers—acting through their
puppets, the Nazis—have declared economic
war on all economic classes whose conditions
can only be improved at the expense of the men
at the top. As the German economic structure
careens closer to hell on its long drop downward,
the owners of the Nazis employ one means after
another of protecting their own interests. And
the only way these rulers know of holding on
to their gold is to cut the incomes and the wages
of professional men and workers in Germany.
As an additional step in this process, they are
cutting the profits of the small shopkeepers
and business men.
This, however, is still not enough to save the
“Between us, -Moses, how did you manage to keep your program un
changed for the past five thousand years.”
situation for the powers behind the Nazis.
Consequently, they are driving the standards of
living of all classes other than their own down
still further in order to widen a foreign market.
Hitler’s decree of March 1(5, 1935, ordering the
immediate establishment of a conscript army of
500,000, is a very clear indication of the methods
the real rulers of Germany expect to use in their
drive for a greater slice of a foreign market.
I’lie one thing the masters of Germany, as it
now exists, see as the essential prerequisite for
wider foreign sales is new territory. This ter
ritory must include certain natural resources—
oil, iron, water power, coal, fertile wheat land,
and mineral deposits. It requires no crystal
gazing, therefore, to understand that Hitlers
backers have their hearts set on a major slice
of the Ukraine.
Very well, but what about the German Jews
who were driven out of their professions, and
even—like myself—into exile. I was born of
German parents in the Rhineland. During the
war, I served for four years as a battalion doctor.
Twice, I was seriously wounded, and my return
from the front was made in a Red Cross stretcher.
\et, when the Austrian alien Hitler came into
power, 1 found myself an exile from the nati\e
land I had served and loved.
Multiply my case by some eighty thousand,
and you get a fairly good picture of the a\a*
lanclie which buried most of us. Take off your
shoes and stockings, count each finger and toe.
multiply the result by ten or twelve, am
can table the final sum “Honorary Aryans
In the first case, you would find, if y ou : UU ^
investigate, that most of the dispossessed "ere
not even anti-Fascist, before the adyei
Hitler. Every hospital, every law office h at
its “Professor Mamlock” tragedy-'when
staged his coup de force. (“Professor .
lock" is the title of Friedrich Wolf
known play, dealing with the Nazi per
tion of a Jewish physician who, alt u *
more Prussian than (Continued on 1
[Cj
if THE SOUTHERN ISR