THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 172 No. 5141

LONDON NOVEMBER 19th 1938

SIXPENCE

IN THIS ISSUE

TH E FUTURE OF THE UKRAINE

The Coming Question in Central Europe

THE CHURCH IN NATIONALIST SPAIN

II. The Religious Orders (From Our Burgos Correspondent)

THE WORK OF ATATURK

An Estimate o f Turkey To-Day

“THE BOOKE OF ST. THOMAS MOORE”

By Bernard Newdigate

“STRANDED”

By Robert Speaight Full L ist o f Contents on page 664.

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The Nazi Revenge

Last week-end witnessed, in Germany, a succession of attacks on Jewish property by hooligan mobs, followed by wholesale arrests of Jews and by penal decrees of the German Government against the unhappy half a million Jews who remain under the Reich. This revenge for the murder, in Paris, of a German diplomat by a Jewish youth of seventeen, was such an exhibition of sustained malignancy and indiscriminate cruelty th a t it has provoked general disgust and indignation outside Germany, for it is an attem pt to impose vicarious suffering on a grotesque scale. This is a recrudescence o f Nazi anti-Semitism which cannot plead for itself any of the reasons which were brought forward in 1933. I t is not now pretended that the remaining Jews constitute any sort of threat or possess any stranglehold on German life. They are a frightened and downtrodden minority, and the Nazis are unable to argue that they are not, without detracting from the Nazi achievements o f the last five years. While the Paris murder afforded the occasion, it has for some time been feared and forecast th a t the lull following the settlement with Czechoslovakia was to be employed in further measures against the Jews, and then against the Protestants, and finally against the Catholics inside the Reich. The Hostages

The Jews in Germany today are viewed in part as hostages and in part as sources of wealth. The Germans are notoriously bad a t gauging the reactions abroad o f what they do. They undoubtedly suffer from Jewish enmity all over the world, and particularly in the New World, and it is their calculation that such enmity can best be controlled by there being, in Germany, many Jews who can be made to suffer for what happens abroad. From this point o f view there is not really a desire to see the last Jew pack up and go, and the refusal to let Jews take their property away and depart is not simply a desire to seize th a t property for the State. But, equally, it is convenient to have a community of people naturally devoted to acquiring wealth, as bees collect honey, and to be able from time to time, on this pretext or that, to raid their hives. The official estimates which have been put out in the last few days about the wealth o f the Jews in Germany are no doubt highly speculative figures, but the Jewish community is large enough to be well worth shearing from time to time. There have been many indications that the outbreaks were coming, and th a t the idea o f destruction as a pretext for levying a collective fine was approved from above and known in advance.

A not unim portant factor in these incidents is clearly brought out in Professor Stephen R oberts’ valuable study, The House that Hitler Built. It is the overlapping between the party and State organization and the rivalry between competing bodies who know that, sooner or later, one o f the two will be merged in the other. This accounts, for instance, for the over-elaborate thoroughness with which card indexes are compiled, and for many o f the excesses which young and ambitious group leaders indulge in when they judge the moment favourable. In certain Rhineland towns, special rioters had to be imported, it being thought that the local Storm Troopers had too many active Catholics in their ranks. A Good Day for the War Nursers

About the Czech frontiers, the Germans had a good case and the successful violence with which they handled it did not make it less good. With th a t settlement was removed the last great immediate and unescapable issue, which might have involved Germany and France,