Dorothy Thompson

Daily Oklahoman/February 22, 1939

MR. GEORGE RUBLEE is to be congratulated for having used his patience, intelligence and common sense to secure from the Germans the greatest concessions that they have yet given in the matter of their Jewish citizens and the emigration of those citizens.

To what extent the German willingness to listen to a measure of reason is due to the reaction abroad and to what extent it is due to the internal reaction it is not possible for this column to gauge.

Certainly the world’s indignation was not without effect. The late Count Brockdorf-Rantzau, for many years German ambassador in Russia, used to say of the bolsheviks, “Parvenus are sensitive.” But tribute also must be paid to the German people.

I say. as one who has known Germany intimately for years and who has lived there, that the whole German people were shocked and appalled bv the events in November. Letters have come to me, smuggled out of Germany from friends and from strangers there, begging me to tell the world that these actions were not initiated by the German people nor did they have their support.

This dooes not mean, however, that one can count on any reversal of the fundamental German policy. One can certainly not count on the reversal as long as the anti-Semitism, which is their chief stock in trade in fomenting a world counter revolution against democracy, is working so well as it is.

One must consider. rather, that any relaxation of outright persecution to the point of extermination may be really a sort of nazi policy, which, when it was initiated in Russia, was hailed as a definite turn toward moderation—a mistake which was paid for by the whole world and especially by those poor Russians who were encouraged by the policy to reopen enterprises only to be very soon “liquidated” by expropriation and even by murder.

It would be a disservice to the world if governments halt in their efforts to speed an alleviation of this problem.

It is difficult to estimate to what extent the program arrived at by Mr. Rublee and the German government can be made workable, but this column takes some pride in the fact that its basic idea was first launched in a little book which I wrote last summer with the aid of experts.

The proposals which I made in “Refugees: Anarchy or Organization?” did not seem to me ideal. Nothing is ideal except a complete reversal of the policy whereby a nation can deprive its own citizens of their legal rights and throw them out as a charge upon the rest of the world.

But inside existing realities and with a view to saving the lives of innocent and useful people it seems possible, given a modicum of common sense, greatly to improve emigration facilities.

Written months in advance of the November pogrom, the book predicted that the refugee problem would become one of mass emigration, that it would demand German co-operation and that it ought to be financed to the greatest possible extent with the Jewish capital existing inside Gcrmany.

We also suggested that in view of the exchange restrictions which the German government has been forced into making by its own policy the emigrants should be allowed to take out capital goods, even locomotives—in other words, the material needed for constructive colonization.

It is argued against this plan that it assists German exports. It also prevents wholesale suicides. It is an enormous advantage to the emigrants that instead of being permitted to take out a minute fraction or none of their goods in money they can take out a large proportion of it in capital goods, in wealth which can be used to produce wealth abroad.

Precisely in this way the “Havaara” has been able to bring out of Germany more than 45,000 persons since 1933 and help build up Palestine.

At any rate, it is easy io tell people inside a fortress to die for a principle rather than accept compromise. It will be our mistake if we regard the compromise as a solution.

There arc things in the German proposal that are revolting for instance, the declaration that Germany intends to let elderly Jews live quietly and without persecution “unless something extraordinary occurs such as an attempt upon the life of a nazi leader by a Jew.”

If one wants to make perfectly clear what this means let us translate it to the American scene. I wonder what the Germany government would have thought if the American government had threatened to expropriate, persecute and imprison every German in the United States because a German kidnapped and murdered the child of an American hero!