Abstract
IT may be impossible, as has been maintained on occasion, to indict a nation; but the letter in which Mr. James G. McDonald resigns office under the League of Nations as High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany does more. By the terms of that letter, which cannot be questioned seriously, Germany stands condemned as guilty of a persecution no less barbarous and an intolerance as rigid and as crass as any that figure in the annals of the Middle Ages. Though economic forces have taken the place of open massacre, the end in due time will be no less certain. For even half a million Jews, and with them the ‘non-Aryans' who are to share their fate, cannot in modern conditions so organise themselves as to avoid being ground to extinction between the alternatives of destitution and an exile which leaves them practically penniless. As Mr. McDonald points out, the conditions created by the Nuremberg legislation of September last have destroyed the utility of the office he now lays down, and have passed beyond the capacity of the activities of philanthropic and other bodies by whom provision has been made for all but some seventeen thousand of the eighty thousand refugees who have left Germany in the last three years. This legislation, by confining Reich citizenship to ‘Aryans' and those who accept the National Socialist conception of the State, has deprived Jews and ‘non-Aryans' of all rights as citizens?not only of the right to hold office, but also of the right to make a living by the exercise of profession, trade or business as between ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Aryan’ and, debarring them from all social relationship except inter se, has sought to create a social and intellectual ghetto, in which it will become increasingly difficult for them to survive.
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National Socialism and Non-Aryans in Germany. Nature 137, 16 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137016a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137016a0