Sir – The atrocities in Herr Hitler’s prisons and concentration camps are known to the outside world. The slow death to which German Fascism has condemned innumerable political opponents is less dramatic. Even unemployment relief is refused in most instances to Jews, Socialists, pacifists, and Communists who have been chased out of their positions. It is without example in modern history that a brutal victor should revenge himself thus terribly upon the guiltless wives and children of his defeated enemies.
Take, for example, the journalists and writers who have been chased out of their positions by Hitler and his regime. The whole Socialist, pacifist, trade union, and Communist press has been forbidden. Their property, offices, and technical plants have been confiscated. Their employees – workmen, journalists, draughtsmen – have been thrown on the streets without notice or compensation, their pension funds have been expropriated. No legally concluded contract stands. Even the payments to the widows and orphans of dead journalists and employees have ceased, since the prohibited newspaper undertakings have been forced into bankruptcy.
Writers with celebrated names whose works have been translated into many foreign languages, are in extreme need – some in Germany, some abroad.
There used to be about two hundred Socialist dailies in Germany, as well as a trade union press with a circulation of millions. Their employees had a safe income and were employed for years together.
For the most part they were former workmen or clerks who had worked themselves up to their positions and the corresponding standard of life through diligence, intelligence, and ability. They had succeeded in acquiring small libraries and decent dwellings; their children, for the most part, reached the higher schools or universities. To-day the lives of these thousands of opposition journalists have been ruined. Many of them are in concentration camps and are robbed of all their income. They must take their children away from school; they cannot pay their rent; they starve with their families; they are politically and socially defamed and calumniated. No bourgeois undertaking or newspaper dares to give work to Socialist, pacifist, or Left-wing journalists or draughtsmen, not to speak of the Jews, who, with an ever-decreasing number of exceptions, have been driven out of journalism.
Some of these journalists – especially the best known and those who are on this account in greatest danger – have fled the country. They are in the adjoining countries without a penny; they are forced to live on charity. Their manuscripts pile up in editorial offices in Prague, Paris, London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Vienna, and so on. Very few of them write a foreign language, and their translators wait impatiently for the printing of an article. They are forced to go the thorny way of the relief committee. Hours and days of waiting in a charity bureau are necessary before support can be obtained. These men are driven along a road full of humiliations.
A whole class of extremely cultured men has been degraded by the Hitler regime into penniless beggars without employment or prospect for the future. A few months ago they formed the elite of a nation. They were committed to the cause of peace and civilisation, and progress in Europe. To-day they are a sheer burden to themselves and their environment. Ninety per cent of them are pacifists, Socialists, democrats, and trade unionists. It was their life’s work to educate classes and nations to equality of status and to peace. For this reason the Hitler regime has denied them the right to live. For this reason it should be the duty of Europe and of every man who seeks the same ends as they to help these German intellectuals and to give them the means of existence.
Yours, &c.,
X. X.
Prague, June 15.
