To the Editor:
Léon Poliakov’s survey “European Anti-Semitism East and West” in your June issue is rather disappointing. . . . M. Poliakov . . . devotes only two columns to the formidable task [of French anti-Semitism], while on Germany (which for all practical purposes belongs to Western Europe) he writes about two pages. However, no clear . . . picture of the situation in West Germany [emerges].
During the last few months we have received so many contradictory reports on the Jewish question in Germany that I for one would have appreciated a more fundamental analysis. . . . Only recently a Philadelphia lawyer, Meyer B. Cassman, after a visit to Germany on the invitation of the Bundes government, stated bluntly that there is no more anti-Semitism or National Socialism in Germany … a statement in sharp contradiction to recent warnings of the German Trade Unions, in which they speak of the existence of forty-two organizations, groups, etc. with anti-democratic and anti-Semitic tendencies. The campaign for a return of Hitler’s SS-men into German society is of grave concern to many good Germans.
M. Poliakov remarks that “there are few violent anti-Semites around and few scandalous incidents.” But the profanation of Jewish cemeteries has been going on for years. Only last April 19 (Hitler’s birthday was on April 20) at the cemeteries in Salzgitter (Lower Saxony), where 2,000 Nazi victims rest, 80 Jewish graves were demolished. On the statue erected in memory of the murdered Nazi victims, a straw dummy was hung up with a poster, “Germany awake—Israel perish!” The same week a similar incident occurred in Luebeck, where 32 gravestones were destroyed. Desecrations of Jewish cemeteries have intensified since 1953. Valuable material on this question is being supplied by awakened German democrats. In the Westfaelische Rundschau (Dortmund) of May 11, 1957, Kurt Georg Lindner discusses the desecrations in an article (“The War Against the Dead”). As Poliakov himself deduces from the statistics he presents, it seems too much to ask that the German people be completely purified of Hitler’s poison. . . .
Kurt R. Grossman
Kew Gardens, New York
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