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"Mobs" and Mobs. Nazi bigwigs have often said off the record that if a Jew should ever assassinate the Fuhrer, "next day not a single member of the Jewish race would be left alive in the Reich." Last week only a handful of Jews were reported killed in the avenging of Ernst vom Rath. But in every part of Germany mobs smashed, looted, burned Jewish property.
The purpose was to wreak final ruin on a section of the German population which had already been systematically persecuted to the brink of ruin.
Synagogues were everywhere fired or dynamited. Numberless Jews of both sexes were beaten by mobs from the Baltic to the Brenner and from Sudetenland to the North Sea.
The complicity of the German Government was proved by the fact that in most cases police made no effort to restrain the so-called "mobs." These consisted mostly of young Germans who drove up in cars.
Heavy boots of the sort worn by party members when in uniform gave a good clue to the identity of the window smashers and firebugs.
The synthetic "mobs" were in some cases joined by genuine mobs but these were mostly Germans who simply grabbed what they could after Jewish shop fronts had been smashed by the "mobs." Some mobsters tossed Jewish goods out of smashed windows to passersby with guffaws and cries of: "Here are some cheap Christmas presents. Get yours early!" Not all German Aryans countenanced this depravity. Said an Aryan Berlin housewife despondently as she watched Aryan children making off with the contents of a Jewish shop: "So that is how they teach our children to steal!".
A few poorly-clad men jogged the elbow of a New York Times Berlin correspondent and whispered: "The German people do not approve of such treatment of the Jews." Bad Neighbor Policy. The harsh, explosive epithets in which the German language is rich, were heaped, together with obscenities, upon Jewish men, women and children in every part of the Reich.
They were spat upon, cuffed, nose-jerked, kicked and given black eyes. The atrocities stopped short of rape or firing squads.
Some Jews were so affected by the Nazi terror that, notably along the German-Netherlands frontier, they pitifully got down on their knees and crawled some distance, wailing and lamenting, to supplicate Dutch frontier guards to let them in.
These guards were adamant in every case, on instructions of Her Majesty's Government, for The Netherlands has good reason to fear Bad Neighbor Germany.
Damage & Indemnity. In Germany, insurance companies reported damage claims of more than $5,000,000 from Jewish policy holders in Berlin, more than $4,000,000 in Vienna. The New York Times estimated that total damage to Jewish property in Germany "may possibly reach one billion marks" ($400,000,000). The Times thought that the Jewish community this week, after all depredations, still owned property in Germany worth perhaps four billion marks ($1,600,000,000) and, before Hitler, may have owned 20 billions.