Page 51 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

38 The British Diplomats

windows of the Park Hotel’s dining room. at that point, the local authori-
ties decided on the “first mass expulsion of Jews which has yet taken place
in Germany.” the press proudly announced that the area was now free of
Jews, and the Bavarian minister of the interior, Gauleiter adolf Wagner,
congratulated Bad toelz; he expressed the hope that the “whole of the Ba-
varian Oberland would follow this example.” 49
a few days after these events in Bavaria, d. C. Newton, a senior diplo-
mat at the British embassy, sent a report to sir samuel Hoare, the foreign
minister, on a speech that streicher had delivered at the sportspalast. it had
lasted for almost three hours and included “a series of incredibly indecent
stories,” which struck Newton as so extraordinarily bizarre that he thought
they deserved to be publicized. streicher’s aim was to warn against the dan-
gers of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, and he made a special
point of including in the first category people who had been converted
from Judaism to Christianity. Conversion, he insisted, was a delusion. “Wa-
ter could be poured over a Jew in buckets, but it would not make him
anything but a Jew.” He also denounced priests who refused to officiate at
the marriage of two aryans if one was a Catholic and the other a Protestant
but who did not object to the marriage of an aryan woman to a baptized
Jew. to buttress his assertion that the latter kind of union was unacceptable,
streicher “told a story which appeared to move him greatly, of the misery
of a German mother who had married a Catholic Jew and who discovered
that her new-born child was clearly stamped with the mark of the Jewish
beast. the creature that looked up at her from its cot was not a happy,
laughing Nordic child, but a hook-nosed, dark-eyed Jewish monster.” 50
toward the end of 1935, by which time the notorious Nuremberg laws
had been enacted, Phipps began to pass on to the Foreign Office dire
51
predictions about the fate of the Jews after hearing from Newton that a
member of alfred rosenberg’s staff had told a British lecturer that “animals
killed off cripples and that National-socialism would do the same. it looks
as though this policy were now being applied to the Jews with typical Ger-
man thoroughness and ruthlessness.” at about the same time, Newton
52
reported that he had been told by the journalist Norman ebbutt that in his
view “the [Nazi] party were determined to make life so impossible for the
Jews that they might be reduced to starvation.” Newton then gave his own

rosenberg, an early supporter of Hitler, was one of the leading ideologues of Nazism.
He published a tract on the “immorality” of the talmud as early as 1919. during the 1920s, he
was an adviser to Hitler on foreign affairs, and after 1933 he played an important role in the
dissemination of Nazi doctrines.