NEW YORK (Feb. 24)
The results of a study on anti-Semitism in Western Germany made by R.H. Shackford, Scripps-Howard correspondent, are published today in the New York World-Telegram. Traveling all over Germany to investigate sentiment about Jews among the population, Mr. Shackford found these attitudes typical among Germans of all classes:
1. Resentment and opposition to Adenauer’s plan to compensate Isral financially for the crimes of Hitler – what Adenauer calls “the demand of our own conscience.”
2. Disbelief that Hitler exterminated 6,000,000 Jews. Even the newspaper Dusseldorfer Nachrichten says “a fair estimate would fee 1,000,000.”
3. Acceptance of neo-Nazi claims that the Allied Nuremberg War Crimes trials were as “staged” as the Communist purge trials. They even accuse the Allies of building concentration camps and gas chambers after the war to support their own propaganda.
4. Belief that Hitler was right but that he made “mistakes.” Extermination of the Jews is sometimes called a Hitler “mistake” but apparently because it aroused the world against Germany rather than on moral grounds.
5. No sense of guilt about the war and the tendency to blame the Allies for failing to see it was a war against Stalin. The Jews are blamed for starting the war. That’s what Hitler always said.
6. Sympathy for the “little” members of the Nazi party who are said to be the real victims of the war -”wronged” by the Allied denazification program.
7. Preferential treatment for German victims of the “barbarous” Allied bombings over needy Jews and others who suffered from Nazi persecution.