This last vacancy should have found many suitable candidates, if there was truth in the violently pink handbills that were handed out in the streets of Berlin during one of the “demonstrations” against the peace terms. For the sake of brevity I give only its high lights:
Fifty months have we stood at the Front honorably and undefeated. Now we have returned home, ignominiously betrayed by deserters and mutineers! We hoped to find a free Germany, with a government of the people. What is offered us?
The participation of the Jews in the fights at the Front was almost nil. Their participation in the new government has already reached 80 per cent.! Yet the percentage of Jewish population in Germany is only 1½ per cent.!
COMRADES, WHO WENT TO THE FRONT AS VOLUNTEERS?
WHO CROWDED INTO THE WAR SERVICES AT HOME? THE JEWS!
WHO SAT COMFORTABLY AND SAFELY IN CANTEENS AND OFFICES?
WHICH PHYSICIANS PROTECTED THEIR FELLOW-RACE FROM THE TRENCHES?
WHO ALWAYS REPORTED US “FIT FOR DUTY” THOUGH WE WERE ALL SHOT TO PIECES?
These are the people who rule us. [Here followed a long list of names and blanket accusations.] Even in the Soldiers’ Councils the Jews have the big word! Four long years these people hung back from the Front, yet on November 9th they had the courage, guns in hand, to tear away from us soldiers our cockades, our shoulder-straps, and our medals of honor!
Comrades, we wish as a free people to decide for ourselves and be ruled by men of OUR race! The National Assembly must bring into the government only men of OUR blood and OUR opinions! Our motto must be:
German people, rend the chains of Jewry asunder! Away with them! We want neither Pogrom nor Bürgerkrieg! We want a free German people, ruled by free German men! We will _not_ be the slaves of the Jews!
Out of the Parties and Societies run by Jews! Elect no Jews! Elect also no baptized Jews! Elect also none of the so-called “confessionless” Jews! Give your votes only to men of genuine German blood!
Though it is violating the chronological order of my tale, it may be as well to sum up at once the attitude of Berlin upon receipt of the peace terms. Four separate times during my stay in Germany I visited the capital, by combinations of choice and necessity. On the day the terms of the proposed treaty were made public apathy seemed to be the chief characteristic of the populace. If one must base conclusions on visible indications, the masses were far less interested in the news from Versailles than in their individual struggles for existence. The talk one heard was not of treaty terms, but of food. Not more than a dozen at a time gathered before the windows of the _Lokal Anzeiger_ on Unter den Linden. They read the bulletins deliberately, some shaking their heads, and strolled on about their business as if they had been Americans scanning the latest baseball scores, a trifle disappointed, perhaps, that the home team had not won. There was no resemblance whatever to the excited throngs of Teuton colonists who had surged about the war maps in Rio de Janeiro during August, 1914. One could not but wonder whether this apathy had reigned in Berlin at that date. Scenes of popular excitement and violence had been prophesied, but for two days I wandered the streets of the capital, mingling with every variety of group, questioning every class of inhabitant, without once hearing a violent word. A few individuals asserted that their opinion of America had been sadly shocked; one or two secretaries of Allied correspondents haughtily resigned their positions. But the afternoon tea at the Adlon showed the same gathering of sleek, well-dressed Germans of both sexes, by no means averse to genial chats with enemy guests in or out of uniform. There was no means of forming definite conclusions as to whether the nation had been stunned with the immensity of the tragedy that had befallen it or whether these taciturn beings had some secret cause for satisfaction hidden away in their labyrinthine minds.