“Interview with Two German Refugees.” A Neighborhood Guild Broadcast from WJJD—1130 kilocycles, Sunday February 26, 1939, conducted by Charles Copeland Smith. Chicago, Illinois.
11”x 8.5”, cover+6 leaves of printed interview. Provenance: U.S. Department of State.
GOOD condition. $150
This is a radio interview conducted by Charles Copeland Smith in 1939 of two German refugees (Mrs. King and a Miss Greta King”) shortly before the fighting war begins later in the year.
Four rubber stamps on the cover (see image); last leaf detached from the stapled binding.
Why did the Kings leave Germany? Because they were Jews. The husband, Dr. King, lost his practice and privilege on April 1933. They outlined what was happening to Jews in general in Germany—the stormtroopers, the loss of life, imprisonment. Reports on some anti-Semitism in the US towards them
By 1935 determined to leave, the end was in sight for the Jews.
The April 1 1933 law that is mentioned I this interview refers to “The “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service”, the first official banishment of the Jewish people as menials, second-class citizens, banning the Jews from government jobs. The Jews had already been established by the Nazis as being the cause for the loss of WWI, the debacle at Versailles, the ruination of German culture and mortal enemy of the Aryan German. Many hundreds of laws like this would be instituted over the coming few years, establishing the legality of the supposed inferior nature of the Jewish people. (Also in July 1933 came the underpinning legislation of some future nasty thinking, Ernst Rudin’s “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring”, which established health courts and compulsory abortion and sterilization for a variety of physical and hereditary traits found to be unacceptable for the promulgation of a superior German race.) And this is all before the Nuremberg Laws of 1935/1936, (specifically the “Reich Citizenship Law” 1936) which basically established the fate of the Jews, removing their citizenship and making them “subjects of the state”. Do I really need reiterate the case for the Nazi subjugation of the Jews, and their making the social and legal basis for the coming extermination policies which were codified at Wansee in 1942? I think not–though it seems to me that for whatever reason the Smiths decided to not utilize this already well established (even by 1939) information. I think that at the very least they did not want to know.”