Tetzlaff, Richard

Die armen Juden [The Poor Jews]

Leipzig: Adolf Klein Verlag, 1939. Second Edition. Virulently antisemitic Nazi propaganda tract published only weeks after Kristallnacht, presenting an elaborate conspiracy theory in which Jews are blamed simultaneously for capitalism, Freemasonry, Christianity, Bolshevism, the First World War, Germany’s postwar economic crises, and revolutionary violence throughout Europe and Mexico. Tetzlaff assembles tendentious biblical quotations, invented casualty figures, racial doctrine, and purported historical examples to ridicule Germans who expressed sympathy for persecuted Jews and to portray Judaism as inherently criminal and hostile to other nations.

The booklet opens with the November 1938 shooting of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan. Tetzlaff repeats the Nazi characterization of the act as an assault by “world Jewry” upon the German nation and condemns anyone who speaks of the “poor Jews” as intellectually corrupted by Jewish influence. This closely follows the regime’s official exploitation of vom Rath’s death as the pretext for the Kristallnacht pogrom. The text is dated Berlin, January 1939, situating its composition between the November pogrom and the outbreak of the Second World War.

The remaining chapters extend this argument through quotations from the Bible and other sources concerning the Israelites, Jewish identity, relations between Jews and non-Jewish societies, and the supposed consequences should Jews obtain political power. Its method—extracting passages from their contexts and combining them with fabricated history and racial conspiracy theory—exemplifies the pseudo-scholarly form adopted by much Nazi antisemitic literature.

An instructive primary document of the rapid transformation of the Grynszpan–vom Rath affair into popular propaganda justifying racial persecution. This second edition formed No. 25 of the Leipzig series Völkisches Erwachen (“Völkisch Awakening”); the appearance of a second edition by January 1939 suggests active demand for the tract during the intensified antisemitic campaign following Kristallnacht.

Pictorial red wrappers, the title partly rendered in pseudo-Hebrew lettering above a caricature surrounded by religious, political, and Masonic symbols; 46 pp. IN GERMAN. A near fine copy. Item #15206

Price: $250.00