On the Jewish Black-Market in Germany, April 1950

Abstract

When I came to Germany in the fall of 1948 what I knew of the so-called D.P. camps was what I had learned from the Jewish newspapers and from the publicity of the United Jewish Appeal. I thought of their inmates more or less the way I had seen them represented on posters: emaciated little girls stretching their bony arms through barbed wire, men walking around in torn rags, all of them depending for their very physical existence on the loaves of bread which American Jews were sending them through the American Joint Distribution Committee. I am a Jew and a rabbi, and as such I think that I had kept up with Jewish developments in Europe as much as the next man and as the information which was given us in America made possible. On the second day I spent in Germany I drove in company with one of the chief leaders of Jewry in the British zone of occupation to the notorious former concentration camp and present D.P. camp Bergen-Belsen. Under the Nazis this had been among the very worst of murderous institutions, and even after its liberation by British troops in 1945 many thousands of its former inmates had still died due to their fatally weakened state of health and mind which had just been able to bear with them through their trial but completely failed when it was over.