GERMANY: ‘Offered to a Jew!

Part of most tourists’ fun in quaint old Nuremberg is shuddering at the medieval torture instruments in its thick-walled Burg (citadel). Last week Nuremberg Storm Troopers revived a medieval custom. They seized a woman convicted of mistreating her stepchild, drove her through the streets with a placard around her neck reading, “I am a liar and an unnatural mother!” Nurembergers guffawed. Two pictures of the driven woman were printed with approving comments by the local Nazi newsorgan Fränkische Zeitung. The Storm Troopers looked around for another woman to drive in medieval fashion through the streets. They found one accused of murdering her child—but suddenly Nuremberg’s Nazi municipal government intervened. There had been too many letters from British tourists, the Storm Troopers were warned, about that pretty, non-Jewish girl whom they had dragged around town orfe night earlier in the week. Aged only 19 and a typical Gretchen with two long plaits of blonde hair, the girl was seized by Storm Troopers when they found her in company with a Jew. To punish such treachery to Nazi “pure race” ideals, they cut off her blonde plaits, shaved her head, tied a placard around her neck reading “I have offered myself to a Jew” and pinned the plaits to the placard. Until after midnight the girl was dragged from cabaret to cabaret, forced to stand on the stage of each while she was made the butt of vile abuse. No Briton in any of the cabarets was so foolish as to challenge the Storm Troopers at the time but scores of Britons wrote scorching eye-witness letters next day, thoroughly scared the Municipality of Nuremberg which looks to tourists for revenue.