In March 1949, Life magazine[1] featured this article:
"Fagin in Berlin Provokes a Riot
Jews clash with German police over the showing of "Oliver Twist"
The pictures from Berlin last week were like photographs of an old nightmare. Here again, as there had been a decade ago, were club-swinging police and mauled and battered Jews. On two successive nights the Jews and police fought with clubs, rocks and firehoses around the Kurbel Theater in Berlin's British sector.
This outbreak, however, was prompted by an attempt to show the J. Arthur Rank motion picture, Oliver Twist. A faithful picturization of the Dickens classic, Oliver Twist has "the Jew Fagin" as its principal villain. Berlin Jews--mostly non-German DPs [stormfag edit: displaced persons means recent immigrants from Poland]--felt this characterization was viciously anti-Semitic and demonstrated against the film both inside and outside the theater. German police were called; the riot followed. The next night demonstrators again engaged police; this time they were reinforced by a petition--signed by Berlin's Lord Mayor--urging withdrawal of the film. British military authorities refused to interfere, but the exhibitors finally gave in. By then the damage had been done. One leading German editor, noting an ominous tendency to blame Jews for Berlin's black markets, wrote that the local reaction to the demonstration had shown "frightening examples of the existence of anti-Semitic circles."
We wud nevah be involved in something like that, goy...
Was Oliver Twist actually as anti-Semitic as the Berlin riots would indicate? Americans could not judge on the evidence of the film itself. Protests by U.S. Jewish groups last fall prevented its release here. In England critics praised the picture, and Director David Lean pleaded guilty only to fidelity to Dickens; pointing out that he had modeled his character on the Cruikshank illustrations. Not once in the picture, the Rank organization added, was Fagin called a Jew. Moreover the Englishman Bill Sikes was just as villainous.
While all of these things were true, it was also true that Dickens himself and his great illustrator Cruikshank had conceived Fagin as a savage racial caricature. In the novel Fagin is described as "a very old shriveled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair." He also is called (by Bill Sikes) an "infernal, rich, plundering, thundering old Jew" and (by Dickens) a "wily old Jew."
In Dickens' and Cruikshank's time this perhaps had seemed an unimportant literary matter. But between Dickens and Director Lean history had interposed the ghosts of six million murdered Jews and the specter of genocide. It was hard to see why the producers of Oliver Twist had insisted on such complete fidelity and it was harder still to guess why the authorities had not only permitted exhibition of the picture in Germany but refused to withdraw it immediately after the inevitable reaction came."
Under pictures, there are the captions:
"Police use clubs in attempt to halt angry Jews storming Kurbel Theater. Before riots ended 35 Jews had been injured and three arrested. Seven policemen were hurt."
And:
"Door of theater where Oliver Twist was being shown is smashed by Jewish demonstrators who five times broke through police cordon established around playhouse."
The #BlackLivesMatter movement is an eerie ((echo)) of Polish-Jewish protests in Berlin which #BurnedThatBitchDown in 1949, over 66 years ago. Same shit, different decade.
Rioting Jew in a moment of confusion, looking for his kippah which fell during the chaos.
That German mayor of the British sector of Berlin, who signed the Jewish petition and encouraged the violence, was Ernst Reuter (surprisingly, no evidence of echo). He acted as the Stephanie Rawlings-Blake of "capitalist" Berlin. Rawlings-Blake, after all, is the mayor who gave Dindus "space to destroy" during riots in Baltimore.
A little background on Ernst Reuter might reveal how this protest was allowed to succeed. In 1914, he openly opposed the German monarchy. After being drafted, Reuter was "wounded and captured" by Russians during the Bolshevik Revolution (a likely story). In captivity, Reuter joined the Bolsheviks and "organized" his fellow prisoners. In 1917, Lenin sent him to Saratov to lead the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.
Ernst Reuter's spiritual father.
Upon his return to Germany, Reuter joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and was named the First Secretary of its Berlin section. He embraced a position on the left wing of the party, endorsing an open rebellion in March 1921.
In 1933, with the Nazis now in power, he was forced to abdicate his positions and was brought to the concentration camp Lichtenburg. After his release, he went into exile in Turkey in 1935 where he stayed until the end to the Nazi era.
This man was literally a Bolshevik commissar, in charge of the ((British)) ((capitalist)) sector of Berlin. So much for "muh capitalist allies." He was a prisoner of the Nazis, a traitor who advocated open revolt, who was allowed by Hitler to go free without death penalty. So much for "muh holocaust."
The whole thing makes me sick.
[1] Life magazine, 7 March 1949.