18. Press Reaction

Over the following days newspapers, from practically all over the world, reported in detail on the events in Hamburg, and on the arrival of the Exodus passenges in Lübeck.
While the French, and a section of the American press, criticized the violence used against the Jews by the British, the British press mostly accentuated the violent resistance of the Jews in Hamburg.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) implied in its reportage that some journalists had travelled to Hamburg merely to write anti-British articles.

Reporting in the German press was more varied in respect to the Exodus passengers. Besides sympathy and consternation there was also latent antisemitism and envy.
Both these views were, in particular, expressed in the Lübecker Nachrichten newspaper (LN). Both the Lübecker Nachrichten newspaper (LN) and the Lübecker Freien Presse newspaper (LFP) had kept their readers regularly informed of the journey of the Exodus Jews from Palestine to Lübeck, from the time the Exodus 1947 had entered Haifa. On 10th September, the Lübecker Nachrichten newspaper (LN) carried the headline and front page article: "Exodus Jews in Lübeck". The article contained the following passages:
It is years - how many exactly? - since we saw such people. They, then, disappeared behind the barbed-wire of the Polish ghettos and concentration camps.
This implied that the ghettos and concentration camps were built by the Poles and not by the Germans. This reluctance to face the truth of historical fact is evident again:
I interviewed several young people - who had allegedly spent years in concentration camps - about the course of their journey.

In contrast to the majority of the German Press, the Northwestdeutsch Rundfunk radio (NWDR) adopted a clear position in its commentaries. For the NWDR, the:
tragedy of our fellow Jewish men and women from the "Exodus" [...] is reason to fight antisemitism unrelentingly and with all our might.
The NWDR commentator also expressed sympathy for Jewish people illegally attempting to reach Palestine:
It has to be understood how people in despair should disregard social norms which prevent them from realizing their milennia old desire for a homeland.
Radio Bremen made the following commentary regarding the Exodus 1947 refugees:
the fate of the homelessness of the Jewish people is being repeated.


German Text: Henrik Jan Fahlbusch, Sarah Haake, Felix Hurlin, Paul Kononow and Lars Krobitsch.


Section 19