Erika Dreifus

“There has been no tragedy in modern times equal in its awful effects to the fight on the Jew in Germany. It is an attack on civilization comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade. Adolf Hitler hardly ever makes a speech today without belittling, blaming, or cursing Jews. Every misfortune of the world is in whole or in part blamed on Jews. There is a campaign of race prejudice which surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen, and I have seen much.”

Source: W.E.B. DuBois, quoted in the first episode of Ken Burns’s latest documentary, The United States and the Holocaust (beginning at 1:21:40). I did a bit of digging: DuBois wrote these words in 1936.