Your Mark is Our disgrace’

In September 1941 the German Government introduced yet another means to abase and isolate the remaining Jews in Germany, the requirement that whenever in public they each wear a six-pointed yellow patch with the word 'Jude' written on it. Jewish responses were mixed. Some bravely embraced this sign of difference, following Robert Weltsch's exhortation of April 1933 that they 'Wear it with pride -the yellow patch'. Others felt deeply humiliated and exposed by having been thus marked out for all to see as social pariahs. But at least one anonymous non-Jewish German saw it differently. Addressing a Jew wearing the yellow 'star' the German said: 'Euer Fleck ist unsere Schande' (Your mark is our disgrace) (Beck, p. 623). That the Jews were forced to be different, forced not to be like everyone else, was to the shame of Germans and not Jews

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