Censorship in Germany

Ironic comment is produced here by the repeated official assurances through the German Foreign Minister, von Neurath, that no real censorship exists in Germany, and that press correspondents are unrestricted in their messages.

Thus, the New York “Evening Post” reveals that yesterday, for the third time, a dispatch sent to the “Evening Post”, by the Berlin correspondent, H. R. Knickerbocker, was stopped. The “Evening Post” says that the message in question described Mr. Knickerbocker’s personal observations of the conduct of Nazi Storm Troops on the Kurfurstendamm “where a troop of Brown Shirts marched down the Avenue shouting, ‘Down with the Jews’, ‘Out with the Jews’, while patrons in Jewish-owned cafes and restaurants fled.”

Yesterday’s New York “Times”, touching on the question of the German censorship, publishes an editorial under the caption, “A Short and Easy Way”. It says, “A favorite German comparison today is with the stories of alleged ‘atrocities’ in Belgium at the onset of the war in 1914. But there is this difference. At that time Germany was cut off from direct communication with the outside world. She could not at once register her protests and denials. Today everything is open to her — cables, wireless, telephone. A troop of foreign correspondents are in Berlin ready to send along every public statement by the German Government. The columns of the American press are at the free disposal of German officials to make whatever representations they please . . . . It may truthfully be said of the press of this country that in all this news about what is going on in Germany, it has been guilty of no suppression.

“This condition of free communication will leave the German Government without excuse if it does not make use of it to get its case clearly and fully before the whole world. Let the censorship in Berlin be entirely lifted. . . . That would be a frank and convincing course. The stupid suspicious course is to raise the cry of ‘reprisals’ as has been done in Berlin, and to threaten other Governments unless they suppress in their own newspapers what the Hitler regime is pleased to call ‘calumnies’.”