“Upheld by the desire to combat the ever-growing agitation against our German Homeland and to give Germans in the United States a spiritual weapon we have worked out this little pamphlet as a precursor to a mightier defensive campaign”. This is the avowed purpose of the “German Legion, Inc., Member of the Association of German and Austrian War Veterans in America” in issuing its preliminary brochure, and a naive, sorry little Manila-covered booklet it is—and full of some awful boners.
One of the “spiritual weapons” for Hitler’s cohorts here is a list of the names and deeds of Germans who have contributed to the culture and weal of the world. Although the too-obvious Einstein is omitted as not “belonging”, they slipped up and included such non-Aryans as Fritz Haber and Richard Willstaetter, both Nobel Prize Winners, and Albert Neisser and Albert Fraenkel, on whom it bestows laurels for significant research and discoveries in medicine—men here called upon to boost Germany’s fair name although anathema and damnation have descended upon their heads in the New Germany. In failing to “purge” their lists of Jews the German Legion, Inc. were caught more than napping, for Fraenkel is, on the face of it, as unmistakably a Jewish name to every German as Goldstein is a Jewish name in America.
EVEN GOEBBELS SLIPS UP
But the example for irresponsible propaganda has been set in high places. When Paul Joseph Goebbels, himself neither blue-eyed nor dolichocephalous, but yet Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, said that four worthwhile movies have been produced and named them—”Potemkin”, “Anna Karenina”, “Rebel” and “Niebelungen”—he himself was so far unenlightened as to be unaware that all four of them had been produced under Jewish directors.
Another spiritual weapon which the incorporated German Legion puts into the hands of the Germans among us is a tabulation of the Nobel Prize Winners from 1907 to 1932. That is, it lists the nations this way: (1) Germany with a total of 31; (2) America with 14; (3) France with 18; (4) England with 16; and (5) Italy with 1. There is, of course, no analysis of these figures, no elucidating statement that of the 31 awards going to Germany, 8 went to Jews.
The fine comb which got such “lice” and Nobel Prize winners as Einstein, Mendelssohm, Mahler, Liebermann, Schoenberg, James Franck, Gustav Hertz, Paul Ehrlich, Otto Meyerhoff, Heine, Gundolf, Emil Ludwig and Paul Heyse, manifestly had several teeth missing. . . .
Another fact from which Germans here should gain support is the first place Germany occupies among the nations whose sons migrated to these shores. For lo, Germany leads all the rest with a total of 5,907,893 during the years 1820 to 1930, and it holds this place securely for Ireland’s second best is only 4,651,195.
One is unaware that any hostility existed today against Germany because the Duke of Hessia sold his because the Duke of Hessia sold his minions to serve as professional soldiers in the English army against the colonial rebels during the Revolutionary War. But the German Legion, Inc. evidently finds it necessary to whitewash Germany of hostility towards our young, revolutionary country, for it presents the following paragraphs as additional spiritual weapons:
FREDERICK’S ANTI-ENGLISH STAND
“On April 7, 1777 Frederick the Great write: ‘Even if the English Crown gave me all the millions at its disposal I would not give it two companies of men to fight the colonies’.
“Frederick forbade the Hessian mercenaries to march through his territory.
“Replying to another suggestion to ally himself with England, Frederick wrote: ‘Never! I am not like other German princes whom you can buy with gold’. And about the Duke of Hessia he wrote: ‘Do not make me responsible for his education. Had he gone through my school he would not have sold his subjects to England’.
“In January, 1778 Frederick requested his ambassador in Paris to inform the American deputies that ‘it is my wish that your efforts be crowned with success. Nor shall I hesitate to recognize the independence of the colonies as soon as France, which is playing a greater role in the conflict, has done so’.
GERMANY’S HELP TO UNION
The good-will of the Germans during the Civil War leads to an even more imposing list of irrelevancies and not very subtle anti-British propaganda. “England and France both forbade the sale and purchase of Union bonds and England especially supported the South both financially and morally in every way possible. But Germany bought up almost $600,000,000 worth of Union bonds”, is one nugget of truth. Even the Congressional Record is cited, 3rd Session, Part II, page 954, giving Senator Pomeroy’s remarks in 1870: “The Germans gave us men, they recruited our army, they helped save this nation. The French were formerly our friends, the Germans are our new friends’.
The preface of this pamphlet promises a handbook which will fill all the interstices of the pamphlet, it will ‘most especially deal with the Treaty of Versailles and the fourteen years of slavery which followed”.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
