Editorials

The Nazis will be destroyed, if they are ever to be destroyed, by economics. No revolutionary up-thrust from within and no protest from without can be counted upon to undermine their power or to modify their program.

The German’s need for freedom is metaphysical not psychological. He will even grow sentimental about it. But he will never fight for it. He will never “overthrow” the present regime. It can only break up and crumble about him as did the Kaiser regime in 1918.

Protests and ### moral indig### move the Nazis. Their moral sense can neither be offended nor appealed to. It is hopelessly warped. Their chiefs have long ago discounted the world’s hostile judgment and persuaded their people to see in it only the sinister manipulation of Jews.

Economic pressure alone will break or change them.

For four months now, Hitler has been feeding the German people on florid talk and apocalyptic visions. He has given them circuses. He must now give them bread. His showmanship is played out. His race incantations with which he charmed his followers is losing its magic potency. One cannot indefinitely feed the empty stomachs of people on Aryanism. Economic conditions in Germany have grown steadily worse since the coming of the Nazis into power. Business has slumped. The stock exchanges have suffered steady declines. The number of unemployed has not declined—except where unemployed Nazis have taken the places of Jews who are no longer included in governmental unemployment statistics. Unfortunately for Hitler there are not enough jobs from which German Jews can be dislodged to take care even of a small fraction of the unemployed Aryans in the Reich.

The people are beginning to demand action. Under date of July 3, the correspondent of the New York Times writes: “The business slump has created such unrest, far into the Nazi ranks, that the thought of the need of a ‘second revolution’ has become quite general.”

A large scale, persistent and relentless boycott of Germany will contribute mightily to the undermining of the power of this vicious and brutal regime and will hasten the day of the emancipation of Germany and of German Jewry.

The boycott is a moral weapon. It is recognized in International Law. The League of Nations retains it as its ultimate weapon in bringing recalcitrant nations to repentance. The Jews of the world must now resort to this weapon since all other methods to stop these would-be-destroyers of our people have failed.

Let there be no mistake about it. The Nazis will yield to pressure only. Our strategy, whether quiet or noisy, has failed to achieve its objective because we did not realize that these methods which may have proved effective in the past are of little or no value in the case of the Nazis who represent both ideologically and pathologically an altogether new species of anti-Semites. The Nazis recognize the logic of brute force only. This was illustrated in the case of Upper Silesia, where Germany yielded only to the forthright international pressure of the League of Nations and in the case of the Olympic games, where the threat of an international boycott brought Germany quickly to terms.

The economic offensive is our last weapon. It can be deadly in our hands if we falter not. A catastrophic tourist season in Germany, a bankrupt steamship business, a ruined export trade will accomplish what the “Sha-Sha” diplomacy of the Philadelphia School and the “Oi-Oi” diplomacy of the New York School can never hope to accomplish.

THE JEWS’ ‘GIFT’ TO THE NAZIS?

Publication of evidence, just short of the documentary, in the Vienna Oesterreeichische Abendblatt, to the effect that in the veins of Adolf Hitler runs the blood of Jews, derived from his mother’s side, opens up several curious possibilities.

Until the clinching documents are found, it will continue to be possible for the Nazis to claim that Hitler is four-fourths of an Aryan, if not eight-eighths. The substitute for what we might call the missing papers is the hearsay evidence of a Czech village registrar now dead.

It is known of course that Hitler has shown disinclination to discuss his heritage and, least of all, his maternal ancestry. In a recent despatch it was pointed out that in the new Who’s Who in Germany only six lines are allotted to Hitler, an amazing note of modesty in a practicing self-exhibitionist of such long standing; one, moreover, who could have had six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six lines without any good Aryan thinking that his leader was taking up a disproportionate amount of space. After all, nothing is too good for Handsome Adolf.

Suppose that it is established beyond a doubt that Adolf Hitler is a Jew. Suppose the evidence is so conclusive that not only the Nazis but even the Jews have to accept the evidence, what then?

The Nazis will, to put it mildly, be embarrassed. The Jews, to put it mildly, will be outraged. But in our opinion the Jews should swallow their outraged feelings temporarily for the sake of the greater havoc the fact of Hitler’s Jewishness will wreak in the ranks of the Nazis in Germany and of anti-Semites everywhere else who look up to Hitler. As a human being Adolf Hitler is an offense to the human race; as a Jew he would be an offense to the Jewish race. If he is proven a Jew, the Jewish people will have the exquisite right and the exquisite opportunity to excommunicate him. But for the Nazis he remains a Jew, just as for them the grandson of a converted Jew remains a Jew.

Should the Nazis retain Hitler, as leader, they will have to dump into the intellectual garbage heap so much of their ideology about race and the Jews that that ideology would become not only a horse of another color, but another animal, of another species. For the “idea” they have stressed to the point of nausea is the inescapability of Jewishness. Jewishness is something you can’t do anything about: there is no effort of the mind, of the body, of the will that can transcend Jewishness. Jewishness, they say, is so pervasive a poison that a little of it muddies the blood stream, so to speak, for generations to come. Three-quarters of Aryanism cannot prevail against one-quarter of Jewishness. Heroism, achievement, service to Germany, service to humanity cannot negate or undo the evil that is inherent in being the son or the daughter of Jews. There has been no propaganda which has so monotonously hammered the point of the hopelessness of being Jewish.

Will the Nazis do without Hitler? The Jews could do without him sooner. Before the Jews will swallow Hitler the Nazis will have to amend their inevitability theory about the Jew. They will have to modify their Aryan philosophy. But the bloom will be off the rose; the pursuit of world Jewry will have to be tempered by the knowledge that the dog leading the pack has a strain of the blood of the hunted.