Amazing his listeners with the directness of his attack on the Hitler regime, Sherwood Eddy openly criticized the attitude of the Nazis toward the Jews. He spoke at a reception given in his honor by the Karl Schurz-Society here yesterday.
“My friends,” he said, “you cannot hide your treatment of the Jews, liberals, Socialists and even despised Communists. I do not speak of atrocities. These occur in all wars and in the beginning of all revolutions and there are always exaggerated stories about them. What is much more serious is economic elimination, which may lead to starvation of this despairing people.
“A hunger blockade which hits little children may not be as sensational as an air bombardment, but it is nevertheless a serious thing.
“I had hoped to find that there was no longer persecution of the Jews in Germany. Instead, I have learned from many reliable witnesses, both Jew and Gentile, that the case of the Jew is becoming increasingly more hopeless. Your laws tend towards the extermination of the Jews.”
Holding up a copy of the Voelkischer Beobachter, Mr. Eddy said:
“Here in your daily paper yesterday is an article on ‘Why the Influence of the Jews Must Be Broken.’ Here in my hand is a textbook used in your schools, in which hatred and contempt for the great Jewish race is instilled into the children of Germany. I myself have listened to your orators preaching flaming hatred of the Jews which might largely have inspired their hearers to pogroms.”
He declared that Hitler’s regime contained three serious defects which he listed as denial of impartial judgment to all, denial of liberty and denial of certain basic normal and economic principles on which, he said, the advance of civilization during the last 700 years had been founded.
“We Anglo-Saxons,” he declared, “still have an abiding conviction of the necessity of impartial justice for all—not merely for Nordics, Aryans or any other favorite race. But how about the Jews, the Social Democrats, the Communists, the liberals and the other despised peoples in your country today? Is there justice for them?”
Mr. Eddy is the head of a group of American educators and publishers which is traveling through the principal countries of Europe to study at first hand international relations. He charged the present rulers of Germany with deliberately keeping from the German people the news about what was going on in the outside world and in Germany itself.
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.
