The Boycott is fast eating into the vitals of the Blond Beasts of Berlin.
At first they were inclined to laugh uproariously at the very idea of a Jewish Boycott of Germany. The Jews hadn’t the courage, the unity or the persistency for such a thing. Then came the first sharp pinch of the Boycott in the collapse of the steamship and tourist trade. Nietzsche’s superman winced perceptibly but proudly resolved to ignore it.
But the Boycott’s attrition moved on relentlessly and now the strong, ruthless men of the Third Reich with true “furor Teutonicus” have begun to holler. The world-wide Boycott is getting them! It is playing havoc with the whole domestic economy of Germany whose fatal decline they themselves inaugurated by their mad onslaught upon the economic position of the Jews within the Reich.
The Nazis who are masters of propaganda among their own people but poltroons when it comes to an understanding of the psychology of other peoples, have been dismayed by the rapidity with which the Boycott has embraced not alone the entire Jewish world but untold millions of non-Jews. Liberals in every country who saw in Nazism the deadliest foe of all human rights, organized labor which beheld with horror the destruction of the labor movement by the iron heel of economic reaction, lovers of peace who beheld the menace to world peace in the new idolatry of war which was inculcated in the people and fair-minded men everywhere who were outraged by the unspeakable acts of terrorism and cruelty practiced against innocent men, women and children have all risen in their wrath and have set ### smashing this iniquitous regime by means of the bloodless but withal deadly weapon of the Boycott.
And now the Nazis, rudely awakened from their drunken orgy of arrogance, are hollering in pain. They are indignant. They are complaining bitterly to the world against the Boycott which they denounce as another one of those well-known Jewish conspiracies. Think of the cunning and audacity of the Jews who dare to answer violence and persecution with organized, implacable opposition!
The cis-Atlantic mouthpiece of this loud Nazi wail is the Steuben Society of America. This Society went right to Headquarters and complained to the President of the United States against the anti-Nazi Boycott. It told the President that “this Boycott is the most undesirable and harmful form of action which could have been taken in the present situation”.
Most assuredly! From Hitler’s point of view!… Hinc#illae lacrimae!…
But the Steuben Society is subtle. It bases its protest to the President not upon what the Boycott is doing to Nazi Germany, but upon what it might do to America. The Steuben Society, you must remember, is “an American organization of American citizens” and is inspired exclusively by the purest American motives. The Boycott, it maintains, will prove detrimental to American business. If the Boycott succeeds the German government will not be able to pay interest on or amortize the American debts. Hence the Boycott is a danger to American investments.
That the Hitler Government welched on its foreign debts long before the Boycott got under way and that the Nazi disorganization of German economic life was responsible for what amounts to Germany’s repudiation of nearly half of its foreign obligations and for ruining its foreign trade is, of course, not even alluded to in the protest of this “American organization of American citizens”. These idealistic Teutons, heirs of the noble, non-mercenary tradition of the Aryan Siegfried as distinguished from that of the despicable mercenary Semite, now make their great appeal ot the President of the Republic of the United States entirely in the name of the depleted American pocket-book….
Seemingly it has not occurred to the American patriots of the Steuben Society that there are men in this country and in other lands who really believe in the cause of freedom and humanity to the point where they are willing to fight for it regardless of cost…. Men who out of love for their human kind will not stand idly by the blood of their neighbors…. Men who believe as Carl Schurz—a true American—believed that “You cannot subvert your neighbors’
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.
