Now-editorial Notes

by Herman Bernstein

When the first reports of the arrest of Bruno Richard Hauptmann in connection with the tragic Lindbergh kidnaping reached Germany, the Nazi press immediately insinuated that Hauptmann was a Jew by stating that he was arrested in “a Jewish district,” referring to the Bronx, But now that Hauptmann’s record has been established, his criminal record at Kamentz, Germany, as well as German Aryan ancestry, the Nazi newspapers are singing a different tune. Thus the West German Beobachter, the leading Nazi newspaper in Western Germany, writes as follows:

“That the kidnaper of the Lindbergh baby has been found after two years is not exactly a great accomplishment, but that does not matter to American propagandists. . . . The fact that the criminal comes from Germany is being utilized for an anti-German campaign of vast proportions. The part of the foreign press hostile to us nobly competes with the emigré press, especially in the Saar territory, in constantly emphasizing through big banner headlines that the perpetrator is German. Here again the saying holds that “There’s method in madness.’ Of course every German will regret that a member of the German people is guilty of the deed. But every sensible person will consider it insane to make the whole people responsible for the crime of a single depraved person.

“Suppose the criminal had been a Jew. Would that have been emphasized just as much? Certainly not. For in that case all the psychoanalysts and philanthropists in the world would have united to make of the criminal an honorable man. But, since he is German, the occasion is welcomed to hang something on the German people in an externally harmless form.”

This reasoning is typical of the stupidity and arrogance of the Nazis. No one blames the German people in connection with Bruno Richard Hauptmann. No one would be justified in blaming the German people.

The strange thing about the Nazis is not that their first impulse was to blame the Jews but that they are complaining of the very methods which they and other anti-Semites have been in the habit of applying to the Jews. They say “every sensible person will consider it insane to make the whole people responsible for the crime of a single depraved person.”

This complaint the Nazis have borrowed from the Jews, who are fully justified in making the complaint, because the Nazis and their comrades in Judophobia elsewhere have usually blamed and persecuted the Jewish people on the whole for the offences or crimes of the few.

The Nazis argue that if the criminal involved in the Lindbergh kidnaping had been a Jew, the American press would not have emphasized that fact so much, for the reason, that “all the psychoanalysts and philanthropists in the world would have united to make of the criminal an honorable man.”

In their desperate efforts to malign the Jews, in addition to persecuting them, the Nazis do not realize how ridiculous and how offensive they make themselves to the rest of the world. In this instance, to serve their purposes, they insinuate that all the psychoanalysts and philanthropists in the world are practically controlled by the Jews to an extent that they would declare a criminal to be an honorable man.

This is quite in keeping with the mentality and methods of the present masters of Naziland, who stop at nothing in their cruelty and unscrupulousness, but who whine at imaginary grievances and plead for equality when they themselves deny equality to others.

What the German people need now is that their sadistic masters undergo a thorough examination by some of the foremost non-Jewish but also non-Nazi psychoanalysts and neurologists. The diagnosis would open the eyes of the German people. And the rest of the world, too, would greatly benefit by it.