Now-editorial Notes

The arrest of Dr. Friedrich Chwatal, a Nazi agent agitating against the Jews in Prague, disclosed a direct contact between the Nazi agitator and Dr. Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment. Correspondence seized in Chwatal’s home revealed that Goebbels was planning to start an anti-Jewish boycott drive in Czechoslovakia on September 15. The boycott order was to be broadcast from German stations to Germans abroad, and German students had been assigned to act as propagandists and to distribute anti-Jewish circulars printed secretly in Prague. A number of Chwatal’s accomplices were also arrested, and will be tried for conspiracy to disturb public order.

The Goebbels propaganda machine is being used by the Nazi government to create disturbances in Czechoslovakia by inciting anti-Jewish disorders in that country. The Nazi government of Germany is particularly irritated by her neighbor’s attitude toward the Jews and toward the anti-German boycott. The enlightened government of Czechoslovakia, headed by President Masaryk, with Edward Benes as Minister of Foreign Affairs, has treated the Jews of that country upon terms of equality. Czechoslovakia has also accorded sympathetic aid to German Jewish victims of Nazi terror and persecution.

But the Hitler government is even more infuriated at Czechoslovakia for the reason that that country is benefiting most as a result of the anti-German boycott. The democratic, efficient and enterprising people of Czechoslovakia have organized and perfected industries previously controlled by Germany and are supplying foreign markets with manufactured products formerly supplied by German merchants and industrialists.

Czechoslovakia is profiting by the blunders of Naziland. Besides, it is vigorously resisting Nazi agitation within its borders in self-defense, because it realizes that its very existence is threatened by the spread of Nazism among the large number of Czechoslovaks of German origin.

THE ONLY WAY

Adolf Hitler predicted a hard winter for the German people and blamed the “devilish Jewish international clique” for Germany’s distress. It has never occurred to him that he himself and his brutal policies directed against Jews and Catholics and Protestants and liberals and advocates of peace, are responsible for Germany’s economic {SPAN}###fferings{/SPAN} as well as for her moral degradation and political isolation.

It is reported that the chairman of the Jewish Representative Council in London, in commenting upon the Nazi dictator’s statement, declared:

“We know that opinion in influential German circles is definitely turned against the anti-Jewish policy of the Hitler regime. We have no quarrel with the German people as such, and we fully sympathize with them in their prospects of distress during the coming winter. We are anxious to see Germany restored to economic prosperity at the earliest possible moment. We will willingly assist, provided we can see in its achievements a Germany according to all her citizens full equality of citizens rights and opportunity.”

The boycott against Germany was undertaken as a defensive measure against the inhuman persecution of various elements of the population of Germany on racial, religious and intellectual grounds. While it is true that the Jews in Germany have suffered greater humiliation and persecution than the others, the anti-German boycott in various lands could not truthfully be attributed to Jewish influence alone. The Jews are naturally behind the anti-German boycott, but they constitute only a very small part of this movement of protest on the part of liberty-loving people in many lands, regardless of race or creed.

The only way in which Germany can save herself from increasing economic distress and political isolation is by reversing herself with regard to the absurd and false Nazi race theory of her “Aryan” superiority, by equalizing her citizenry and by ceasing to rearm herself and train her youth for a new war of vengeance. Only in this way can Germany regain her position as an equal in the family of civilized nations.