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Dawa Faithfuls Beat Retreat, Leaving Chicago Quite Cold

October 24, 1934
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A sadly disillusioned little group of Nazis said their last farewells here today and prepared to wend their several ways homeward, nursing their resentment at the lackadaisical spirit which turned the long-heralded DAWA national convention into a fiasco.

When the session, originally scheduled for a full week, sputtered to an inglorious end at the Stevens Hotel yesterday, only forty-five of the seventy-five original delegates were still counted among the faithful.

Nazi leaders ruefully admitted they were convinced that the anti-Jewish boycott movement is an insignificant force everywhere except in New York City and on the West Coast, in Los Angeles. A vast gap of indifference to the DAWA lies between these two points, they were forced to confess.

Equally disheartening to the blood-and-thunder faction was the unproductive junket made by Louis Zahne to population centers between here and New York. Zahne, chairman of the German-American Independent Voters League and one of the Friends of New Germany chieftains, had made a blustering promise, before leaving New York City, to “establish a new branch of the League every day I’m gone.”

Wide yawns greeted him wherever he went. Virtually empty halls echoed coldly to his rantings.

Zahne drained the cup of racial incitement to its bitterest dregs before the frousy little handful of fanatics at the convention here.

Strutting, power-greedy Zahne, secretly accused by those whom he considers his staunchest friends of willingness to sabotage the German-American cause in this country in his grab for leadership, boasted that “there is one thing we have succeeded in doing, and that is in arousing American sympathy to our cause.”

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