More than 50 percent of youths arrested throughout the United States for their involvement in swastika smearing have expressed strong anti-Semitic bias, and about half of all the youths apprehended had some kind of membership or history of identification with Nazi-type gangs, it was reported today at the 49th annual meeting of the National Commission of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.
The report, based on a major study in depth of youths detained by police authorities for swastika smearing during the “swastika epidemic” of 1960, was presented by Samuel Dalsimer, chairman of the ADL program committee. The study also established that 80 percent of the youths apprehended came from families that were classified as “broken or unstable” because of alcoholism, mental illness, prison records, or divorce, Also that 53 percent had previous police records.
The study was made by Dr. Martin Deutsch, associate professor, Department of Psychiatry, Institute for Developmental Studies, New York Medical College. In reporting on it, Mr. Dalsimer said that some of the youth appeared to arrive at their anti-Semitism only as a “necessary appendage” to their Nazi orientation. “A smaller percentage were anti-Semitic first and then became members of Nazi gangs. But most were fascinated from the first by the militarism of Nazism, its paraphernalia, and the swastika as a symbol.”
He said that few of the youths had ever known Jews or had any personal experience with them that could explain their hostility. “All the boys answered questions about Jews in vague generalities unrelated to their personal experience,” he reported. “Thus they might say that Jews control all the money but they had never met a Jew who controlled large sums of money. Or they would say that Jews control the government yet they could never specify a Jew who had influence in government. The Nazi-oriented youths, however, in some cases offered the name of Roosevelt as a Jew who controlled the government.”
Dr. Deutsch’s study suggested that this lack of personal animosity “might account for the fact that in the 1960 outbreak, the youths attacked property, not people, for their hatred was directed against symbolic institutions, not any particular individuals.”
Mr. Dalsimer said that of the 154 youths arrested for swastika desecrations nationally, 76 had been interviewed for the study, 41 of these in depth. “Of these, 22–more than half–had commitment to the Nazi ideology; 14 belonged to Nazi-type gangs, and 11 reported reading ‘Mein Kampf’–one of them 11 times,” Mr. Dalsimer said. “Those who had Nazi orientation said it had been reinforced by such films as ‘The Young Lions,’ The Crooked Cross,’ and other pictures showing precision marching, group chanting, and military trappings.”
“It appears that these children–the median age of the 41 youngsters studied in depth was 16–were acting in a manner that had the sympathy and tacit approval of adult members of their family,” Mr. Dalsimer said. “With few exceptions, there was no remorse among their parents about the nature of the anti-social behavior of the children but only sorrow that their children had gotten into trouble. They seemed concerned about bad publicity and their community’s negative reactions but there was little or no disapproval of the acts themselves.”
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