America Must Bar Spread of Intolerance, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Warns

Attacks upon minorities are “instrumentalities of destruction set loose in a free world whereby Hitler hopes to win even while he loses,” U. S. Assistant Attorney General Norman M. Littel declared today, warning that the American people must not permit the spread of intolerance in any form. He spoke at a conference at the Hotel Astor sponsored by the Nation Associates.

Hitler and his followers, Mr. Littel said, did not restrict themselves to persecuting the Jewish minority in Germany, but planted the anti-Semitic virus in other countries in order to facilitate the triumph of German arms. Paid propagandists with Hitler have injected “new streams of hate” into American life during the past decade, he added, “and Hitler’s imitators are still sowing the seeds in America.” citing Charles A. Lindbergh as one of the public figures who have consciously or unconsciously spread anti-Semitic propaganda in the United States, Mr. Littel said that “these and many others like them have not gone out of American life. They are still here, but just a little less articulate in time of war.”

David Sher, chairman of the National Community Relations Advisory Council, which embraces major Jewish organizations, told the conference that in Europe today anti-Semitism is recognized as being the ugliest feature of fascism. Before the war, he said, the countries who entered the Nazi orbit immediately instituted anti-Semitic legislation, and today as they are breaking away from Germany, their first acts are to repudiate anti-Semitism and rescind anti-Semitic legislation. “Identification of anti-Semitism with fascism is now well understood in Europe,” Mr. Sher stated. “In the United States it is a challenge to us and an opportunity to demonstrate to the american people that anti-Semitism and fascism are synonymous everywhere and that the general community must, in its own interest, be on guard against anti-Semitism.”

Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, speaking on the “Jewish Community,” urged the creation by the Allied nations of a Jewish State in Palestine. The Christian world, he said, owes this to the Jews, who have been persecuted as a people more than any other race or nation.