Secretary of Interior Harold I. Ickes warned tonight that “Hitler’s ultimate aim is to destroy both the Jew and the Christian” and urged that “all Christians realize, before it is too late, that racial and religious hatred, particularly anti-Semitism, is their deadly enemy,”
In an address entitled “Protestantism Answers Hate, ” scheduled for delivery at a dinner forum of the Protestant Digest Associates at the Hotel Roosevelt, over a nationwide network, Ickes combined an attack on race hatred with condemnation of ” the Quislings who, in pretended patriotism, would cravenly spike our guns in order that Hitlerism might more easily overcome us.”
“With diabolical cleverness, ” he asserted, ” Hitler and Goebbels have created a devil for their deluded people to hate. That devil is the Jew–the traditional scapegoat against whom every man’s hand has been raised wherever selfishness or greed or cruelty was to be served…. as a Nordic, a Protestant Nordic, I denounce the cruel cunning of any tortured and twisted soul that would seek to defy nature, to ignore ethnology, to bury deep in ignorance and superstition all that Christ lived and died for.”
Pointing out that “out of Judaism, with the finest moral system of its time–a moral system which prevails to this day–Christianity sprang and developed.” Secretary Ickes said that Christianity’s ” tendrils are lost in Judaism, which has endured for thousands of years and which will survive this latest campaign of hate and persecution that has been launched against it.”
“Nazi hate has spilled over into the Christian camp,” he warned. “On their way to destroy Christianity, the Nazis first besmirched and assaulted Judaism. They believe that they will destroy Judaism if they destroy the Jews. But Judaism is not Hitlers ultimate or exclusive enemy. His real enemy is the Nazarene Carpenter who was never any thing else but a Jew. It is He who is the actual objective of the brown-shifted disciples of hate who run like a swarm of evil streptococci through the blood stream of our western civilization.”
The Interior Secretary quoted from Nazi utterances as proof that ” Hitler’s ultimate aim is to destroy both the Jew and the Christian, between whom Christ is the link of imperishable steel.”
Ickes then turned his guns on the “dangerous fifth columnists who are serving the avowed purposes of Hitler and Goebbels,” declaring that such men as Merwin K. Hart, Father Coughlin, Gol. Lindbergh, Lawrence Dennis and Major Al Williams ” are supported by others who play upon the prejudices of the anti-Semite, the anti-Negro and the anti sharecropper.”
Others on the speakers’ list were Bishop J.I. Blair Larned, Dr. A. Clayton Powell Jr., Ralph Ingersoll, Dr. Joseph R. Sizoo and Johannes Steel.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
