Books

EVERY Jew should read Heinz Liepmann’s “Murder–Made in Germany,” one of the most damaging indictments of Hitlerism published since the Nazis murdered, bludgeoned and tortured their way through Germany. Although relying on the form of fiction, Liepmann’s book has primarily the force of a human document, for there is not a phrase, an episode, the least character whose authenticity is not vouched for by the author, on solemn oath.

The chief authentication of the book consists in the fact that Nazis, working through the Dutch government, on whose soil Liepmann was a refugee, arrested and imprisoned him, although his concentration camp wounds were still unhealed. The Nazis had burned his books and wreaked what vengeance they could on his body, but what must have irked them afresh was the fact that Liepmann published his indictment against Hitlerism in eight tongues, for this book appears in as many languages, the German edition appearing as “The Fatherland,” a bitterly ironic title for the subject matter. The pretext for the Dutch arrest and imprisonment was flimsy enough, for it was the passage in which Hindenburg is accused of having appointed Hitler Chancellor in a deal to evade investigation for having taken money for his estate from the East Prussian Relief Committee. On that basis the English government might just as well have jailed Lord Marley, for the same charge is made in “The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror,” the anonymous work sponsored by the committee of which Lord Marley is president.

The scheme of the book is simple: On March 20, 1933, there enters on the river Elbe the trawler Kulm, 900 tons, which had been off the fishing grounds, for which it had left the day after Christmas. It had stopped at no port and had no radio with which to maintain contact with the world. The boat and its crew had left Republican Germany and returned to the Third Reich. The floating body of a terribly beaten man and his subsequent flight to suicide by drowning after they had bandaged him up give the men on the boat their first hint of the nightmare conditions of Germany. The body of the book is concerned with the adventures of the various members of the crew from the time they an send until the escape of Martin, concentration camp mate of the Communist cook of the Kulm. Among other episodes reported are the suicide of a Jewish wife deserted by her “Aryan” husband, the infliction of abominable tortures on concentration camp prisoners, Storm Troopers raids, the brutal treatment of a couple who had the misfortune to sit on a park bench on which a previous sitter had torn up a National Socialist newspaper, the tossing out of the third floor window of a Brown House of a tortured prisoner, and more of the same. The record is almost monotonous but it does not tend to make the reader indifferent to the Nazi regime.

There is one cheerful, heroic note in “Murder–Made in Germany.” Herr Liepmann gives us a pretty clear idea of the effectiveness, resourcefulness and energy of the anti-Hitler propaganda, even with-in Germany, of the methods in the distribution of propaganda and of the formation of groups hostile to Hitlerism. When the Hitler nightmare is ended the world may learn more fully of this heroic chapter in the battle against oppression, a chapter even more thrilling than the record of the underground press in Belgium during the German occupation.

In company with Alexander Woollcott, I particularly recommend this book to the attention of that fatuous couple, Charles and Kathleen Norris, who, in an interview with John Lardner, said that the Jews of Germany were vastly amused at the reports of anti-Jewish persecution in Germany.

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