Dies Body Told How Nazis Direct Anti-semitic Propaganda in U.S. from Hamburg

Richard T. Forbes, 25, University of Washington student, who with a companion joined the German-American Bund in Seattle, yesterday presented to the Die Committee a graphic story of how the Nazi Propaganda Institute in Hamburg, Germany, directs anti-Semitism in the United States.

Forbes told the committee that the two Bund leaders in Seattle are now employed in the Boeing aviation plant there. Forbes and his companion, whose name was withheld, joined the Bund while cooperating with the Customs Bureau and the Seattle office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They obtained entree to inner Bund circles because Forbes’ companion had been flunked in a history course by Dr. Ernest Levy, refugee German-Jewish professor at the University of Washington, and had subsequently quarreled violently with the professor.

Forbes’ companion was then approached by Otto Klaas, Hamburg-American agent at Seattle and began to receive propaganda material from Germany. Forbes said his companion became alarmed at the contents of the pamphlets and the two youths placed the whole matter before the F.B.I. Federal agents encouraged them to go forward with their correspondence and investigation.

Forbes told the committee that subsequently they were introduced to Bund leaders Paul Stoll and Harry Lechner through Dallas Johnson, Seattle Jew-baiter, who was also director of a youth survey conducted by the National Youth Administration. They were assigned, Forbes said, to spread anti-Semitic propaganda among the 10,000 students at the University of Washington by distributing literature which came from Oscar C. Pfaus, in charge of the American, Canadian and Irish sections of the Deutscher Fichte-Bund in Hamburg. Another of their jobs was to heckle Dr. Harold Laski, who was then lecturing at the university.

Forbes trapped Pfaus into distributing a copy of the Benjamin Franklin forgeries, the witness revealed. Forbes sent Pfaus a copy of the forgery which he had changed in several places, and within fifteen day received from Germany the changed copy in pamphlet form. It was headlined “A Real Case Against the Jews.”