Emerging from past secrecy, local Nazis held their first public meeting here today at the Eagles clubhouse, but after extensive promotion among Germans, the gathering drew only 500 persons. Of these, nearly 150 comprised a delegation from Chicago, while scores of others came as curiosity seekers. The rally was sponsored by the Friends of the New Germany.
It was the first occasion on which the swastika banner was hoisted here beside the American flag, and the first time that the massed Nazi salute together with the roar of “Heil Hitler” occurred at any public German gathering here.
Nazi publications, imported from Germany, including anti-Semitic pamphlets and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” were piled high on a table, and sold to visitors, though not in great numbers.
The meeting was occasionally disturbed by several shouts of “lies” but ushers quickly quieted the hecklers. Peacefulness of the session was explained mainly by the fact that communists were celebrating at a Lenin memorial meeting in another part of town, and failed to appear at the Nazi assemblage to demonstrate against Fascism.
The principal speaker was the Rev- John Schoenberger, a Catholic priest, who had been expelled from Soviet Russia while touring that country. Schoenberger delivered a bitter denunciation of bolshevism and insisted that 60 to 100 percent of all the Soviet commissars were Jews. When questioned, he said he obtained these figures “from a reporter of a newspaper in Berlin.”
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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.
