Samuel Untermyer yesterday answered over Station WOR the international broadcast of Propaganda Minister Goebbels carried to the United States on May 11. Untermyer, quoting at length Goebbels charges against the Jews for boycotting Germany, declared that the propaganda minister’s speech was part of a campaign against Jewry for which $32,000,000 has been appropriated for this year.
Untermyer further charged that of this appropriation $12,000,000 is a direct appropriation from the Reichs’ budget. He said that the McCormack committee to investigate Nazi activities had this and other information regarding Nazi attempts to “sow seeds of race and religious hatred among our people” which will “startle and shake the country to its very foundations.”
The New York attorney called Goebbels speech a “daring attempt to intimidate the Jews of America and of other countries and to warn them that if they continue to boycott German goods the Jews in Germany will suffer, even though they are in no way responsible and have no control over such action.”
“Manifestly goaded by the success of the boycott, as the world’s answer to and only effective weapon against Germany’s persecution of the Catholics, Jews, and Protestants and of the annihilation, of the German Labor Union and Masonic orders and the confiscation of hundreds of millions of dollars of their money and properties, this latest revelation confirms our worst fears and prophesies of the ultimate purpose of the Hitler regime,” he said.
He further stated that “Dr. Goebbels continues to refuse to realize that the effectiveness of this boycott and its constantly growing strength are due mainly to the fact that it is overwhelmingly non-Jewish.”
Untermyer said that recent developments in Germany and Goebbels’ attitude toward the Jews “are ominous signs of a determination to exterminate the German Jews.” He said that the world economic boycott of German goods is the only way to accomplish “the preservation of civilization” against the spread of Hitlerism.
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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.
