Jay Allen spoke to Hitler when the Chancellor appeared at Nuremburg this summer to address a million brown-shirted Germans at the Nazi party convention.
This week, Mr. Allen, ace foreign correspondent of The Chicago Tribune, six thousand miles away from that now-historic scene, called Hitler “a magic-voiced” demagogue, a champion fakir, whose autobiography, ‘Mein Kampf,’ must be read in the unexpurgated German for one to understand the smoky soul of the man who rules Germany!”
The 33-year-old newspaperman, who for the past ten years has been “covering” the European scene and who has personally met the outstanding statesmen of the continent, spent four months in Germany and a month in Vienna.
In an exclusive interview with The Jewish Daily Bulletin he said:
“I am afraid a great tragedy awaits the Jews in Austria. My fellow correspondents, perhaps the best informed observers in Europe, tell me that it is not beyond the realm of possibility for Austria’s 225,000 Jews to be swept by a Nazi-fomented pogrom.” Regarding the Jews in Germany, he said:
“Germany’s Jews are helpless. Every Jew in the Reich is Hitler’s bodyguard, because if on hair of Hitler’s head is touched, so wild and maniacal would be the outburst against the Jews the present officially-sanctioned horrors through which they ae now passing would be child’s play to the slaughter and butchery that would be seen.”
CAUTION ON THE BOYCOTT
Shall Jews boycott German goods?
“There are two ways to look at the boycott. As a red-blooded human being, outraged at the callous attempt to exterminate a whole people because of their religion, and as a witness to actual atrocities committed upon helpless Jews, I should say, Boycott! Boycott till it hurts!”
“But–and its an important ‘but’–if Germany is to be freed from this ghastly tyranny, without force of arms, prosperity must return. Want and suffering are the Nazis’ stock-in-trade. That is how they came into power. When you starve Germany, you help the Nazis because persecution is the German people’s outlet for starvation.”
Coming from the scene of Nazi horrors, Mr. Allen expressed himself as “shocked to learn that the Nazi ideology isn’t held in any particular horror in Seattle. I understand that at least two University of Washington professors are apologists for the Hitler regime and that German consular agents on the Pacific Coast are showing unseemly activity in beating the drum for Hitler.
“It’s a bit strange to see America exacting a solemn pledge from Russia to keep their consular agents here from spreading Soviet propaganda, and then permitting vile and vicious propaganda to be spread by paid Nazi agents.
“I have yet to discover that Hitlerism is any less dangerous a plague in a liberal state like America, where freedom is still cherished, than Communism. As a matter of fact, Nazism is nothing more than white collar Communism.
“Anti-Semitism is as natural to a people as any other savage outbreak in human character. Freud, the famous psychologist, declares the world has never risen above this barbarism.
“The only thing that keeps anti-Semitism in leash is the fear of society’s punishment. And if the state, instead, points its finger and says, “There’s the man,’ the masses are only too glad to crucify the Jew. Thus, in Munich, you can take your choice of thirty-nine different books on race, filled with exquisite nonsense. And the whole of Germany is being taught to hate the Jew!”
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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.
