Jewish Life, Thought and Action in Books of the Day

George N. Shuster is one of the best informed Catholic laymen in the United States. He has what may be termed a word point of view and a secure foundation of information on which to be build. He is aware of the social and spiritual background of phenomena which most of us see as happening more or less in vacuo. His interpretation post-Hitler Germany, published by Appleton-Century under the title of “Strong Man Rules,” is informed by a knowledge of pre-Hitler Germany which is illuminating in many details to those of us who did not become aware, and painfully, of Germany until that nation sought to codify anti-Semitism into a national body of law.

“Strong Man Rules” is important chiefly because it is one intelligent and informed person’s explanation of why and how Hitlerism happened and why and how it took the particular course it did. Mr. Shuster, however, shies away from prophesy, venturing only on an intimation of a prophesy, to wit, that Hitler is not Mussolini and cannot be expected to entrench himself as solidly as has the Italian. His analysis is not invalidated by the fact that he does not see eye-to-eye with the Jewish method of opposing Hitlerism. But when he writes, as he does. that the purpose of the Nazi movement is not to gain world trade, I can only commend him “Hitler Over Europe,” if no more than to its first chapter.

Voltaire said that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him. Mr. Shuster writes that had there been no Hitler it would have been necessary to create a Hitler. To him, Hitler is “the old soldier” to perfection, the old soldier with a knowledge of what the unrepresented mob wants and a knowledge of bringing out the vote and producing slogans. Mr. Shuster, sympathizing as many enemies of Germany today do not, with the national aspirations of the average German, refuses to see in Hitler any of those qualities of heroism and statesmanship that have been attributed to him.

He puts it in this way:

“I went to listen to Hitler again, but Hitler is a windbag and a wire-puller — a politician who knows how to capitalize his own emotions and those of others. Just prior to leaving New York, I chanced to witness a gathering of some thousand Negroes harkening to a spellbinder. His booming voice came through a megaphone, he painted the old colored Utopia gold and silver, the crowd was riveted to the soil of Battery Park, there was a chill in the air as of cold steel passing. To me that Negro spellbinder (whoever he is) has the edge over Hitler; and doubtless if he got into office we should discover in him the same magnetism and ‘genius’ which a lot of sentimentalists, who still believe the history of these days is made by personalities and not by advertising, having discerned in the champion ward boss of Germany.”

A GERMAN BONUS ARMY

Stripping the Nazi propaganda down to the bone, Mr. Shuster pictures the success of Hitlerism as the success of a German bonus army, which could feed its propaganda for power by an appeal to the dread of the Communist menace and of hatred for the Jew who seemed to have ways for getting along of which good Germans were ignorant, and by use of the political means, open to any group which could muster 60,000 adherents.

Under cover of the high-falutin’ verbiage with which Hitlerism drugged its followers, the Nazis “carried out as efficient a raid on the cupboard as Mother Hubbard’s own. When they were through, it was bare indeed. They made laws enabling them to revise the civil service codes, and under cover of that revision placed their men in all jobs within reach. Persons without the slightest training or practical experience were dropped into august easy chairs. . . . They rifled stupendous sums from the national and state treasuries; they levied endless contributions upon all who were in some manner dependent upon their good will; and they barred access to every kind of relief to those who made bold to oppose them.” And the same with the universities, the common schools, the churches and the labor organizations.

In addition to the prediction that Hitler and Mussolini are not at all the same thing, Mr. Shuster makes the larger prophesy that Fascism is not to be regarded as an ultimate stage in the development of the Western world, that from the ashes of the fires of Fascism will rise the Old World, even though we of this generation will not be here to “put out the fire or stir the ashes.”

—H. S.