Mayor Stands by Statement

While the controversy raged about his head, with German organizations here attacking him and Dr. Stephen S. Wise coming to his defense, Mayor LaGuardia stuck to his guns with this statement:

“I stand on what I said and I repeat it. I referred to a brown-shirted fanatic who was menacing the peace of Europe. Mr. Hitler’s Government was quick to recognize that I meant him. I don’t know whether it was his guilty conscience or my powers of description, but that is irrelevant.”

Dr. Wise announced that “the scurrilities that appeared in the Nazi press” about the Mayor would be answered at a mass meeting marking the fourth anniversary of the Hitler regime called by the American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labor Committee at Madison Square Garden March 15.

“It may be technically necessary for the State Department to disavow the utterance of the Mayor,” Dr. Wise said. “The American people will rejoice in the mood of the man who has spoken the truth touching him who is the world’s greatest menace to peace–the Nazi chancellor.”

German-American organizations and the German press here, meanwhile, echoed in less violent vein the attacks on LaGuardia voiced in Germany. The Board of Trade for German-American Commerce and the United German Societies joined in protesting the Mayor’s “chamber of horror” remarks while the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold criticized the Mayor for “bad manners.”

Meanwhile, a World’s Fair temple of religious and civil liberty, to which Mayor LaGuardia had proposed the “horror chamber” with Hitler’s figure as an annex, was asked by the American Committee of Religious Rights and Minorities in a formal application to Grover Whalen, president of the fair corporation.