The Nazi press scaled new heights of invective today in renewing attacks on Mayor LaGuardia, American Jews, democracy, liberty and other ideals, as answer to the anti-Nazi rally Monday night in New York.
Leading the onslaught were such papers as the Schwarze Korps, organ of Chancellor Hitler’s elite guards, the Lokal Anzeiger, and Der Stuermer, Julius Streicher’s pornographic weekly.
The Schwarze Korps attack is waged in five columns of printed matter and many cartoons. One of the cartoons depicts the Statue of Liberty as a gangster, decorated with a Mogen David, holding a torch in one hand and a machine gun in the other. The cartoon is inscribed “LaGuardia.”
Another sketch shows children being escorted to school by heavy police guard. It is captioned “Land of Kidnapers.”
The Nazi organ called America the land of gangsters, lynch law, slavery, kidnapers, police brutality and “the kind of freedom where people seeking security must employ private police.”
One fact the paper singled out for particular condemnation was the prohibition of the study of Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” in certain American schools in order not to arouse race hatred.
For five columns the abuse against the American people and institutions went on, much of it in unreproduceable language. Felix M. Warburg, J.P. Morgan and William K. Vanderbilt were names which came in for particular condemnation.
“This is your American culture,” the Schwarze Korps concluded. “This is the land of democratic liberty, whose national heroes must flee under assumed names to foreign countries; the land possessing a LaGuardia who guarantees security for every immigrant Jew but is unable to provide security for Lindbergh.
“LaGuardia thinks he is an American to whom the whole world listens, meaning the Jews. He will, however, grow cheaper and will yet be seen for fifty cents like his predecessor Walker who ended in a sideshow.”
The Voelkischer Beobachter reported the anti-Nazi demonstration in the Madison Square Garden under the headline “New York Jews Are Insolent,” but did not comment on the speeches.
“The American Government is tolerating a new campaign of hatred,” said the Lokal Anzeiger. “The Reich has been insulted.” The “insults” to Germany and its Fuehrer at a meeting attended by “the scum of the city” who cheered the “disgusting excesses” of the speakers, showed “the moral and intellectual inferiority of paid agitators.”
“This does not bother us,” the paper said, “but it is a poison influencing American public opinion concerning Germany. It is this the American Government should prevent, or at least not make itself an accomplice. Germany protests vigorously against the invective of the Mayor of New York.”
The paper reproached the Government in Washington and the American people “which allows Jews, emigrants and Bolsheviks to become its statesmen.”
Jewish circles in Berlin were not overly enthusiastic about the demonstrations of anti-Nazi sentiment in the United States, fearing they would only be visited upon the Jews in Germany in the form of new persecutions, according to the Havas News Agency.
“The New York meetings offer no satisfaction to us.” a prominent Jewish leader told Havas. “On the contrary, our situation is becoming more difficult and we fear that the Nazi Party will use the New York demonstration as a pretext to strike new blows at the Jews in Germany.”
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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.
