Nazi Tyranny is Harshest in the World–baldwin

The following is from the speech of Roger N. Baldwin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union, who testified for Civil Liberties at the “Case of Civilization Against Hitlerism” last night:

When the German Day celebration was held in this auditorium last December, with the Nazi ambassador as the chief speaker, this platform was flanked on one side by the Swastika, on the other by a great banner reading “German-Americans, fight for free speech, press and assembly!” With such a demand for liberty to spread their fanatic doctrines in the United States di## the Nazis celebrate the death of liberty in Germany! Their hypocritical appeal to American traditions of liberty was al affront. If we concede to them the same right as to others for their un-American agitation, it is only the better to expose and destroy them.

Here tonight we of diverse political traditions unite in common loyalty to that freedom to organize and agitate which is basic to all progress. That freedom has been destroyed in Nazi Germany, as in other lands, in the struggle to maintain by dictatorship and violence a tottering economic system of privilege against the threat either of revolution or of chaos. All the forces of dissent to that program,–from mild liberals to “wild” Communists,–share the common fate of a barbaric suppression. Disunited as they were before, they are tragically united now–in concentration camps, exile, prison, silence and death. The united front against Hitler which they failed to achieve, he has made for them.

“I regard it as – my task before posterity,” he says, “to destroy Marxism.” But he goes not stop with Socialists and Communists. He goes on: “Bismarck told us that liberalism was the pace-maker of social-democracy. Social democracy is the pace-maker of Communism. And Communism is the forerunner of death, of national destruction and xt. ##ction. We shall fight it to the death.”

On this ground, the Nazis justify a wholesale terrorism unmatched by any dictatorship in the world. The extent of their terror is the measure of their fear of losing power,–a power won by a scant majority of votes gained by hysteria and intimidation, and now held by violence. Behind them stand their beneficiaries, the great industrialists and landowners. They sustain the dictatorship which has outlawed all political opposition,–including the largest Socialist and Communist parties in the world,–“coordinated” the trade unions and cooperatives, subjected religion to state control, and made outcasts of a whole minority race. Not a thought is expressed, not a word written, which it does not assume the power to direct, control or punish. “Everything with-in the state, nothing outside the state,” that is their philosophy of enslavement. And that State is plainly a handful of adventurers ruling by decrees, enforced by the violence and bloodshed of an irresponsible army of Storm Troops.

What other dictatorship boasts so perfect a tyranny?

Despite their pretension to Socialism, National Socialism is a program of stagnation by force Just one good word may be said for it. It is the last possible stage of reaction, the last stronghold under the State of the privileged classes. It cannot endure. Its violent attempt to harness a desperate working class. Its hysterical effort to buttress a decaying economic system through middle class support against the masses, makes only more certain its ultimate destruction. Economic collapse or war will engulf it. Against these twin catastrophies, forward-looking forces fight with time to pull down fascism first. To achieve it–in Germany as else-where,–we among others face the difficult challenge of united action. Whatever our political outlook, we share the common task of battling the fact and the menace of this new tyranny of reaction.