Nazism Not Yet Cured in Germany, U.S. Delegate to United Nations Tells B’nai B’rith

Ambassador Ernest Gross, deputy chief of the United States delegation to the United Nations, speaking before the B’nai B’rith District Three annual convention at the Hotel Ambassador last night, departed from his prepared text on human rights to state that it is “absurd” to say that Nazism in Germany “has been cured merely because many of the major symptoms have been removed.”

Earlier Frank Goldman, president of B’nai B’rith, appeared before the delegates to call for appointment of a Presidential commission to “ascertain the true facts” as to the situation in Germany, and to cite evidence to disprove the thesis of Benjamin J. Buttenwieser, Assistant High Commissioner for Germany, that “Nazism in Germany, save for some fragments, has been destroyed, never to rise again. Mr. Buttenwieser made this statement in an address he sought to deliver before the recent B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League meeting in Chicago.

Ambassador Gross, in his interpolation, added: “The germs of Nazism are bred in an unclean and dark environment. The attack must be on the breeding swamps and that is the goal of democratization in Germany. When germs have infected the members of a society, as they did the German society, to an extent never before known in history, the essential treatment consists in re-education. For without re-education the latent and dormant malarial germs of Nazism could explode into the fever which such a short time ago succeeded in bringing an end to our civilization.

“Therefore, in my mind the process of denazification cannot be said to be completed unless and until the twin processes of democratization and re-education are ‘completed,’ and in a real sense they are never ‘completed’ for it is a continuing, dynamic and overlasting problem in a society such as Germany which has been ravaged by the disease,” Ambassador Gross said.