Newspapers of all shades of opinion today voiced strong approval of the United States Government’s action in sharply rejecting a formal German protest at a speech by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes in which he denounced Nazi leaders and their “bestial” persecution of Jews.
Declaring Acting Secretary of State Welles “took the proper course and the only course available” in rejecting the Nazi demand for an apology, the N.Y. Times said in its leading editorial: “As matters stand, we are necessarily concerned primarily with our own affairs and our own problems. But this primary concern has never in the past prevented us, and is never likely to prevent us, from speaking our minds when any Government anywhere in the world commits acts of barbarism and brutality.”
The Herald Tribune, in an editorial captioned “About Time.” said “we cannot resist a feeling of profound satisfaction in the fact that we belong to perhaps the one nation in the world which is still able to make precisely the kind of reply to the Nazis that Mr. Welles yesterday made to their government’s official protest of Mr. Ickes’ Cleveland speech.” The Nazi political policy is “clear evidence” of an extreme economic shortage in Germany, Walter Lippmann declared in his nationally-syndicated column “Today and Tomorrow,” published in the Herald Tribune.
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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.
