R. D. B. Speaks

For thirty years Editor-in-chief of the Daily Express in London, England’s most celebrated journalist and chairman of the Board of Directors of the London Daily Express

There is every indication that the Nazi camarilla are about to launch a widespread world propaganda campaign with the view of minimizing, if possible, the effects of the growing anti-German sentiment and its inevitable damaging consequences to German trade. The ingenious Herr Rosenberg has by now succeeded in planting his agents in all the strategic world centers. Their so-called “dope” is decanted on the desks of foreign editors in all the principal newspapers and I note with interest that fewer and fewer now succumb to the blandishments of the Nazi press agencies. From defensive statements they have now descended to the downright abuse of those “wicked” people who refuse to believe that Hitlerism is anything but an imposition and a fraud. You will soon be able to observe that this Nazi press service will begin to assert vehemently that the world’s antipathy and abstention from trading relations with Germany is due entirely to the machinations of those Jews who have left “dear” Germany for reasons best known to themselves and so on. German Jews who went abroad did so because they found life either irksome or next to impossible in that hideous atmosphere of persecution. That makes no difference. They are traitors to the country which inconsistently disowns them and at the same time expresses surprise at their failure to worship the Nazi calf. I have been reading with some amusement the lucubrations of Rosenberg’s dissemination plant which is stationed at Locarno. This wholly unbiased, independent and completely aloof spreader of Nazi dope appears to be under the aegis of a gentleman named Gabriel Leblanc, assisted by one Noel and a most energetic personage calling herself the Princess Karadja who waxes cloquent and lyrical in defense of her heroes and is so keen to tell the world about them that her blurbs go out in multiples. That is how it should be. People must live somehow and the profession of press agent is quite attractive and varied. These German press agents have been fairly well-trained by their master, for he has not permitted them to tell the world about the wonderful new roads and new bridges that Germany is building or about the money that is being spent on armaments. You see, if the press agents dwelt on all this expenditure, the creditors of Germany might begin to ask awkward questions and to suggest that if so much money is about, there might be a little percentage to be set aside for Germany’s creditors so that even the moratorium might be reconsidered. The Nazis know as well as anyone that if the world were told of Germany’s present expenditures, there would at once be a demand for the reopening of the debt question and that would be really too bad when the programme, as the German generals used to say during the war, is going “according to plan”.

In one sense I think it is perhaps a good thing for the Jews that this question has not yet been raised, for the Nazis at once would attribute it all to the treachery of their Jewish enemies. How can we pay our debts, Schacht will ask, when we are hampered right and left in our trade connections by the intrigues and interferences of Jews? When you receive this message I will be on board ship enroute to the United States. I have not visited the land of my birth for just five years and I shall, I am sure, meet many new strange sights, for America is like a kaleidoscope ever altering. When I first left it to come permanently to live in Europe more than forty years ago, New York was a pleasant fast-growing city preparing to be a world metropolis, whereas my native Wisconsin was pastoral and far, far away in the West. I will land in New York with the feelings of Rip Van Winkle.