Resolution and Verdict Adopted at Trial’s End

Following is the full text of the resolution presented by Senator Millard E. Tydings of Maryland, and the verdict handed down at the conclusion of the Madison Square Garden trial of “The Case of Civilization Against Hitlerism”:

Because the leaders of the Nationalist Socialist Party of Germany, in violation of their oaths of office, have seized power and by a coup d’etat destroyed the German Republic and abolished its Constitution, and because they have set up in its place the arbitrary and brutal rule of a minority:

Because Hitler and his followers turned their backs on the civilized tradition of government and law and order in Germany;

Because they set up the arbitrary will of the “leader” in the place of the administration of justice and above the rule of law;

Because they exterminated every vestige of the hard-won liberties of the forgotten men and women whose defense and protection has made up the progress of civilization;

Because they have destroyed security of person and of property;

Because they have abolished freedom of association;

Because they have destroyed freedom of speech and of the press;

Because they have rendered impossible freedom of teachings and research and because they seek to enslave instruction in the arts and the sciences to the purposes of the ruling party, regardless of scientific truth and artistic honesty;

Because they war against and seek to destroy freedom of conscience;

Because they have deprived citizens of the right to petition the government for the redress of wrongs and have destroyed every possibility of lawful appeal from the injustice of the persons in power, whom they call the State;

Because the scientifically false and mythical differences of race have been invoked to deprive the 600,000 Jews of Germany of their civil and human rights, and to make them the victims of a policy and a program whose goal is Clair complete extermination;

Because they treat differences of opinion as heresies subject to inquisition and to be punished by imprisonment and torture;

Because, according to the declaration of their leader, they base their rule upon a combination of farce and fraud, a technique of the deception of the masses of their people, both by suppressing the true and by spreading the false;

Because they are employing this technique of lies and propaganda to gain their ends in foreign lands with which they are publicly at peace;

Because by doctrine, by law, and by administrative procedure they are degrading womanhood in Germany from the position of human beings who share equally with men in the duties and responsibilities of civilized life;

Because they have robbed the workingmen of Germany of their right of free association and of the protection by the law of their trade union standards and conditions, and because they have subordinated the workers to “leaders” to whom they stand related as mediaeval serfs to their masters;

Because they have cut off the arts of Germany from the fertilizing contacts with the rest of the world and have inhibited those discoveries, inventions, and variations in which the progress of art consists;

Because they have inhibited the sciences from the pursuit of truth and have subordinated them to the purpose of their state;

Because, by their financial methods, they have cheated and are continuing to cheat both the public and the private creditors of Germany of their due;

Because, although they speak of peace, they have thirteen hundred thousand marching men in uniform and have made instruction in the art of war a part of the curriculum in every institution of higher education;

Because they have defied, insulted, and endeavored to disrupt the instrumentalities of international cooperation and international peace, and have by this and other means thrown Europe into a state of war tension such as prevailed in 1914;

THEREFORE:

We, citizens of the United States of America, assembled together in Madison Square Garden in the City of New York on Wednesday, March 7, 1934, upon the first anniversary of the Hitlerite coup ##, solemnly declare that the National Socialist Government of Germany has turned its face against historic progress and the positive blessings and achievements of modern civilization. It has shown itself by doctrine and practice to be the avowed enemy of those methods of peace and freedom by which the march of civilization has been enabled and the progress of mankind accomplished.

We declare that the Hitler government is compelling the German people to turn back from civilization to an antiquated and barbarous despotism which menaces the progress of mankind toward peace and freedom and is a present threat against civilized life throughout the world.

To the great masses of German people, who are thus being made the victims of a regression so tragic and terrible, we express our deep sympathy and friendship. We recognize the wrongs which they have suffered on account of the inequities of the Treaty of Versailles. We deplore the enhancement of those wrongs because of the mistaken post-war policies of the victors in the Great War. We admire the resolution, the good sense, and the endurance with which the German people at the end of the War undertook further to advance civilization by means of the free government and free institutions of the German Republic, which Hitlerism has with ruthless malice destroyed. We deeply deplore the fact that the efforts of the Republic received from the other nations less cooperation than they deserved. But we deem it our solemn duty to point out that as time passed this cooperation improved in scope, in degree and in kind, and that when Hitler coup d’etat destroyed freedom and justice in Germany and began to undermine German civilization, the German nation was well advanced toward equality and freedom in the family of nations.

Today the German people and the German Government stand before the world as they did in 1918, and with far greater justice. In 1918 Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, called attention to the distinction between the German people and the German Government–how the Government had coerced the people into conduct contrary to their traditions and standards and opposed to their essential desires. President Wilson called upon the people of Germany to liberate themselves from their coercion and thus to recover for themselves and for their children the peace and freedom in which civilization and progress consist.

Today it has once again become the solemn duty of the enlightened opinion of mankind to call attention to the difference between the German people and the German Government. Once again the people are being terrorized by a privileged minority more ruthless, more arbitrary, more ignorant and more hypocritical than any in German history, into policies and conduct at home and abroad contrary to every conception of equity and harmony in human life.

We declare it our solemn conviction that such a situation cannot long endure. It is our faith and our prayer that the time is not far off, when all the people of Germany, regardless of race, sex, or creed, may restore for themselves and for their children each and every one of those rights and duties, those opportunities for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in which just government at home consists; and that the German nation thus freed may at last take its place as an equal and free member of the family of nations in the cooperative enterprise of civilization.

Until that day arrives the German Government stands convicted by its own acts of a crime against civilization.