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Roosevelt Sees Peace Impossible While Millions Are Dispersed, Persecuted Abroad

October 28, 1938
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Mentioning no country nor people by name, President Roosevelt last night lashed out at the German Government’s policy of expelling Jews as making peace impossible. He spoke by radio to the New York herald tribune’s eighth annual Forum on Current Problems at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

“There can be no peace,” the President said in listing the forces making for war, “if national policy adopts as a deliberate instrument the dispersion all over the world of millions of helpless and persecuted wanderers with no place to lay their heads.”

Mr. Roosevelt said it was becoming increasingly clear that “peace by fear has no higher or more enduring quality than peace by the sword,” and asserted that there could be no peace “if the reign of law is to be replaced by a recurrent sanctification of sheer force. He added that peace was impossible “if humble men are not free to think their own thoughts, to express their own feelings, to worship god.”

The President also evidenced, his concern over the problem of those expelled from Germany by writing to the World Youth Congress in New York urging youth in neutral countries to cooperate “in the humanitarian work of the intergovernmental committee on refugees,” saying that such cooperation would be “0f immense usefulness.”

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