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## clined to accept as truth everything that they are told. And uncontrolled rumors circulating among a population that is ground down by terror, and that hardly dares ever to whisper within the four walls of their own home, by passing from mouth to mouth, develop into fabulous tales. That is one of the crimes that must be laid at the door of a Minister of Propaganda. So that if Dr. Geobbels complains of atrocity propaganda, the indictment is really against himself. He has a very effective method open to him of combating this atrocity propaganda, simply by restoring freedom of speech to the people from whom he has filched it.

Even if we allow for a great deal of exaggeration in what we are told about the events in Germany, we still find enough left to disturb modern civilization.

I am not a squeamish person. I know that masses of people, fired by unscrupulous agitators, do not behave according to the rules of polite society when they think the day of reckoning has come. And when there is a revolution, the leaders have more important things to do than to go through all the streets of all the towns and cities to exhort the mob to behave itself. A great many things are bound to occur that the leaders would rather not have had happen.

But the National Socialist leaders are responsible for what happened in Germany after they took over. The whole world read Goering’s speech, and many actually heard him on the wireless, declaring that the police were not there to protect Jews, Marxists and Democrats. That was not only direct incitement, but actually a guarantee to all and sundry that they could commit any outrage they wished, with impunity.

ATROCITIES ESTABLISHED

Nor need we confine ourselves to what happened in the early days. The fact that atrocities were committed in the Brown Houses of the National Socialists, which were equipped with regular torture chambers, and that political prisoners were taken to the concentration camps from the custody of the regular police for the deliberate purpose of being maltreated is clearly established in documents that carry the stamp of truth. There was not only physical brutality, and people murdered by being “shot down while trying to escape.” The National Socialist press reported recently that the political prisoners in one concentration camp had been forced to build a Horst-Wessel monument, which one of the supreme Nazi leaders unveiled at a compulsory demonstration of prisoners who had been marched down in procession. It reminded me of the slaves who built the Pyramids. But those ancient cruelties were at least committed for the honor of the gods, while in this Twentieth Century the only thought is to humiliate these people. They are forced to build a monument to a so-called National Socialist hero, who was not only a political antagonist, but whom they actually despised.

This humiliation of the spirit is the characteristic method of National Socialism in dealing with the Jews. Not in the early militant days of the Nazi Revolution, but now, months after, the sole idea behind the Nazi regime is to degrade and to humiliate the Jews.

(Copyright, 1934, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Inc)