Teach German Youth Creed of War Fought with Disease Germs

Recognizing the outbursts in the foreign press occasioned by the publication in Germany of a textbook on military science which justifies waging war by polluting wells, setting loose rats infected with plague germs, and similar methods, the government has just ordered the confiscation of the book, “Military Science: An Introduction to a New National Science” by Professor Ewald Banse. The book has been in use in the high schools.

This “scientific” book was quoted by Foreign Minister Constantin Von Neurath at his September 15 reception to the foreign press in Berlin. The following quotations are from its pages.

“War is based on an idea. War builds up while it destroys. War is therefore eternally the renewer. It is therefore completely erroneous to regard war unfavorably as a destroyer. Those who speak so have in mind only the extinction of human life and human achievements during the war proper, but this is only a transient phenomenon and a necessary transitional condition—the bath of purification before new endeavors. The majority of those who experience war see only the terrors in it; only the survivors can recognize the war’s significance for the future.

“Everyone must realize that war is not something extraordinary, not something criminal, not a crime against humanity. War is one of the forms of the biological struggle for control of existing circumstance… the defense and the improvement of this existence is among the most important moral duties and rights of man and the state. From this it will be seen that only those citizens have the right to protection and advantages of the state who are ready to protect it with their property and blood.”…

Professor Banse makes the point that this readiness for war should be inculcated in very early youth by means of “conscious defense eugenics.”

But the professor is most insidious in his dissertations on biology as an implement of warfare. We quote:

“As an implement of war biology lags far behind chemistry, but it is highly probable that during the next war it will win for itself a place among the most important…. The infection with typhoid bacilli of water used for drinking and cooking, the introduction of typhoid by means of fleas and of plagues by artificially infected rats all come into consideration here…. This much is certain: The biological war is the accepted weapon for nations which have been disarmed and made defenceless.”

Nor can anyone, says Professor Banse, condemn a nation for adopting such a course when it is a matter of preserving the state and the nation.

ISLAM’S DEBT TO ISRAEL

The Jewish Institution of Religion announces publication of the Stroock lectures for 1931, entitled “The Jewish Foundation of Islam,” by Professor Charles C. Torrey.

The book consists of five lectures delivered by Professor Torrey, recently head of the Semitic Department of New York University.

PAGEANT YIELDS $450,000

A combined attendance of about 400,000 persons, yielding approximately $450,000 in gross receipts and $200,000 in net receipts, witnessed the twenty performances of “The Romance of a People”, Jewish pageant, which closed October 19 at the Kingsbridge Armory.

According to Meyer Weisgal, executive director, the average nightly attendance was between 18,000 and 20,000. The American Palestine Campaign and affiliates will receive $150,000 for the settlement of German Jews in Palestine. Fifty thousand dollars will be donated to local charities.

THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW

“The Truth of Old Testament Religion,” an article by Eduard Konig, professor of Biblical Philology at the University of Bonn, Germany, appears in the current issue of the Jewish Quarterly Review which is edited by Dr. Cyrus Adler. Professor Koning is one of the outstanding Biblical scholars of our time. Included in the magazine are articles by Solomon {SPAN}Ka#z{/SPAN}, assistant in ancient history at Cornell University, on “Pope Gregory the Great and the Jews” and Phinear Mordell’s “The Beginning and Development of Hebrew Punctuation.”