If only Herr Hitler could have heard that pint-size “Aryan” Negro, who the other night stood at Lexington avenue and Eighty-sixth street and in outlandish German rubbed addled Adolf’s nose in the dirt as few Jewish orators have dared to do in that Yorkville not bed of Nazism!
The Austrian corporal would have turned the color of a parboiled lobster. A world-wide anti-Negro movement would have been cooked up on the spot.
What was even more miraculous, more astonishing than the picture of this pigmy fumblingly throwing his poisoned darts at der Fuehrer, was the self-control exercised by the Yorkville Nazis as he was addressing.
“Hitler,” the thick-lipped son of Niobe shrieked, “is the greatest enemy of the German people!”
The crowd moved restlessly. Guttural mutterings. But the Negro was still up there in one piece.
“Achtung!” he roared. “I fought the French in the Cameroons. I was in the Kaiser’s colonial army. And now Hitler won’t let me in Germany. I am as good an ‘Aryan’ as you are”
This struck the Teutonic sense of humor in the vital spot. The crowd guffawed.
“Warum lachen Sie?” the Ethiopian, hurt by the laughter more than he would have been by epithets, bellowed in his garnished German.
“Are you too fooled by Hitler?” he thundered at Yorkvillites.
“He will not last long. The Kaiser will come back soon.”
That didn’t go so well with the preservers of “Aryan” purity. Their laughter of a moment before was swallowed up in a throaty rumble that boded it to the black mite. The chesty, daring Negro realized it was time to call it a night.
A Bulletin reporter intrigued by the bravado of the little man, trailed him and finally succeeded in luring him into a restaurant.
His belly full, he revealed after a bit of coaxing that his name was Karl Vechto, that for all he knew he might have been a test-tube baby, that he had left his mother when the war broke out, that he was refused re-admittance into Germany last year because of his color, and that he had gone through the usual vicissitudes since arriving in this country.
“Yes,” he said in English as quaint as his German, “I am an ‘Aryan,’ Eight years I am in German army before war. Then war comes. I get shot vunce. I fight more. My regiment go to Germany. I get shot again.
“Vat Hitler do for Germany? He get shot like me. He fool people. Soon he vill get shot ven der Kaiser comes back. I am gut ‘Aryan’…gut black ‘Aryan.’.”
Yes, indeed, Herr Hitler should have heard Karl Vechto! D. S.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
