‘the Deputy’ Opens in New York; Small Groups Picket the Theater

The first performance in the United States of the controversial play “The Deputy” was greeted here last night with reserve by critics and with picketing by small groups, including members of the American Nazi Party, and members of the Ad Hoc Committee to Protest The Deputy, most of whom said they were Catholics. No disorders were registered by the police and no arrests were made.

The critics of the New York Times, Herald-Tribune and other metropolitan newspapers agreed that as a play, “The Deputy” was uneven but they also agreed the play carried an important message and that the issues it raised concerning Nazi annihilation of European Jewry needed to be debated and taken to heart. “The Deputy,” which has created disorders in every European city where it has been performed, presents the late Pope Pius XII as having failed to speak out publicly against the Nazi mass-murders of Jews.

The 1,890 seat theater where the play opening night was filled to capacity. The curtain went up on schedule and the pickets outside the playhouse dispersed before the performance was over. The author of the play is Roll Hochhuth, a German Protestant who arrived in New York this week to witness the opening of his drama in New York.

AMERICAN JEWISH CONGRESS SAYS PLAY IS NOT ANTI-CATHOLIC

Dr. Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, today issued a statement lauding the courage of the producers in putting on the play in New York” in the face of reported threats of violence and other reprisals.” The statement said:

“The right to show ‘The Deputy’ should of course be defended by every citizen committed to the basic freedoms of our country. But beyond that, there is a human obligation on each of us to confront the awful meaning of the Nazi slaughter of European Jewry, to recognize his own share of guilt for the sin of silence and — having done that to do whatever must be done so that the world may never again be witness to such shame.

” ‘The Deputy’ challenges us to make this confrontation, and in this regard the play performs a valuable service. It reminds us of the agony endured by the Six Million, and it recalls to us that the World was silent to their cry. One of those who was silent was Pope Pius XII, and this is the thrust of Roll Hochhut’s play. The Deputy’ is not anti-Catholic. Its hero is a Catholic who voluntarily goes to a concentration camp to take his place with the Jewish victims of Nazism.

“But the stage of a theatre cannot be the place for rendering the judgment of history. In focusing all of its attention on the failure of one man — the Pope — to speak out against Nazism, the play neglects the heavy responsibility of both the German Catholic church and the German Protestant church in cooperation with the Nazi program of anti-Semitism that led inexorably to the Nazi policy of extermination.

“The play neglects the responsibility of the German people for their avid embracing of the Nazi ideology. It neglects the responsibility of the leaders of the free world for their own silence to the frantic pleas that came from the Warsaw Ghetto, from Auschwitz, from Buchenwald, from Dachau.

“‘The Deputy’ is valuable as a reminder of the tragic depths to which man can sink in his inhumanity to man. But in its obsession with the responsibility of one man – eve so important a figure as the Pontiff of the Roman Catholic — it distorts and blurs the real meaning of the Nazi era — that tens of millions of good, honest, God-fearing men and women must, by their indifference to brutality and their silence to their neighbors cry of anguish, share in the responsibility for the most awesome tragedy of our time.”