A protest against the menace of Hitlerism in Germany to the status of the Jews and appeal to the sense of justice of the German people was uttered on Sunday morning at Carnegie H### by representatives of the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish faiths, at a meeting convened under the auspices of the Executive Committee of the American Jewish Congress.
Addresses were delivered by Martin Conboy, prominent Catholic layman; Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, who is chairman of the Committee on Good Will Between Jews and Christians of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ and a leading Protestant preacher; Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, honorary president of the American Jewish Congress and Bernard S. Deutsch, president of the Congress, who presided.
Mr. Conboy declared that it was the duty of all Americans to protest against any attempt on the part of Hitlerism to deprive German Jewry of their equal citizenship rights.
Dr. Cadman said that an injustice to the Jewish people is an injustice to the world.
“Hitlerism,” he asserted, “must be defeated. It is a recrudescence of the pre-war madnesses, of diabolism and blood lust and hate. Let us never cease until it is defeated.”
“It is an obligation that rests upon those who are so situated that they can do so to voice a protest when the lives, the well being and the fundamental rights of their kindred are endangered, said Mr. Conboy.
“No one can say of the Jews of the United States that they have never failed to discharge this obligation.
“Every American must honor them for it. We in this country differ about many things, but one instinct we have in common is a hatred of oppression. With that goes a corresponding sympathy for the weaker element who in any country feel the heavy hand of the tyrannous and strong.
“Happily, this meeting is not called for the purpose of denouncing a pogrom. However, the burnt child who dreads the fire is a sound philosopher.
“There is ground for apprehension when a man is placed in office who wrote, as one of Herr Hitler’s lieutenants did a few months ago, that the Nazis would not murder the Jews when his party came to power.
“The literature of politics, indeed all history, is replete with accounts of things that have been done after the opposite intention has been declared.
“Captain Goering, who took that pledge to do no murder, made it appear as a concession to what he called “a disruptive and poisonous element which had brought harm to the German people.” Captain Goering is now Speaker of the Reichstag and Minister of the Interior for Prussia.
“One cannot blame the Jews of Germany, or their friends and kinsmen here, if they look upon the pledge as an inadequate guarantee of security when made by a man who now has the power to do irreparable damage if he should happen to change his mind.
“Pogroms and other forms of official murder apart, there is enough in declarations made by the Hitler Party to call for emphatic protest.
“There is not much to be said for the policy that would spare a man’s life while taking from him all that makes living worth while.
“Make a man an alien in his own land, deprive him of equal civil and religious rights with his neighbors, shut him out of all opportunities to employ his abilities for his own, his family’s or his country’s benefit, and what special advantage is there in being spared even a violent death?
“There is not a people under heaven that has ever accepted that dispensation, not one that has tolerated its continuance beyond the hour when it could be ended.
“Even if one generation submits, the next one will go into rebellion, and the process will be repeated as long as the evil endures.
“The announced intention to reduce the Jews of Germany to a servile condition is what constitutes a real menace as we in America see it. That is quite enough, if the danger is real, regardless of any contingent vaccillation as to the political expediency of murder.
“If there are two subjects on which the mind of this country has been definitely made up, religious liberty is one of them and civil equality is the other.
“If it be pleaded that the present matter is not our concern, it must be answered that our decisions were taken on the broadest grounds of human interest and welfare. We cannot be indifferent when a retrograde tendency manifests itself anywhere. Still less can we do so when a nation that has high claims to recognition as one of the leaders amongst civilized peoples has been implicated by its choice of spokesmen.”
“We are not met to offer counsel to Germany. We are not met to make protest against Germany, but as friends and well-wishers of Germany, we wish today to point out certain dangers to Germany, which inhere in the situation which has come to pass,” said Dr. Wise.
“There is a twofold danger that faces Germany today,—the danger in the relationships with which Germany will be wise enough to deal, and the danger of peril and strife in the inner life of Germany; the conflict and the strife are at hand. We Jews are not the only victims of Hitlerist terror and oppression. We are merely the earliest and the chiefest victims of Hitlerite hatred and rage. Hitlerism means one thing—no friend of humanity, no friend of Germany, and we who are the friends and well-wishers of Germany, cannot fail to lament over the truth that Hitlerism means the rule of hatred, a nation that has served by hatred is tragically dis-served. A leader who sets out to divide his national home against itself may have electoral triumphs for an hour, but he is bound to go down in the end in moral defeat and in spiritual disaster.”
“The American people know that we are not strangers in Germany; our fathers were not alien there. For one thousand years and more we have lived in Germany, and we have been among the constructive, serviceable, enriching upbuilders of Germany.
“What if we had given Germany nothing, but Heine and Berner, Wassermann and Ehrlich, Mendelsohn and Einstein! How could any reasonable, sane person say that we are strangers in Germany? Germany is greater than Hitlerism. Germany means freedom, justice.”
In explaining the purpose of the conference, Mr. Deutsch declared:
“The American Jewish Congress has convened this morning to give earnest and reasoned consideration to the recent developments in Germany that make imminent the menace of Hitler ism.
“In conformity with the purposes of the American Jewish Congress we desire here today, to acquaint the American public with the grave dangers which are represented in the Hitler program; the danger to the democratic ideal, to the peace of the world, to the cause of religious liberty, and, more especially and immediately, the threat to the safety and physical well-being of six hundred thousand Jews in Germany.”
“In the name of common humanity, we appeal to the German Government, to the great German nation in this hour of trial; and to all the nations of the world that there may come a new spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation. Above races and nations, there stands a higher tribunal, the highest court of appeals of history and the touchstone of all values, which is the universality of mankind.”
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