Tribune Scores Goebbels; Calls Him a Failure

The Herald Tribune in an editorial entitled “Germany’s Minister of Obfuscation,” yesterday attributed Reich propaganda Minister Goebbels’ recent attacks on Jews to a desire to divert public attention from the administration’s “failure to bring in the economic Elysium according to schedule.”

Referring to Goebbels’ speech at the Berlin Sport Palace on Friday night, the editorial says in part:

“The peculiar feature of this policy, which, as we know, the Hitlerites would have the German masses forget in a fresh burst of anti-Jewish hysteria is the complete absence from it of the Socialistic program that figured so large in the party’s advance propaganda. For this there has been substituted a more abject surrender of the economic machinery of the state into the hands of the great industrialists and merchants (including unmolested Jewish capitalists) than the republic ever contemplated, and the faithful are beginning to mutter about it. They have the circuses but not the bread.”

With reference to Dr. Goebbels’ statement that foreign reaction to further persecution of the Jews can do Germany no further harm, the Herald Tribune has this to say:

“He (Goebbels) must know that, even though such an orgy might be incapable of firing the Jews of other nations to any bitterer hostility to Nazi Germany than they now profess, it would be quite capable of engendering abroad a contempt for the Nazi hierarchy, and for the nation that submits to its government, which might easily be more expensive to Germany than the policy of the Hohenzollerns.”