“Intelligent Germans with whom I conversed in Berlin and other parts of Germany felt that the Nazi regime gave them nothing. People in general are not in sympathy with the Hitlerite anti-Semitic program, which promised a millenium that they see failed to materialize,” declared the Rev. Dr. Will H. Houghton, pastor of the Calvary Baptist Church, on his arrival aboard the Cunard liner Berengaria Friday. With Mrs. Houghton he made a seven weeks’ tour of Europe, studying youth movements abroad.
University professors and other leaders throughout Germany told Dr. Houghton of the persecution of the Jews in the beginning of the Nazi rule, and of the discrimination at the present time. In Berlin he learned that 70,000 had been exiled.
“I can’t say that I saw much in Germany that I could commend. Conditions are getting worse,” Dr. Houghton said. In Austria, Czechoslovakia and other parts of the continent he observed a growth in anti-Jewish feeling, which he attributed to the “Nazi contagion, ” although, he explained, most countries are developing their own Fascism.
“I believe in Zionism very ardently,” was one of Dr. Houghton’s statements. There is a possibility of Germany being the aggressor in a European war, he said. Some of her neighbors are afraid of her and in general fear is the outstanding characteristic in Europe today; everybody is afraid of his neighbor.
All religions in Germany find conditions oppressive, as efforts are made to bring them under political control, the minister declared, and Hitlerism may wreck itself on this issue.
He conversed with some Nazi leaders in Berlin, Dr. Houghton admitted, but would not reveal either their names or what they said, as that “would prove extremely embarrassing to them.”
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.
