A slashing editorial on the “stupid, unthinking, frenzied” policies of Adolf Hitler features the current issue of Collier’s. In the same issue is a feature story by Dr. Ernst F. S. (Putzy) Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s propaganda aide, who recently visited this country to attend the twenty-fifth anniversary reunion of his Harvard class.
While in this country, Hanfstaengl was reluctant to discuss the Jewish situation in Germany other than to make the somewhat cryptic remark that it was “fairly normal.”
In the Collier’s article, however, Hanfstaengl is more loquacious on the subject.
“Hitler,” he writes, “has given Germany a New Deal. Hitler has been vigorous in prosecution of those who for so many years looted Germany, leeches feeding on the body politic. The Jews in Germany had so overwhelmingly associated themselves with those disorganizing forces and had so enthusiastically embraced the role of pacemaker for Bolshevism that to cure the body the surgeon had to cut off the leg.”
Hanfstaengl’s defense of Hitler and attack on the Jews is vigorously answered by Collier’s in the editorial, which occupies a full page.
“The net result of Hitler’s leadership is the moral isolation of Germany,” the editorial states. “His bloody cleansing of the Nazi party startled and shocked the world; his persecution of the Jews would have been enough to condemn him in any court of civilized opinion. The violence and wrong actually inflicted on innocent men and women were precisely consistent with the Hitler policies. Hitler waged a savage and unprovoked war on German Jews. Not since the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s has any great nation indulged in such an orgy of frenzied hatred.”
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.
