Now-editorial Notes

William Randolph Hearst flew from Manheim to Berlin and was received by Adolf Hitler. When asked about his conversation with the Nazi leader, the American publisher replied:

“Visiting Hitler is like calling on the President of the United States. One doesn’t talk about it for publication.”

Putzy Hanfstaengl, intimate friend of the Nazi leader and foreign attache of the Nazi government, who presented Mr. Hearst to Hitler, said:

“Mr. Hearst asked Hitler whether he could borrow me for his trip to Wales, to which Hitler laughingly replied, ‘I envy Hanfstaengl. I wish I could go with you’.”

While Mr. Hearst is right in withholding information about his talk with the Nazi Reichsfuehrer, it is an affront to Americans to compare Hitler to the President of the United States. Mr. Hearst surely knows that Hitler is directly responsible for the system which is persecuting Jews, Catholics and Protestants because of their race or faith, suppressing the freedom of the press and of conscience, crushing intellectuals who dare express ideas of progress and liberty and peace. Nor can Mr. Hearst be ignorant of the fact that Hitler’s hands are stained with blood—the blood of innocent men and women and also the blood of his own former comrades in crime who had helped him to assume the dictatorship over the German people.

Mr. Hearst’s newspapers have always advocated religious liberty and freedom of the press. His newspapers have combatted bigotry and race prejudice. His flirtations with Putzy Hanfstaengl, the Hitler apologist who in his autobiographical sketch for the Harvard alumni volume made offensive references to the United States and to the Jewish people, are, to say the least, extremely amazing.

Mr. Hearst’s newspapers have consistently and vigorously opposed entangling alliances between the United States and foreign governments. By hobnobbing with Hanfstaengl and by his recent praise of Hitlerism, Mr. Hearst is giving aid and comfort to a foreign system of government that is repugnant to liberty-loving people everywhere and that is the very antithesis of American democracy.

GERMAN REARMAMENT

The most startling testimony before the Senate Committee, which is investigating the munitions industry, is that the Hitler government has increased its purchases of military aircraft from one American firm from $6,000 in 1932 to $234,000 in 1933. A memorandum by a representative of the company revealed also that “one large factory (producing munitions) in Germany has doubled the number of its employes since Hitler came to power,” while the next ranking company “has tripled the number of employes in the same period.”

Documentary evidence has been presented to substantiate the charge that Germany, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, has been rearming, feverishly increasing its military airplane equipment under the guise of purchases for commercial purposes.

There is not the slightest doubt any longer that, despite Hitler’s prating about peace, Naziland is preparing for a new war. Nor is there any doubt that, despite Dr. Hjalmar Schacht’s tricky excuses for Germany’s failure to meet her obligations to foreign countries and to foreign investors, Germany is spending vast sums of the funds borrowed in foreign lands, for military preparations and for vicious propaganda at home and abroad.

The present leaders of Germany are not only defying world public opinion but, by Machiavellian methods, are also seeking to undermine the foundations of peace and of democratic institutions.