Radio Interview with Nazi Touches off a Demonstration

The son of a survivor of a Nazi death camp conducted a two-hour interview with a self-proclaimed Nazi on the American University campus radio last night. The program, on WAMU-AM, touched off an anti-Nazi demonstration by a number of Jewish and non-Jewish students, some of whom broke down the door and invaded the studio during the broadcast. However, there were no injuries and no arrests, a university official told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency today.

David Adler, of Wilmington, Del., a sophomore studying communications, told the JTA that he invited Harold Mantius, an organizer of the National Socialist White People’s Party of Arlington, Va. to the studio in order to “wake people up against the potential threat of Nazism in America.”

Adler said that his father; who died five weeks ago, had lost his entire family in Nazi death camps. “Jews must realize this threat but they do not and non-Jewish groups don’t either,” said the youth who hosts the campus radio talk show. He said he had asked the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Knights of Columbus to send representatives to reply to the Nazi, but they all refused on grounds that to do so would give the Nazis publicity.

University authorities said they permitted the interview in the “interests of free speech.” It had been postponed for a week because of Jewish student protests and was limited to the campus radio. The demonstrators consisted of about 40 students, among them “a sprinkling of Blacks,” who belong to a group called “The Committee Against Racism.”

Lindsay Miller, the advisor to the university’s Jewish Student Association, said some non-Jewish students joined the protest because “they saw it not as a strictly Jewish event but a true protest against Nazism.” However, another group of about 50 Jewish students, marched peacefully with candles and then went to a student center to discuss how best to combat Nazism and educate the public to its threat, the university official said. The university has some 12,000 students, of whom an estimated 25 percent are Jewish.