The District of Columbia commissioners today received a ruling that they are not empowered to halt distribution of pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic hate literature on downtown streets.
The ruling came from the District of Columbia Corporation Counsel Chester H. Gray. It pertained to inflammatory anti-Jewish handbills handed out here by George Lincoln Rockwell’s “American Nazi Party.” Mr. Gray said that while the Nazi literature is offensive, insulting and abusive, it is not obscene and does not violate District of Columbia libel laws. The Rockwell literature urges “the gas chamber” for American Jews.
The Nazi party serves printed notice that it intends to “establish an International Jewish Control Authority… to make a long-term scientific study to determine if the Jewish virus is a matter of environment, and can be eliminated by education and training, or if some other method must be developed to render Jews harmless to society.”
The Nazis also would “establish an international treason tribunal to investigate, try, and publicly hang, in front of the Capitol, all non-Jews who are convicted of having acted consciously as fronts for Jewish treason or subversion.” Under the Nazi program, all debts owed to Jews by non-Jews would be “canceled.” Adolf Hitler is hailed as “the gift of an inscrutable providence.”
After studying such material, the District of Columbia legal authorities concluded it was not obscene. Orders have been issued to police to protect Rockwell’s Nazis as they distribute the handbills. Police were told not to interfere with the “peaceful distribution of the pamphlets” unless they see “a clear and present threat to public disorder.”
Lawrence Speaker, Washington spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union, today said that District of Columbia legal authorities should be highly commended for permitting and protecting the distribution of the American Nazi Party’s anti-Jewish handbills. He termed the attitude of the authorities “admirable” in the face of what he described as “intense pressures” to act against “free speech.”
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