What you grandfather did to help Hitler
international |
rights, freedoms and repression |
opinion/analysis 
Monday January 05, 2004 10:25
by James McKenna
jimmymac61 at hotmail dot com
In 1933 a strange new movement was sweeping Europe. Some felt at home with it and some didn't.
In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. Immediately, members of Hitler's Nazi Party began a campaign of violence against German Jews, socialists, communists and other Nazi opponents. Germany's Jewish Central Association (Verein) issued a statement asserting its belief that "the responsible government authorities are unaware of the threatening situation" and that the Verein had thus "dutifully apprised [the Hitler administration] thereof." The Verein's statement concluded, "We do not believe our German-fellow citizens will let themselves be carried away into committing excesses against the Jews." As early as 1933, however, Stephen S. Wise, founder of the American Jewish Congress, seemed to know better.
Representatives of the American Jewish Committee, B'nai B'rith and the American Jewish Congress met in New York and agreed that organized public protests in America would further undermine the already precarious position of German Jews. Less than a month later, however, the American Jewish Congress changed its mind and called on its partners to help organize an American protest campaign. On March 12, 1933, the AJCongress resolved to hold a mass protest rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Judge Irving Lehman of the American Jewish Committee publicly counseled restraint. Lehman feared that any rally in America "may add to the terrible dangers of the Jews in Germany."
Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, honorary president of the American Jewish Congress, had the final word:
The time for prudence and caution is past. We must speak up like men. How can we ask our Christian friends to lift their voices in protest against the wrongs suffered by Jews if we keep silent?
The conference voted to hold the Madison Square Garden rally.
On March 27th 1933 , the AJCongress and its allies convened simultaneous protest rallies at Madison Square Garden in New York, in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland and 70 other locations. The New York rally was broadcast worldwide. An overflow crowd of 55,000 inside the Garden and in the streets outside heard AJCongress president Bernard Deutsch, American Federation of Labor president William Green, Senator Robert F. Wagner, former New York governor Al Smith and several Christian clergy call for an immediate cessation of the brutal treatment being inflicted on German Jewry.
The Nazi apparatus denounced the American complaints as slanders generated by "Jews of German origin." Goebbels announced a campaign of "sharp countermeasures" against these attacks. He accused German Jewry of engineering a worldwide boycott of German goods to destroy the German economy. To give Jews a taste of their own medicine, Goebbels announced that the following Saturday, April first, all good Aryan Germans would boycott Jewish-owned businesses. If, after the one-day boycott, the "false charges" against the Nazis in the overseas press stopped, there would be no further boycott of Jewish businesses. If worldwide Jewish attacks on the Nazi regime continued, Goebbels warned, "the boycott will be resumed … until German Jewry has been annihilated."
Urged by Stephen S. Wise to protest to the German government, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull issued a mild statement to the American ambassador to Berlin complaining that "unfortunate incidents have indeed occurred and the whole world joins in regretting them." Hull expressed his personal belief, however, that the reports of anti-Jewish violence were probably exaggerated.
Of course, the American boycott did nothing to deter the Nazis, who escalated their violence against Europe's Jews until settling on the Final Solution. As Rabbi Wise observed, however, the boycott effort, whatever its effect, was a moral imperative. "We must speak out," he explained. "If that is unavailing, at least we shall have spoken."
Meanwhile in Ireland from the Deasys in Waterford to the O'Sullivans of Goleen, Buleshirt bully boys were donning their blue shirts to join the Nazi/fascist Movement. Marches and demonstrations were held all over Ireland and even in the Mansion house by these good "Christians" in support of Hitler , Franco and Mousselini . They went to Spain to fight for the fascists and at home they burned out trade union offices and deported Irish citizens for being Socialists. Aided of course by the Catholic Church.
Where are they all today? The Jewish groups America have now almost totally sold out to the "Holocaust Industry" shakedown of European contries and thus the moral justification of Israel. The German Nazis have for the most part gone away while their Irish cousins who escaped the Nuremburg trials still hassle "hippies", travellers, anti-war people, socialists directly as Gardai or Community Alert paranoids. Same attitude, same people, same fascism, same challenge to humanity from Berlin to Bantry.
