Dorothy Thompson

Fort Worth Star-Telegram/February 5, 1939

Whenever Hitler moderates his voice and delivers a speech in a tone to which civilized ears are accustomed, the world breathes a sigh of relief and is inclined to praise him. Thus Mr. Chamberlain finds that the Monday speech was not one calculated to throw the world into war, and Senator Key Pittman suggests that if Hitler’s future actions are as tolerant as his Reichstag speech there will be no fear of any immediate war.

As a matter of fact Hitler never delivered a more ominous speech or one more cunningly calculated to befuddle his opponents and create dissension in democracies.

The speech boils down to a declaration of intention to reapportion the distribution of the world’s wealth among nations. He declared his complete solidarity with Italy and in effect handed Mussolini a blank check.

He announced a more intensive trade and propaganda war on the democracies.

He appealed to the masses of the world to unite in a common front against their universal enemy, the Jews, whom he managed at one and the same time to associate with international finance capitalism and with Bolshevism.

And his argument was that any attempt to halt the inevitable expansion of Germany, Italy and Japan, which he clearly associated ideologically with Fascism and National Socialism, might precipitate a war and that in that case the defenders would be the aggressors and bear the burden of the war guilt!

Hitler’s intention is to put anybody who opposes the extension of Fascism and the aggrandizement of the Fascist nations in the position of being a war mongerer. He therefore plays upon the overwhelming desire for peace of civilized people and exploits one of the noblest yearnings of mankind for the uses of a completely militarized social order.

Hitler’s whole program follows a pattern. He is now pursuing on a world scale exactly the political technique with which he conquered Germany. Recognizing that there is an aggressive instinct in man, he seeks to deflect that instinct in a direction where it will do him no possible harm.

Just as inside Germany he managed to persuade the German people that the source of all their troubles was the 1 per cent of the Jewish population, so he seeks to convince Great Britain, for instance, or France that they are not endangered by 10,000 German airplanes, by the 19 airports and five submarine bases that the Germans have built in Nationalist Spain, but that their real enemies are within their own gates and are Jewish.

He deflects attention from himself, from Mussolini, and from the great aggressive military machine of Japan to the 15,000,000 people of many nationalities scattered throughout the earth, picturing them as part of some gigantic plot whose aim is world Bolshevism.

And with this technique he hopes to create civil strife in the democracies to confuse issues, to awaken distrust, and thus to weaken the nations at whose expense he intends to profit.

The mind of Adolf Hitler is a peculiar thing. It would be psychologically interesting to know whether he really believes what he says and is himself a victim of huge obsessions, or whether the fantastic distortions of history and of facts which he voices are coldly and cunningly devised for a precise effect. His speech on Monday contained some patent but mostly irrelevant truths and some gigantic lies.

This column certainly would not quarrel with his ironic description of the Versailles policy toward Germany—with the idiocy of fighting a war for trade and then exacting huge reparations which could only be paid by an artificial acceleration of German exports. But the Versailles policy is all water under bridges and has no pertinence to the present state of affairs. When Hitler comes to more recent history his descriptions are breathtaking in their monstrous misrepresentation.

One need only take his description of the conquest of Austria, which he presents as an act of self-determination! He describes Chancellor Schuschnigg’s plebiscite as the “destruction of the legal basis of the national right of self-determination” of Austrian Germans.

He makes no reference to his own plebiscite conducted in Austria under an army of occupation, by which he destroyed the legal existence of Austria!

Defending the right of self-determination, he makes no reference to the million Czechs who have been forced under German rule in the last few months by a military coup d’etat.

His description of German trade policies as compared with those of states “with an international capitalistic outlook” is way afoul of the facts. He accuses these capitalistic states of juggling their currencies, making no reference to the fact that there are at present at least 11 different forms of Reichsmark, with 11 different values, all of them arbitrarily fixed.

All through the speech there is evidence of the paranoiac persecution mania under which Hitler as the apotheosis of Germany continually suffers. Whatever ills Germany endures are exclusively the fault of the rest of the world.

No act of consideration or kindness or even of reason has ever been shown for Germany since 1914.

He refers to the German children who died of hunger and undernourishment at the close of the war. He makes no reference to the fact that American Quakers and others using the voluntary gifts of hundreds of thousands of humanitarian Americans fed a million German children in the very period to which he refers.

He scoffs at the democracies’ solicitude for persecuted Jews, deriding us for not immediately moving to our own shores several hundred thousand German-speaking German citizens.

He makes no mention of the fact that George Rublee is in Berlin at this moment trying to negotiate some way in which the people of the democracies at considerable cost to themselves can save these human lives.

Nor does he mention the fact that the same American Quakers who once fed German children are feeding destitute Jewish German citizens inside Germany at this moment.

While claiming that he does not want to intervene in any way in American affairs, he suggests that it is our business radically to reform our immigration laws in order to relieve him of a self-made problem and if we do not do so we are inhumanitarian.

He denounces Bolshevism. But— and this is very significant—he does not say a word about Russia. One can only gather from his speech that the Bolshevik countries today are the democracies and that Communism and democracy are one and the same thing.

At the same time he attacks bourgeois society, and his speech presages the establishment of complete military Communism in Germany. He announces that trade, industry and finance will be even more closely concentrated than they are at present under the German state and that the Reichstag is to be transformed into a purely German bank of issue.

“If need be we will place all the production resources of our new National Socialist community at the disposal of its leaders” can only mean the complete socialization of all the means of production.

His statements regarding the treatment of religion are not true. His categorical remark that “National Socialism has neither interfered with the doctrinal teaching nor with the creed of any denomination” is not in agreement with the expressed convictions of the pope, nor with the Confessional Synod of the Evangelical Church, nor with a most remarkable document issued by the chaplains of the German army some months ago.

There is a very serious doctrinal conflict between National Socialism and Christianity on the racial question, on marriage, and on the teaching of youth.

Again he completely distorts the reasons for the SA purge of 1934.

He asserts that Captain Roehm and other Nazi party leaders were shot because they were found guilty of pederasty and sexual offenses against children. Captain Roehm was a notorious pederast. He was a notorious pederast when Mr. Hitler made him head of the SA and the organizer of German youth. If Hitler did not know that then, he was the most unknowledgeable person in Germany. Roehm was shot for political reasons. And it is for political and religious reasons that out of 18,000 Protestant pastors, 1,300 have been under prison or police arrest since 1934 and that more than 8,000 Catholic religious leaders have been smeared with charges of immorality although even in Nazi courts only 49 have ever been convicted.

It is not true that Germany refrains from any intervention in American affairs. German agents have organized groups in the United States, and the Nazi party is sending masses of anti-Semitic propaganda into this country aimed at stirring up internal dissension.

Nazi Germany maintains offices for the purpose of persuading German Americans that their first loyalty is to Germany and not to this country.

The answer to Hitler’s charges of gigantic Jewish propaganda is in the morning papers. “The New York Times” devotes two full pages to the official German translation of the text of Hitler’s speech. The Herald Tribune devotes an entire page to it. One of the two great radio networks of this country carried Hitler’s speech in its entirety. Do the German newspapers carry uncensored texts of President Roosevelt’s speeches? Do the German radio stations transmit them to the German people uncensored over the air?

They do not.

It is noteworthy that the speech makes no reference whatsoever to the recently concluded non-aggression agreement with the French while giving free hand to Mussolini.

One can only conclude that if Mussolini moves against Tunisia Hitler will give him aid, either by harassing Britain or, in the manner of Italian and German intervention in Spain, will agree to non-intervention while sending arms and technical assistants to Mussolini.

Beware of the Greeks bearing gifts! Beware of Adolf Hitler preaching peace