AMERICAN PROTESTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 November 1938, Page 5

AMERICAN PROTESTS

WAVE OF INDIGNATION AGAINST NAZIS QUESTION OF CIVILISATION RAISED. DEMONSTRATION BY GROUP IN NEW YORK. NEW YORK, November 12. A wave of intense indignation regarding the sufferings of Jews in Germany is sweeping through the Press. The “New York Herald-Tribune” comments: “One would not have supposed that a single assassination would have been taken so seriously by a nation which four years ago cold-blooded-ly assassinated half of the most eminent of its political leaders.” Thomas Dewey, New York’s District Attorney, and Al Smith, former Governor of New York, broadcast a protest against Germany’s anti-Semitic riots. Dewey appealed to world opinion to halt “the savagery of barbarism which is inspiring a bloody pogrom.” He brushed aside Dr Goebbels’s denial that the riots were staged by the Government, saying: “If you saw a gang of thugs beating a helpless man on the street, you would not stand silent.” Al Smith declared that the question raised by German events was “not merely a Jewish, Catholic or Protestant question, but a question of civilisation itself.”

Previously David Dubinsky, president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, telegraphed to President Roosevelt urging him to protest to Germany in unmistakeable terms so that the “perpetrators of these atrocities may realise that they had placed themselves by their barbarities beyond the pale of civilisation.”

He added that America had “broken off relations and failed to recognise Governments for much lesser crimes against humanity.” Meanwhile, the police have placed a guard at the German consulate at Boston after the Consul had received a telephone threat that the consulate would be bombed. Guards were also placed at the New York consulate, following several abusive telephone calls and a demonstration by a group which paraded in front of the consulate chanting “Down with Germany.”