WILLKIE REPLIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 May 1941, Page 6

WILLKIE REPLIES

GERMANS WHO LONG FOR "FREE WAY.” ■ Wendell L. Willkie was interested to hear that the long arm of the Nazi propaganda machine had made , a "home consumption" morsel for the German daily Press of his London message to the German people that Americans of Gorman descent "rejected and haled the aggression and lust for power of the present German Government.” He was elated at this evidence that his words, spoken as an American of German parentage, not only had reached the German people, but had disturbed the Nazi Propaganda Ministry to the extent of a reply, no matter how “incredible” the story. The German Propaganda Ministry of Dr Joseph Goebbels declared in a widely-published newspaper story that “documentary research" by an archivist of Aschersleben, the Willkie family home in Germany, showed that Mr Wilikie's grandfather left Germany not in 1848, but in 1862. and not because he haled tyranny, but had been “cheated by a Jew." In telling of his grandfather, Mr Willkie said he had been reporting things known only generally by'family tradition, that his grandfather came to the United States in 1848 as the result of the democratic revolution, returned to Germany, married, and came back to the United States in 1860 to make his home.

According to the German Press story, the leave T taking was in 1860 after a family dispute over disposal of the coppersmith business of Joseph Willkie’s father through a Jewish neighbour, Bernhard Gerson, who handsomely profited from the transaction, but gave the family such a niggardly return that it "destroyed" Joseph's economic well-being. “I don't pretend to have devoted any time to studying family history,” Mr Willkie said. "I do know as a fact, however, that my grandfather taught my father a deep and abiding hatred of German autocracy and militarism, a passionate love and a warm and sympathetic understanding of the problems of the Jewish people, and of all minority groups. "I am proud that my father taught those same doctrines to his children, and I am firmly convinced, despite Mr Goebbels, that millions of Germans enslaved by Mr Hitler still cling to these beliefs."—-“Christian Science Monitor."