NAZI CLAIMS ON AMERICA

Waikato Times, Volume 124, Issue 20728, 11 February 1939, Page 15 (Supplement)

NAZI CLAIMS ON AMERICA

Intensive Propaganda :: Amazing Contention :: Reconquering Campaign

(S. D. Padover, Research Scholar and Historian.)

AMERICA IS RIGHTFULLY GERMAN. Germans played the predominant role in creating, preserving and upbuilding it; German blood predominates in a majority of its citizens; the hour is imminent when the Germans in America will take over the United States. Already they call it “Unser Amerika” —“Our America.’’ This is not the mere babbling of extremists; it is part of the official programme of Nazi propaganda now under way in this country and in Germany on a more extensive scale than most Americans realise. The Nazis’ technique—successful in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia—is to stir up dissatisfaction and internal dissension, then to step in and, through the German minority they control, to dominate the chaos they have created. It .is improbable that the realistic Nazi leaders actually expect any such overwhelming triumph in the United States. But if they can create enough dissension and enough pro-German sentiment in America to prevent us again helping Germany’s enemies, they will have won victory enough. ... Learned professors write that nothing except Nazi-ism can save the United States, which is a vulgar, corrupt and basically uncultured land, owned by Jews, full of criminals, and clinging to a degenerate form of government. Worse, the Americans are neither a race nor a a nation, but a sort of Bastardised Racial Conglomeration in which the best blood, that which made the country powerful, is German. To stir up dissatisfaction, the Nazis are attacking democracy and its institutions. Pamphlet No. 7 of the official Nazi Instructions for Our Friends Overseas says: “The fundamental aim must always be to discredit conditions in the United States.” If Americans are ever to be free, they must destroy the Constitution, which the Nazis call “the chain that ties the whole misery of American politics.” Above all, Americans are told, they must smash the Bill of Rights. As Hans Kiderlen puts it in his book, Journey into New America, “The Bill of Rights is the wall in which a breach must be made before America’s problems can be solved.” To create dissension, the Nazis, with skill born of long practice, raise issues—issues intended to split the country socially, to undermine political institutions and instill mutual hatreds among the ctizens. The chief issues which Nazi propaganda is now seeking to inflame in America are the Jewish and Germanic problems. The Nazis are exerting every effort to make the United States Jew-conscious. They know that nothing else splits a country wide open so thoroughly. A spokesman for the Nazi institute for foreign propaganda declares that anti-Semitism in America is a vital necessity for Nazi plans. Hence, since 1933, they have distributed thousands of pamphlets, designed to convince American farmers, workers and lower middle-class folk that the country is Jew-dominated. Repeating their time-tested formula, they trace every American ill to the Jews. They are spreading the canards that the Jews control America's money, own the American press and dominate the government. “Aryan” Americans are urged to revolt against this Jewish tyranny. Heinrich Krieger, writing in Die Tat, an important official party organ, warns us sternly: “If America continues to drift along her present racial course, she mu3t inevitably be forced to abandon calling herself a Ger-; manic nation.” As for the Germanic issue, the Nazis claim that the United States has so much of German blood that all Hitler needs to do to control America is to arouse this “blood” to an awareness of its brotherhood. I For the basis of their claims, they go back to Pastorius, who with his Mennoties settled Germantown, Pa. The Nazis claim that they played a preponderant role in the opening of the new land. A German, Martin Waldseemuller, first named it “America” in 1507. Another German, Charles V, was King of Spain shortly after Columbus returned from his fourth voyage. This, in Nazi law, gives Germans title to the Western continent. (Actually, Charles V was part Austrian, part Spaniard.) Moreover, so writes a Nazi scholar, it was Martin Luther, a German, who founded Protestantism. Without Protestantism, there would have been no Protestant colonisation of North America. “Thus the Deepest Roots of the United States go back to a German.” All this, the Nazis conclude triumphantly, gives “us” as much right to claim North America is German as the British have to claim it is Anglo-Saxon. Nor is this all. By the time of the American Revolution, a great portion of the colonists were German, or had “German blood.” Large numbers of Germans fought with Washington. (The Hessians on the other side are never mentioned.) Other Germans, notably General Steuben, came over to help the colonists. When it was all over, there was a movement to make German the national tongue and to put a German king on the vacant American throne. “Some wanted a French, others a German king,” according to Johannes Stoye, a popular Nazi author, but the unscrupulous Anglo-Saxon minority robbed the Germans of their victory. In the Civil War, the Nazis tell us, every third soldier in the Northern army was a German. They quote General Robert E. Lee to the effect that “without the Germans, it would be a trifle to lick the Yankees.” Listen to the Nazis’ officially endorsed propagandist, Colin Ross. Ross is the descendant of Scotch forebears who settled in Germany generations ago; he is regarded in Germany as their foremost authority on American affairs. He writes indignantly; “We are bitterly furious at the way they treated the Germanic portion of the population from the very beginning and how thoroughly they obliterated everything that the German has done for his American fatherland.” But, the Nazis console themselves, the Germans are bound to control America by sheer numbers and “blood.” They claim that from one-fourth to one-third of the population of the country is of Germanic blood. Professor Karl Haushofer, the famous geo-political theorist, puts the number at 30,000,000 in his Weltpolitik. According to Richard Nitschke, in his Dcr Auslandsdeutschtum, a public school textbook, the number may reach 40,000,000. Another school textbook computes that almost half of the American population is of Germanic origin. (In sober fact, the census of 1790 put the German population at 8 per cent; it may be 15 per cent now.) But whether it is 40,000,000 or 50,000,000, writes Georg Timpe in his Catholic Germans in the United States, “German blood” is of the very essence of America. So are German words, German thought, German culture, German music, German education. “In all the veins of America’s cultural body flow the German spirit, German profundity, modesty, self-sacrifice, duty, endurance, thoroughness.” Herr Timpe says the hour it at hand when the “German Essence” of America will reassert itself: “The American of to-day would not be what he is ... if no German had ever come over there. In what moment the American’s German Being will again participate in world history and become a source of usefulness to the old fatherland, no one can say. But that such a moment will arrive, and that we will be compensated for the sacrifices which we have made there, is not a deceptive hope.” In the official Handbook of Foreign Germans, Hugo Grothe writes darkly that one-fourth of America’s blood will not long be denied its rightful place. The Reich must do everything in its power to make these Americans return to their German race.

Gigantic efforts are under way to arouse this Germanic element to a feeling of solidarity with the Germany of to-day. The Institute of Germans Living Abroad, at btuttgart, is perhaps the greatest single propaganda plant in the world; its purpose, as reiterated by Hitler, Goebbels and Goering, is to bring people of “German blood into the spiritual fold of the Reich. (Dorothy Thomp,son points out. that it is the exact counterpart of the Communist International.) The Institute is compiling a German World Migration Register; agents everywhere in Germany search family Bibles and letters to trace all persons who have emigrated during the last 100 years, and to record the names of living descendants. “The world-migration book,” says the Stuttgart Kurier, official organ of the Institute, “must represent not a card index, but a German world in human beings. W ith each human being should be established personal connection.” Here is to be the colossal list of persons to be bombarded with “blood brotherhood” propaganda. Minister of the Interior, Frick, addressing the Fifth Congress of Germans Abroad in Stuttgart in 1938, sternly reminded his hearers, “No German abroad may forget that he is always and everywhere a piece of Germany. At the same meeting, Goering bluntly warned the world that Germany “is not only ready but strong enough to protect Germans all over the world.” Richard Nitschke writes in Der Auslandsdeutschtum, “In our position, we cannot afford to give up one-third of our people. We make no distinction between Germans at home and Germans abroad.” The Stuttgart Kurier states flatly: “We desire to bring back the Germans in the United States to the Racial Unity and Common Faith of all Germans. To this end, the spiritual and intellectual reform of Americans of German extraction is necessary, in accord with the model furnished by the homeland . . . German-American influence shall then be thrown in the. balance under our leadership for the coming struggle for America’s regeneration.” Nazi propaganda in this country aims at two audiences. To the non-Germans are addressed the racial, anti-Semitic and anti-labour propaganda. More sinister is the Nazi propaganda among Americans of German descent. The Nazis, by the way, protest the term “Ger-man-Americans” and prefer the plain German “Amerikaner,” which implies “Germans in America,” and, as it carries no hyphen, suggests no possible division of allegiance. The “Amerikaner” are told that Nazi-ism is a world movement which is bound to lead to Teutonic domination of the United States. Nazis quote Dr. Goebbels’ assertion that the “German idea” must conquer the world, including the United States, for the Germans are the Chosen People, selected by destiny and history to rule the earth. To undermine the German-Americans’ belief in American ideals, the Nazis have established a network of cells, agencies, organisations and press bureaus in every population centre of the country. The most powerful organisation is the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, under Fuhrer Fritz Kuhn, sedulous ape of Hitler. The Bund, like its parent, the propaganda institute in Stuttgart, rejects the validity of American citizenship. “The German man is ' and remains our fellow-national (Volksgenosse), regardless of the citizenship papers that he may possess.” ■ A Much of the effort of the Volksbund is to capture 1 American youth of German descent. The Volksbund holds that “our future,” meaning the future of Nazi de- ■ fsigns in America, lies in the youth. “In our youth groups fwe want to build young men to be useful to the German /folk community.” Free German-language schools give l“careful German training” and prepare youths from 7 to 18 “to become members of American Germandom.” •American-German youth is told that it is not enough to •speak or even to think German. “We must consciously work for the totality of the folk, and become politically active in a folk-German sense,” writes Funges Volk, official organ of the Nazi youth in the United States. “A few of our generations have permitted themselves to be robbed of what eminent men of our blood have built up and left behind in this country. To reconquer this is our most sacred duty!” The Yearbook of the Bund proclaims: “We are proud of Germany! Proud of its great Fuehrer! Proud of our culture!” The programme of the Bund is, “The union of all people of German origin in the United States.” _ The Bund is a tightly-knit organisation, along military lines. Kuhn, three regional directors and one youth leader rule no less than 56 units scattered from coast to coast. Each group has its own newspaper. Apart from the strictly party newspapers of the Bund, there are 2) German-language newspapers in the United States that are unofficial Nazi mouthpieces. Preaching Anti-Semitism and Ridiculing Democracy. Far more significant is a book that has escaped attention in the American press—Colin Ross’ astounding Unser Amerika, published in Leipzig in 1936. It must be taken as semi-official, since Ross is an officer of the propaganda institute in Stuttgart and since the organ of the Nazi party Nationalsozialistische Monatsheft (June, 1938) urges that his book be given “the most widespread distribution.” In it, Ross recites the arguments we have already reviewed. Then he urges that the “30,000,000 Germans in the United States” should assert the rights of their blood by every and any means. He protests strenuously against the German habit of saying “we also” contributed to America. That implies a partnership, whereas the Germans were the chief factor in America’s creation. “I believe in the German Hour of America,” he writes. “The great historic events usually are prepared underground until they suddenly emerge in the open. The German rebirth in the United States is more powerful than most people think. We Germans in the old country can only watch the great revolution that is preparing over there, not altogether impartially, to be sure, for our hearts will always beat for a people whose blood is one-fourth ours. When this German portion . . . will have taken a firm hold of the destiny of its new fatherland, it will do so not for our sake, but for its sake, the sake of America. “From amongst them (Germans in America) will arise a German Thomas Paine ... He will unite all of German blood. All will come as soon as they have realised the simple truth that they are not ‘Americans’ but ‘Amerikaner,’ men of German blood and American soil.” Thus the Nazis will save America from “chaos and barbarism.” Ross reiterates that the Germans have a sacred duty to perform; America is “A Creation of the German Spirit,” hence the United States must become “Unser Amerika.” The mass of have shown themselves consistently cold to suen Nazi propaganda, just as they were cold to the clumsier German propaganda of World War days. Despite enormous pressure and Nazi incitation, they have remained what they always have been, loyal Americans. The situation in the future is, nevertheless, fraught with danger. The Nazis have the theoretical and material basis for a powerful “race and blood” campaign in this country. German plans look far into the future. Hitler has proclaimed himself again and again to be supreme lord and protector of all people of German blood on earth. It is almost certain that when the Fuehrer is ready to strike at the two great European democracies, he will instantly intensify the “race and blood” issue here, as he did in Czechoslovakia. He may even demand autonomy for “Germans in America.”