Following is the text of Samuel Untermyer's address last night
over Station WABC after his return from Europe:
My Friends:
What a joy and relief and sense of security to be once more on American
soil! The nightmares of horrors through which I have passed in those two
weeks in Europe, listening to the heartbreaking tales of refugee victims,
beggar description.
I deeply appreciate your enthusiastic greeting on my arrival today,
which I quite understand is addressed not to me personally but to the holy
war in the cause of humanity in which we are embarked. Jews and non-Jews
alike, for we are equally concerned that the work of centuries shall not
be undone, and that civilization shall not be allowed to die.
It is a war that must be waged unremittingly until the black clouds
of bigotry, race hatred and fanaticism that have descended upon what was
once Germany, but is now medieval Hitlerland, have been dispersed. If we
will but enlist to a man and persist in our purpose, the bright sun of
civilization will again shine upon Germany, and the world will be a safer
place in which to dwell.
As our ship sailed up the bay today past our proud Statue of Liberty,
[a gift to the U.S. from the Grand Orient - Illuminati - Lodge of France]
I breathed a prayer of gratitude and thanksgiving that this fair land of
freedom has escaped the curse that has descended upon benighted Germany,
which has thereby been converted from a nation of culture into a veritable
hell of cruel and savage beasts.
The World's Concern
We owe it not only to our persecuted brethren but to the entire world
to now strike in self-defense a blow that will free humanity from a repetition
of this incredible outrage. This time the Jews are the victims, next time
it may be the Catholics or the Protestants. If we once admit, as is brazenly
insisted
by the German Government, that such fiendish persecution of the people
of one race or creed is an internal domestic affair and not a world concern,
how are we to know whose turn will be next?
Now or never must all the nations of the earth make common cause against
the monstrous claim that the slaughter, starvation and annihilation, by
a country that has reverted to barbarism, of its own innocent and defenseless
citizens without rhyme, reason or excuse is an internal affair against
which the rest of the world must stand idly by and not lift a hand in defense.
I have seen and talked with many of these terror-stricken refugees who
have had the good fortune to escape over the border, though forced to leave
their property behind them, and I want to say to you that nothing that
has seeped through to you over the rigid censorship and lying propaganda
that are at work to conceal and misrepresent the situation of the Jews
in Germany begins to tell a fraction of the frightful story of fiendish
torture, cruelty and persecution that are being inflicted day by day upon
these men, women and children, of the terrors of worse than death in which
they are living.
When the tale is told, as it will be some day if the impotent League
of Nations ever sufficiently awakens from its Rip Van Winkle slumbers to
the realization of its power and duty to prosecute an investigation into
the facts, the world will confront a picture so fearful in its barbarous
cruelty that the hell of war and the alleged Belgian atrocities will pale
into insignificance as compared to this devilishly, deliberately, cold-bloodedly
planned and already partially executed campaign for the extermination of
a proud, gentle, loyal, law-abiding people -- a people who love and have
shed their blood for their Fatherland, and to whom Germany owes in large
part its prosperity and its great scientists, educators, lawyers, physicians,
poets, musicians, diplomats and philosophers, who are the backbone of its
past cultural life.
Back to Dark Ages
But why dwell longer upon this revolting picture of the ravages wrought
by these ingrates and beasts of prey, animated by the loathsome motives
of race hatred, bigotry and envy. For the Jews are the aristocrats of the
world. From time immemorial they have been persecuted and have seen their
persecutors come and go. They alone have survived. And so will history
repeat itself, but that furnishes no reason why we should permit this reversion
of a once great nation to the Dark Ages or fail to rescue these 600,000
human souls from the tortures of hell as we can with the aid of our Christian
friends, if we have the will to act.
Protests and pleas from all corners of the earth, from the leaders of
all creeds, having proven as vain and unavailing as was the idealistic
dream of our martyred President of making the world safe for democracy
and of protecting minorities, what then are to be the lines of our defensive
campaign against these atrocities, on which we are already actively embarked?
Are we right in our plan? If so, what steps shall now be prosecuted to
attain success?
Our campaign is twofold -- defensive and constructive. On the defensive
side will be the economic boycott against all German goods, shipping and
services. On the constructive side will be an appeal to the League of Nations
to construe and enforce the labor union provisions of the Versailles Treaty
and the written promises made by Germany, while the treaty was under negotiation,
to protect its minorities, which have been flagrantly violated by its disfranchisement
and persecution of the German Jews.
What Boycott Means
As in the boycott, strange to say a mere handful in number, but powerful
in influence, of our thoughtless but doubtless well-intentioned Jews seem
obsessed and frightened at the bare mention of the word "boycott". It signifies
and conjures up to them images of force and illegality, such as have on
occasions in the past characterized struggles between labor unions and
their employers. As these timid souls are capitalists and employers, the
word and all that it implies are hateful to their ears.
In point of fact, it signifies nothing of the kind. These gentlemen
do not know what they are talking or thinking about. Instead of surrendering
to their vague fears and half-baked ideas, our first duty is to educate
them as to what is meant by a purely defensive economic boycott, and what
we are doing and proposing.
Admittedly, the boycott is our only really effective weapon. These gentlemen
who are taking counsel of their groundless fears to the exclusion of their
reason have done nothing and have no program except to attempt to arouse
world opinion, which is and has been from the outset on our side, as it
was bound to be because of this brutal, senseless, unprovoked assault upon
civilization.
It is not necessary to belittle or underrate that accomplishment, if
their aimless, fruitless endeavors in that direction may be so dignified
in recognition of their good intentions, barren of results as they have
been.
It is sufficient that their efforts have proven unavailing and that
the campaign of Schreckligheit not only goes on unabated in the face of
unanimous world opinion; but that it is increasing in intensity and that
the masses of the German people, misled by government propaganda and suppression
of free speech and of the press, are either voluntarily, or through fear
of punishment at the hands of their despotic rulers, supporting their government
in this hellish campaign.
What then have these amiable gentlemen accomplished and what do they
hope or expect to accomplish in the way of stemming this conflagration
of civilization by their "feather-duster" methods? You cannot put out a
fire, and especially that kind of a fire, by just looking on until the
mad flames, fanned by the wind of hate, have destroyed everything.
What we are proposing and have already gone far toward doing, is to
prosecute a purely defensive economic boycott that will undermine the Hitler
regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their
export trade on which their very existence depends.
"Force Them to Learn"
They have flaunted and persisted in flaunting and defying world opinion.
We propose to and are organizing world opinion to express itself in
the only way Germany can be made to understand. Hitler and his mob will
not permit their people to know how they are regarded by the outside world.
We shall force them to learn in the only way open to us.
Revolting as it is, it would be an interesting study in psychology to
analyze the motives, other than fear and cowardice, that have prompted
Jewish bankers to lend money to Germany as they are now doing. It is in
part their money that is being used by the Hitler regime in its reckless,
wicked campaign of propaganda to make the world anti-Semitic; with that
money they have invaded Great Britain, the United States and other countries
where they have established newspapers, subsidized agents and otherwise
are spending untold millions in spreading their infamous creed.
The suggestion that they use that money toward paying the honest debts
they have repudiated is answered only by contemptuous sneers and silence.
Meantime the infamous campaign goes on unabated with ever increasing intensity
to the everlasting disgrace of the Jewish bankers who are helping to finance
it and of the weaklings who are doing nothing effective to check it.
The Hitler regime originated are fiendishly prosecuting their boycott
to exterminate the Jews by placarding Jewish shops, warning Germans against
dealing with them, by imprisoning Jewish shopkeepers and parading them
through the streets by the hundreds under guard of Nazi troops for the
sole crime of being Jews, by ejecting them from the learned professions
in which many of them had attained eminence, by excluding their children
from the schools, their men from the labor unions, closing against them
every avenue of livelihood, locking them in vile concentration camps, starving
and torturing them, murdering and beating them without cause and resorting
to every other conceivable form of torture, inhuman beyond conception,
until suicide has become their only means of escape, and all solely because
they are or their remote ancestors were Jews, and all with the avowed object
of exterminating them.
Appeal to Mankind
As against this, the foulest boycott in the annals of time, we are appealing
to all mankind to enforce a counter-boycott. That appeal is meeting with
the conviction that idealism and justice are still alive.
There is nothing new in the use of the economic boycott as an instrument
of justice. The covenant of the League of Nations expressly provides in
these identical words for its use to bring recalcitrant nations to terms.
President Roosevelt, whose wise statesmanship and vision are the wonder
of the civilized world, is invoking it in furtherance of his noble conception
for the readjustment of the relations between capital and labor under the
terms of the sweeping Industrial Recovery Act, to the end that labor shall
receive a more just share of the wealth it creates. He is about to enlist
the consumers of the country in a national campaign in which they pledge
themselves to boycott all manufacturers, jobbers and retailers who fail
to subscribe to the codes and to buy only from those who have assented
and who are thereby privileged to fly the blue eagle of NRA [National Recovery
Act]. What more exalted precedent do our timid friends want?
With this explanation of our aims, I appeal to the American Jewish Committee,
whose public spirit and good intentions I do not for a moment question,
but the wisdom of whose judgment I challenge, no longer to hold aloof but
to rid themselves of their timid and ill-considered prejudices and join
in actively pressing this boycott as our only weapon except the appeal
to the League, which I shall discuss at a later time.
I purposely refrain from including the American Jewish Congress in this
appeal because I am satisfied that 95 per cent of their members are already
with us and that they are being misrepresented by two or three men now
abroad. Of them I ask that, prior to the meeting to be held this month
in Prague by their executive committee, they instruct these false leaders
in no uncertain terms as to the stand they must take on this all-important
subject and demand that they shall either openly represent their views
or resign their offices. One of them, generally recognized as the kingpin
of mischief makers, is junketing around the Continent engaged in his favorite
pastime of spreading discord, asserting at one time and place that he favors
and supports the boycott and at another that he is opposed or indifferent
to it, all dependent on the audience he is addressing; but always directly
or indirectly delivering a stab in the dark.
Progress So Far Made
There is not time now, but I hope and expect in the near future to be
able to report to you the steps that have been taken and that are already
under way, and the surprising and gratifying progress already made in many
countries toward the success of the economic boycott in which we are engaged.
Although considerable progress in that direction has already been made
in Great Britain and in the United States, you will be surprised to learn
that they are the least advanced and as yet the most inadequately organized
of all the countries that were represented at the Amsterdam World Economic
Conference, where the boycott was unanimously and enthusiastically approved
by formal resolution by a rising vote.
With us in America the delay has been due in part to lack of funds and
the vast territory to be covered, but it is hoped, and expected, that this
condition will soon be corrected. The object-lesson we are determined to
teach is so priceless to all humanity that we dare not fall.
Each of you, Jew and Gentile alike, who has not already enlisted in
this sacred war should do so now and here. It is not sufficient that you
buy no goods made in Germany. You must refuse to deal with any merchant
or shopkeeper who sells any German-made goods or who patronizes German
ships or shipping.
To our shame be it said that there are a few Jews among us, but fortunately
only a few, so wanting in dignity and self-respect that they are willing
to travel on German ships where they are despised and meet with the just
contempt of the servants who wait upon them and of their fellow passengers.
Their names should be heralded far and wide. They are traitors to their
race.
In conclusion, permit me again to thank you for this heartening reception
and to assure you that, with your support and that of our millions of non-Jewish
friends, we will drive the last nail in the coffin of bigotry and fanaticism
that has dared raise its ugly head to slander, belie and disgrace twentieth
century civilization.
