Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The Nazi Threat to World Peace May, 1933

At Kline Books we have a large collection of World War II and Nazi paraphernalia, not all of which we publicly advertise (and the enlightened one will understand and keep silent).

An example of this is a supplementary bulletin published by the Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association in May of 1933, months following the Nazi takeover of Germany. It offers a snapshot of the opening stages of Holocaust with quotations from newspapers from Germany and England and statements from British and German leaders. Such texts are particularly interesting as no one at this point knew how this was all going to play out with a second world war and a Holocaust.

Here is a statement by one member of the British Parliament.  

Nevertheless, one of the things which we were told after the Great War would be a security for us was Parliamentary institutions in Germany; that she would be a democracy with Parliamentary institutions. All that has been swept away. You have dictatorship - most grim dictatorship. You have militarism and appeals to every form of fighting spirit, from the introduction of duelling in the colleges to the Minister of Education advising the plentiful use of the cane in the elementary schools. You have these martial or pugnacious manifestations, and also the persecution of the Jews, of which so many hon[or]. (Pg. 30-31.)

In case you have not yet guessed it. The person who said this was Sir Winston Churchill.

Notice the educational policies he points to. Many conservative Republicans today bemoan the banning corporal punishment in schools. One wonders what they would make of their idol Winston Churchill placing government support of corporal punishment in schools as a first sign of Nazi militarism?

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