Nazis Compare Their Rule to Roosevelt's
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| An anti-American Nazi propaganda cartoon attacking President Roosevelt as he ran for a fourth presidential term in 1944. The captions read: "An ass remains an ass" and "Please tread on me for four more years, dictator!" (source) |
From The New York Times, May 8, 1933:
GERMANS BELITTLE OUR 'DICTATORSHIP'⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯Enjoy Comparing Nazis' Rule With Roosevelt's, Wholly to American Disadvantage⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯LASTING REGIME IS SEEN⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯Hitler Warns World Not to Hope There is Another Germany Concealed Behind His Own⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯By FREDERICK T. BIRCHALL
BERLIN, May 7 — The latest German indoor sport in the new era of popular enlightenment presided over by Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels is to compare the Hitler dictatorship with the powers recently granted to President Roosevelt in the United States, entirely, of course, to the American disadvantage.
Americans here get a great kick out of the comparison. It starts with the premise that both governments are democratic in that the people elected both, and that being granted the rest is easy for the German proponents.
Any reference to the complete suppression of the opposition press and the stifling of opposition opinion is met with the retort that this is not democratic America but democratic Germany, where conditions are different.
But any mention of the array of barbed-wire concentration camps guarded by rifle-bearing storm troopers with orders to "shoot to kill" any of the politically differing prisoners within who try to escape is treated as a foul blow below the belt, so the argument is naturally somewhat one-sided. For that reason only the Germans initiate it.
See Régime Likely to Last
This German democratic government, created by bludgeoning democracy until it abdicated for four years, leaving all powers in the hands of the bludgeoners is now accepted by Americans in Germany as likely to last for a long time. There is nobody to put it out.
Chancellor Hitler himself daily proclaims that view in ever-stronger terms. Today he reviewed the Nazi storm troops of the Schleswig sector, adjoining the Danish border, at a great demonstration held by them at Kiel.
After the review the Chancellor made a speech in which, after commending the array before him as representative of "those 600,000 Brown Shirts who are the unswerving and steadfast phalanx guarding the disciplined will of the German people and with consistency carrying it to its ultimate conclusion," he said this:
"The world sees in us only what we are and will only respect that in us which it sees. The thought we want to demonstrate to this world is that the days of the November-Germany [Germany from the armistice until it was National-Socialized] have definitely ended.
Warns the World
"We want to make it clear to the world that it must not hope that there is another Germany than that Germany which presents itself today. There is only one. With this Germany the world must manage to get along. It must not deceive itself that there is a second Germany concealed somewhere.
"No, it is well to leave all such hopes behind. We and you [the storm troops] are the guarantee of the cause that this is not so."
It has been noted by the Chancellor's recent foreign callers that his custom of "telling" them rather than discussing with them any subject upon which he has granted them an audience is becoming more marked.
One if his latest callers, Sir John Foster Fraser, English lecturer and writer, noted after his interview with Herr Hitler last week that he had been addressed "as if I were a public meeting," at one time "feared that the Chancellor would be heard in the corridor" and left after an hour recording the impression that it had been "like spending an hour with a hurricane."
