Relations Beclouded

Thinking over the anti-U. S. scurrility which boiled up in the State-controlled German press last fortnight after New York's Mayor LaGuardia had called Hitler a "brown-shirted fanatic" (TIME, March 15), the wife of New York's famed Rabbi Stephen S. Wise last week began to boil, too. Off to Secretary of State Hull she shot a hot letter calling his attention to remarks in No. 3 Nazi Goebbels' Der Angriff* demanding an official rebuke.

Secretary Hull, who had been studying some first-hand samples of the Nazi tirade, which he refused to release as too obscene for publication in the U. S. press, promptly replied that he had instructed U. S. Ambassador William E. Dodd to make "emphatic comment" to the German Government on its semi-official abuse. Milder than a "protest," diplomatic "comment" requires no reply by the offending Government.

After a 24-hour stand-off during which he was presumably studying his large collection of responsible and irresponsible U. S. press attacks on the Fuhrer, Foreign Minister Baron Constantin von Neurath received the scholarly U. S. Ambassador.

Result was another standoff. For direct quotation onetime History Professor Dodd declared of his interview: "We accompanied the delivery of our instructions with a verbal expose of what the attacks mean in the way of beclouding German-American relations, but left it to the German authorities to draw their own conclusions." U. S. correspondents in Berlin reported authoritatively that mild Ambassador Dodd had actually barked one of the stiffest complaints ever delivered by one Government to another, proclaiming the U. S. Government & people thoroughly shocked by the Nazi press's "unparalleled coarse, indecent language." But his trip to the German Foreign Office elicited neither "apology" nor "regrets" from the Foreign Minister, only an "explanation" accompanied by counterprotest against "malicious and untrue" U. S. press comments on Germany. The explanation, as reported in a semi-official communique, was: "If the language of some of the German newspapers went, perhaps, beyond the desired limits, this was due only to irritation. An insult to the American nation was by no means intended." The German press, which had banner-headlined Secretary Hull's "very earnest" regrets in response to the German protest against Mayor LaGuardia's crack week before, ignored both U. S. protest and Nazi explanation. At the same time, however, the press did quit belaboring the U. S., becoming absorbed in the 40th anniversary as a soldier of Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg.

Across the Atlantic in Washington, when Representative Edith Nourse Rogers up-rose in the House to demand fuller revenge for insulted U. S. womanhood than mere "emphatic comment," Minnesota's grizzled Harold Knutson, who voted against War in 1917, replied: "I wonder whether the gentlewoman from Massachusetts speaks from personal knowledge or from propaganda coming from London. ... I can re-call when people here received tales of horror. . . . Didn't we learn something then? Are we going to be worked into a similar frenzy?" Congress, however, was not to be denied the fun of counter-baiting the Brown-Shirts. Before the House Rules Commit tee, Representative Samuel Dickstein of New York, who is perennially excited about alien infiltrations, charged that one Fritz Kuhn, onetime Ford Motor Co. chem ist, had organized a subversive army of 200,000 Nazis in the U. S. Discovered by newshawks in a Detroit office plastered with Nazi swastikas, Chemist Kuhn eagerly admitted that his Amerikadeuts-cher Volksbund had 200,000 members, but denied all connection with the German Government. "The main purpose of our organization," said he, "is to open the eyes of the American people to the dangers they are facing in the Communistic movement now under way in this country." In Manhattan on receipt of an order from Fuhrer Kuhn last week for his followers to acquire snappy new uniforms patterned on the American Legion's, "American Nazi" spokesmen observed: "It does not mean that they will be compelled to. They will just be urged to. ... Every one has the Sam Browne belts anyway. . . .

The advantage of the uniforms is that at meetings when Communists pop up, it's easier to spot them." The new uniforms, the spokesmen declared, would cost about $28 apiece. Jewish tailors would get none of the business.

*The American Jewish Congresswomen whom Mayor LaGuardia addressed were described as "women of the streets" listening to a "pimp and procurer."

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