FUROR OVER DER FUEHRER
Meyer, Ernest L.
Furor Over Der Fuehrer By ERNEST L. MEYER NOW doctors of international law everywhere are consulting textbooks trying to solve the problem of can we, should we, and will we bring Hitler and his...
...In common with most people I'd like to see him suffer to the hilt, and yet I doubt whether it would make a whit of difference to the future of the world whether he died peacefully in his sleep with a smile on his lips or whether he were burned with hot irons while on the rack of Torquemada...
...Furor Over Der Fuehrer By ERNEST L. MEYER NOW doctors of international law everywhere are consulting textbooks trying to solve the problem of can we, should we, and will we bring Hitler and his hoodlums to trial before an international court...
...Other voices have joined the chorus, some urging that a formal trial for Hitler and his gang is a procedure too humane for the hellions, that a trial would provide loopholes for escape, and that even if found guilty and shot to death the punishment would not fit the crime...
...Last year a score of malcontent windbags, big and little, were brought to trial in Washington on charges of seditious conspiracy...
...But the fact remains that for some months now these people have been at large, on bail, and there is no indication that either they or their lunatic move* ments have gained in stature or strength...
...In that bleak era of the depression, the ears of many were attuned to the oratory of demagogues...
...The ailing body that was America was revived...
...In the very year that Hitler ascended to power by a fake Reichstag fire and terrorism, America plodded slowly but surely toward some degree of economic stability without the loss of political stability...
...Hitlerism was made possible in Europe in the 1930's because prostrate Germany lent a ready ear to any fake Messiah, and because Britain and France were in part Fascist-minded or willing to play ball with Fascism as a bulwark against the feared menace of a Red inundation from the East...
...Can the News editorial writer cite a single instance in which the leader of a major power ever entered a war which he was not confident, in advance, of winning...
...the maggots of fanaticism found no place to breed...
...Penalizing defeat has never yet obliterated daring...
...The trial, as you recall, dragged on for interminable months, and was adjourned after the sudden death of the presiding judge...
...The News gravely recommends that the head of any nation losing a war be summarily executed...
...Nazism As A Maggot The point is that Hitler did not of himself create a bad situation, but that a bad situation made possible a Hitler...
...Something of a similar phenomenon marked the gray early years of the 1930's in our own America...
...Personally, when feeling a moral sweat coming on, I favor one suggestion that has been advanced : that Hitler be dyed black and let loose in the Jim Crow belt of the deepest backwoods of our own deep South...
...The United States was saved, I think, by the relatively democratic and quite successful revolutionary era of the early years of the New Deal...
...I feel assured that even if an assassin's bullet had not ended the life of a man like Huey Long, the voice of Huey, too, would have faded away to the hoarse croak of a defeated kingfish...
...What makes me feel sure is an analogous situation more recent...
...Crackpots flourished, weird and incipiently dangerous movements gained wide followings, the time was ripe for mischief...
...If the Allies lost the war, the paper says, then Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt should promptly be shot...
...Remembering the unspeakable horrors that spread across Europe in the shadow of the swastika, a good case can be made for this rather human, eye-for-an-eye point of view...
...We are at the moment a prospering, conquering, hopeful nation—a nation thorough" ly alive...
...The editorial adds that such a simple policy would forever discourage leaders of nations in the future from declaring wars...
...Keep the postwar world that way, and posterity won't need to care a hoot whether Hitler died in a Swiss chalet or was torn to pieces by red-hot pincers...
...Debate over the issue has become widespread and shrill, sometimes touching the level of lunacy...
...Alarmist newspapers like New York's PM wailed to high heaven, warning of dreadful consequences if the defendants escaped punishment...
...But let the world sinS back into the ante-bellum bog of balances of powwfc periodic economic depressions, hoggish international commercial rivalries, and sometime and somewhere am other Hitler will arise and write his name in blood on the scroll of history absolutely regardless of the fat© of his defeated ancestor...
...Which, of course, is rank nonsense...
...Allow the same situation to prevail after the current war, and you'll invite the rise of another monster, be his name Hitler, or Schmidt, or Rumpelstilzchen...
...it is undoubtedly true that some of the defendants spealg the language of Mein Kampf and are a nasty and noisy, crew...
...As, for example, in the pages of the New York Daily News, a paper which really merits some sort of Pulitzer award for achievement in editorial screwballism...
...Keep it that way, and democracy has nothing: to fear from potential American Fuehrers...
...The reason is simple...
...Now it may be true that among the score of alleged seditionists there was a potential Hitler, or worse...
...Get At The Causes...
...Nazism is a maggot that breeds only in corrupt flesh...
...And yet in moments more reasonable I feel that the furor about what-to-do-with-Hitler is unimportant hul-aballoo...
...The voice of the crackpot was lost in a benign breeze...
...These people vision the most exquisite tortures for the Nazi despoilers...
...revitalize, reanimate the cadaver, and the egg won't hatch...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 15
