The Smear Terror - John T. Flynn |
The various operators pictured in the Friends of Democracy, the Anti-Nazi League are now seen gathering with some new recruits under a new banner—The Society for the Prevention of World War III. While using the smear, it has, so far as I know, no spy force of its own. Rex Stout is its president. Birkhead is a board member. So is Clarence Low, treasurer of the Friends of Democracy, along with the Belgian diamond trader refugee, Isidore Lipschutz, vice-president and treasurer of the Anti-Nazi League.
The idea for this new movement seems to have taken rise in the minds of two other non-citizen refugees of recent vintage—Dr. F. W. Foerster and T. H. Tetens.
Foerster and Tetens have a pet theory—that practically all Germans are bad, and should be rendered permanently helpless. This is the basis of the infamous Morgenthau Plan which the Roosevelt administration adopted in Germany and which is a disgrace to America. Tetens says he escaped from a concentration camp in 1935, fled from Germany to the Argentine from whence after a few years he came to America. Foerster has been at war with his native Germany for over a generation. Before World War I he was arrested for his attacks upon the government. After World War I he, with Kurt Eisner in Switzerland, organized a Red revolution in Bavaria and seized the government—Foerster acting as Foreign Minister. It lasted only a brief moment. When the Social Democratic Republic was created, Foerster declared personal war on that. The republic was as hateful to him as the old Empire or the Nazi regime later. He did not wait for Hitler's rise to power in 1955 to get out of Germany. He left in 1923 and denounced the governments of Stressemann and Bruening as bitterly as others berated Hitler.
The chief product of this outfit is a pamphlet bitterly attacking Americans of German descent and in particular Mr. Victor Ridder, publisher of a number of American newspapers. One of these is the German language newspaper, Staats Zeitung. The pamphlet is signed by Foerster and Tetens with a preface by Quentin Reynolds and Rex Stout. Ridder is accused of visiting Hitler and of signing a public declaration after Pearl Harbor artfully designed to soften public sentiment toward Germany. The truth is that while Mr. Ridder visited Hitler before the war —in 1933—he did so at the request of certain Jewish leaders to try to point out to him the folly of his persecution of the Jews. The declaration he signed after Pearl Harbor, known as the Christmas Declaration, was prepared by Miss Dorothy Thompson at the request of our government and was printed in numerous newspapers as an advertisement and paid for by the American Jewish Congress. All Ridder had to do with it was to sign it at the request of a government official.
It is clear that in the plan to make continuous war upon Germany this group is determined to make war also upon Americans of German descent. That is a numerous group. If it submits to this infamy indefinitely it will be strange indeed. If not we shall see another of these miserable European feuds fanned into flame in our land to bedevil our own policies and decisions.