Source: Socialist Appeal, Vol. III No. 63, 29 August 1939, p. 2.
Transcription/HTML Markup: 2016 by Einde O’Callaghan.
Public Domain: Joseph Hansen Internet Archive 2016; This work is completely free. In any reproduction, we ask that you cite this Internet address and the publishing information above.
During the World War the French had used Negro troops from their colonies to fight where the carnage was the bloodiest at the front. The United States, too, sent over large numbers of colored troops. All these Negroes fought with unparalleled bravery and thus won the especial hate of the German patriots. Men like Hitler feared the Negroes and considered them on the same level as apes.
Hitler played on this hate. He wove fantastic stories about the Negroes that would have shocked even a Southern Bourbon lynch-lover.
Who was responsible for bringing the Negroes to the Rhine? The Jews, stormed Hitler. It was the Jews in the first place who instigated education for the Negroes, “born half-ape.” This act of the Jews was “nothing less than a sin against the will of the eternal Creator.” (Mein Kampf, p. 640)
“African negroes rape our women and children ...” (Mein Kampf, p. 532)
“The black disgrace works havoc on the Rhine. Women, girls and children pay for the bestial negroes’ lust with their death. An uninterrupted stream of poison and disease flows into the blood of our people.” (Mein Kampf, p. 540)
“It was and is the Jews who bring the negro to the Rhine, always with the same concealed thought and the clear goal of destroying, by the bastardization which would necessarily set in, the white race which they hate.” (Mein Kampf, p. 449)
Through a lurid campaign such as this against the Negroes who had fought on the side of the Allies in the World War Hitler brought his audiences to the seething point, then he directed this rage against the Jews who lived in Germany.
“This infection of our blood, which hundreds of thousands of our people overlook as though blind, is moreover promoted systematically by the Jews today. Systematically these black parasites of the nations ravish our innocent young blonde girls and thus destroy something that can never again be replaced in this world.” (Mein Kampf, p. 826)
“The personification of the Devil, as the symbol of all evil, assumes the living appearance of the Jew.” (Mein Kampf, p. 447)
“Therefore I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator: BY WARDING OFF THE JEWS I AM FIGHTING FOR THE LORD’S WORK.” (Mein Kampf, p. 84)
Der Fuehrer went to enormous lengths to describe how the “international bankers,” and “loan capital,” these and the “Bolsheviks” and the capitalists were all one and the same: THE JEWS.
But not even this propaganda painted with hell flames was enough. Something else was needed. Action.
Der Fuehrer provided that too.
Beginning very cautiously, by merely spreading Hitler’s literature far and wide, the Brown Shirts soon initiated bolder actions.
They beat up workers.
No one stopped them.
They broke into the headquarters of trade unions and wrecked them, throwing typewriters out of the windows, breaking the furniture to kindling wood.
No one stopped them.
They tortured workers – not in the “refined” Italian way with castor oil, but by stripping their victim, man or woman, naked, strapping him down to a table, and then beating him unconscious with rubber hoses.
No one stopped them.
In fact the police helped the Brown Shirts. If a worker attempted to defend himself from the Brown Shirts, then the police arrested him.
When the Brown Shirts became strong enough to flaunt arms, the police furnished large quantities.
The Brown Shirts began killing workers in the streets.
All over Germany, workers suffered from these murderous attacks of the Brown Shirts.
Still no one stopped them.
Der Fuehrer stepped up the brutality of his campaign. From the Rhine to the Baltic, he organized small militant groups of Brown Shirts to break up gatherings of workers.
Hitler describes one of the encounters between his men and the workers in the following words:
“My men rushed into the attack like wolves. They hurled themselves on their adversaries in packs of eight or ten and began to drive them out of the hall by showering them with blows. The hubbub lasted twenty minutes. By this time, our adversaries, of whom there were perhaps seven or eight hundred, had most of them been thrown out of the hall and driven down the stairs by my men, of whom there were less than fifty ... That evening we really learned many things.” (Quoted in Fascism and Big Business, pp. 101–2. See also Mein Kampf, p. 748)
After that evening, Der Fuehrer called his men Storm Troopers.
Last updated on: 12 March 2016