SWITZERLAND: To the Future!

Among Jews who waited too long in Germany is not numbered smart Emil Ludwig (né Cohn), best-selling biographer of Napoleon, Bismarck and Wilhelm II. He has had a Swiss home for years, skipped Germany just before Adolf Hitler seized the powers of Dictator. Last week Dr. Ludwig sailed into Manhattan on the sleek French liner Paris. With an air of detachment proper in so prosperous an exile as himself he warned Jews and other citizens of the world not to blind themselves to the fact that “Hitler suits the German character. . . . What is going on there now is not the forcible rule of but a single party. It is rather the overwhelming majority of the nation which jubilantly accepts [Hitler’s] principles and is eager to further and uphold them.”

“Hitler has the right,” continued Dr. Ludwig, “to assert that his ideals of race, blood and war worship are indeed the German national ideals. . . . Among all the policies of the [Hitler] regime, .persecution of the Jews is the most popular.”

Two nights later, at a reception in Manhattan by the American Jewish Congress, Dr. Ludwig boasted that the Nazi burning of his books and those of many another Jew and Pacifist, including Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), is helping to boost their world sales, quickening the flow of royalty checks to Switzerland where Friends Ludwig and Remarque bank their money in gold francs. “The night of the public burning of the books,” said Author Ludwig. “I invited my friend, Erich Maria Remarque, to drink with me. We opened our oldest Rhine wine, turned on the radio, heard the flames crackling, heard the speeches of the Hitler spokesmen—and drank to the future.”

Still in detached vein, Dr. Ludwig recalled that anti-Semitism is no new thing in Germany. His own father, a distinguished oculist, was barred from appointment to a Hohenzollern Government clinic because he was a Jew. Facing the fact that Nazi Hitler, by his nationally popular Jew-baiting, has ruined Germany for years to come as a residence for Jews, Author Ludwig proposed that the Jewish people seek membership as a “nation” in the League of Nations and there agitate their rights. Dismissing Palestine as too small for the world’s 16,000,000 Jews, Dr. Ludwig comfortably concluded, “It would not be advisable to send all our people there. Both they and the remainder of the world would lose too much.”