IS HITLER DOOMED? – By Rabbi Solomon b. Freehof. Rodef Shalom Synagogue, Pittsburgh – 1934. “The word of Adolf Hitler is absolute law. What he says in Germany cannot be missed. He determines the conditions of labor and the fate of capital; he settles issues of war and peace; he dictates to the press and controls the public assembly. He is Chancellor, President, Dictator. There is no cabinet to block him… Hitler is the most absolute autocrat…” Extremely rare.
An unknown publication printed by stencil in which Rabbi Solomon Freehof analyzes the future of Hitler and Nazi Germany shortly after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and following the Night of the Long Knives, during which the entire leadership of the SA was arrested, and Hitler ordered a wave of executions without trial. On this night, Hitler murdered over 200 activists. It was the first time in history that Hitler’s brutality and madness were exposed to the world, and at this point, Rabbi Freehof recognized the true nature of Adolf Hitler, who speaks of peace but desires war. He writes:
“How, then, do we reconcile his bellicose statements with his consistent action? It’s really quite simple. Hitler does want war, but not yet. Hitler is eager to make Germany victorious again, but not yet ready. The Nazi problem in international affairs is, therefore, a race between mad armament and war…”. He identified that it would be very difficult to convince the German people to believe in the Nazi ideal even after it had come to power, and so the Nazis invested all their resources in propaganda:
“Much of his money goes into propaganda. Radio, every moving picture screen — the message is absorbed into the German people’s consciousness until they see him as leader, master, genius, and even savior… He shuts down every foreign newspaper, suppresses every dissenting opinion so that the hymn of praise is not disturbed…”.
Regarding Hitler’s future, Rabbi Freehof writes that sooner or later he will be defeated. Either by war, when in his madness he will launch an attack and the nations of the world will defeat him, or by an internal rebellion when a German opposition will arise to say “no” to the totalitarian fascism that he began to establish in those months, as the Christian church had already started to do at that time. Rabbi Freehof did not specify a timeline for Hitler’s defeat; he simply writes:
“History is not an exact science, to predict the precise moment of the inevitable act, but we know that dictatorships appear strong until the moment of their collapse. It may take another year, it may happen next month, it may happen any day… And soon, Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring will join the dust heap of history to which they belong. May that time come soon.”
Extremely rare. Not listed in the WorldCat library catalog.
[1], 9 pages. 29 cm. Very good condition.
