MR ICKES’S SPEECH

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 December 1938, Page 6

MR ICKES’S SPEECH

ON NAZI DICTATORSHIP STATE DEPARTMENT REJECTS GERMAN PROTEST. FEELINGS OF OVERWHELMING MAJORITY. (Received This Day, 1.0 p.m.) WASHINGTON, December 22. The State Department has emphatically rejected the German protest against the address by Mr H. Ickes (Secretary of the Interior) on December 19 and has also criticised German Press attacks on President Roosevelt’s Cabinet. It is stated that Mr Ickes voiced the feelings of an overwhelming majority. In an address at Cleveland, on December 19, Mi’ Ickes specifically mentioning Mr Henry Ford and Colonel Lindbergh, criticised the acceptance by Americans of decorations from Germans. He commented: “How can they pretend, in accepting shabby baubles from a brutal dictator, that they are honouring a great people whom a dictator has victimised and degraded?” In the most outspoken attack on the Nazis ever made by an American statesman, Mr Ickes declared that her persecution of the Jews had carried Germany back to the period in history when man was unlettered, beknighted, and bestial. He added that Jews in Germany were regarded as political eunuchs and social outcasts to be dragged down like mad dogs. Mr Ickes made the charge that a dictator was forced to manufacture dangers in order to strengthen his hold on the neonle.