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Woman in the Third Reich

March 15, 1937 — Anti-Nazi mass meeting, American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labor Committee, Madison Square Garden, New York City

 

[Mann read a message from her father urging her to tell her audience that “the entire world” is looking to the great America, the land of Lincoln, of Whitman and of Franklin D. Roosevelt.]

Woman in the Third Reich is a brood-mare and like everyone and everything else has to serve but one purpose — the preparation for and making possible of war. Dignity? Respectable existence? All concepts become hopelessly confused. What is “love” — does “love” as much as exist any more? A young girl knows, for this much she has been taught impressively at the matrimonial-advice bureau, which the government insistently “suggests” her visiting — a young girl knows:

I, who am a brown-haired, long-narrowed skull, must mate in wedlock for the purpose of producing children with a long square skull; albeit I sinfully and most reprehensively desire some one quite else. I love this someone else, but I would be thrown into prison, cast into an insane asylum, or even into a concentration camp, if I admitted my sentiment — for this some one else is a half-Jew.

And were I to meet him secretly, trembling, at some dark corner, I should have to face the probability that my own brother would denounce me to the secret police, for he is head of a small Storm Troop unit and desires to climb higher, to become officer of a group or even a district leader.

 

 

Source: The New York Times, March 16, 1937, p. 2.