JF Ptak Science Books Post 2896
I recently uncovered a scarce and unusual pamphlet printed in 1939 in Chicago that addressed Hitler's threat to Europe, his designs on action in the United States, and his general threat to the world. The pamphlet under discussion here is Leo Kaul's Is Hitler Planning to Conquer the United States?, which was published by the author in Chicago in 1939 as part of a planned monthly series of pamphlets called the "Library of Liberal Endeavor". This was volume two, following Why is the Jew Persecuted Today as volume one; there was a third volume planned called Hitler and Father Coughlin though it seems never to have been published. I think that Mr. Kaul--who was writing as early as 1912 and as late as 1950 and who had a business in Chicago manufacturing small bottles and porcelains--self-published these tracts hoping to establish a journal or monthly, though it appears that the existing works didn't reach a wide audience and barely survive in libraries.
One part of this pamphlet that I'd like to mention here is a three-page discussion on "concentration camps" which I think is remarkable not for "exposing" them but for recording the remarks that (in 1938/9) "there have been many books written about life in concentration camps, about the liquidation of the Jewish people, and about the persecution of everyone not in sympathy with Hitler." The German concentration camp system began with Dachau in 1933 and expanded to over 1000 (including the main and sub-camps) before the end in 1945 (this is exclusive of ghettos and other controlled environments), and there was certainly a good-sized literature on the camps--I am less certain though about the phrase "liquidation of the Jewish people" which does seem jarring to me for 1939.
Most of the discussion of the concentration camps in this pamphlet are quotes from a work by Martha Dodd and William Dodd jr., Through Embassy Eyes, which was published in 1938. I don't have a copy of this though from what I could find this work is based on the collected experiences of the Dodd family, with William Dodd (sr.) being the U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1933-1937, and Martha and William being the children, each named for their parents. The daughter Marsha was later accused of being a Soviet spy, while the son William was destroyed by the Dies Commission and in spite of his accomplished past and connections was a sales clerk at a department store in San Francisco when he died in 1952.
I've reproduced the pages on the KL below:
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