Widener Exhibit Features Early German Propaganda

"The first sprinkling of a deluge that will continue for the next hundred years," is the way that Clarence E. Walton, Assistant Librarian, describes the current exhibit on German propaganda displayed for the first time this week in the Widener exhibit cases." There are some items, however, of immediate significance."

He referred specifically to a 1938 issue of "Schwarz Korps," the official organ of the Nazi Brown Shirts, as something "that could be put to effective use in the war criminal trials now progressing in Nuremburg." It is displayed in the right hand case by the main entrance.

In the editorial column is an intelligent article denouncing the barbarism of the Austrians that the Germans have unearthed as a result of the Anschluss. It is an ironic turn-about tale; the Germans discovered, in the suburbs of Vienna, an "inhuman" concentration camp where Nazi agents in Austria were being detained by the Schussnigg government.

The German writer appeals to humanity to condemn the brutal sadism of the Austrians, and they indict, in their righteous anger, the sub-human cruelty of any people who could devise a concentration camp as an instrument of state control.

"What excuses have the savages responsible for this outrage?" demands the indignant writer. The same theme song that the judicial authorities of the United Nations have heard from every German prisoner accused of war crimes. "All that the Austrian judge could say," declares the astonished storm troop periodical, was "I wasn't at fault. I had to do it. I had to obey orders."