Some American editors and reporters perceived Nazi actions against Jews not so much as attacks on Jews per se, but rather as resentment over some aspects of the Jews’ own (alleged) behavior.

The New York Herald Tribune’s Berlin correspondent, John Elliott, claimed the Nazis were targeting Jews not because of their “race,” but because they were political opponents of the Hitler regime. According to Elliott, even Albert Einstein was “detested by the Nazis more for his pacifism than for his Jewish blood.”

The editors of The Columbus Dispatch believed the Nazis were reacting to the “large Jewish element in the financial, commercial, professional, and official life of present-day Germany.” A Christian Science Monitor editorial declared that it was the Jews’ own “commercial clannishness” which “gets them into trouble.”

A leading Protestant periodical, The Christian Century, proclaimed in an April 26 editorial: “May we ask if Hitler’s attitude may be somewhat governed by the fact that too many Jews, at least in Germany, are radical, too many are communists? May that have any bearing on the situation? There must be some reason other than race or creed—just what is that reason?”