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Friday, January 4, 2013

When The Babe Took a Swing at the Nazis

This story is new to me and is now the basis for an upcoming documentary.  In 1942, famed journalist Dorothy Thompson, who had been expelled from Germany, recruited a group of German-Americans to sign full-page ad to appear in the NYT and nine other newspapers denouncing what had thus far been unverified or accepted in the U.S.--that  acts against Jews in Germany were not scattered but part of an utter annihilation plan.  Among the signers were everyone from Reinhold Niebuhr to Nation editor Freda Kirchwey, but most notably...Babe Ruth.  In fact: 
Filmmaker Byron Hunter and Ruth’s granddaughter, Linda Ruth Tosetti, have collaborated on a soon-to-be-released documentary, Universal Babe. Those who are accustomed to thinking of Ruth’s off-the-field activities in terms of binges and carousing will be pleasantly surprised to learn from the film of the slugger’s noble efforts on behalf of women’s baseball, the Negro Baseball Leagues and the Jews of Hitler’s Europe.

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