HEADED WHERE?

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 283, 30 November 1933, Page 26

HEADED WHERE?

THE NAZI TRANCE. GERMANY WILL REARM. «MANY TIMES YOU WERE WARNED." (By A. ,T. CUMMINGS, in the "News Chronicle.") LONDON, October 25. As one who dislikes intensely certain too familiar manifestations of the Hitler regime, I have made it my business in the last fortnight to get into personal touch with a number of Nazi citizens who belong to the intelligentsia of this strange new order of human society. Having heard and read almost everything there is to be said about the Nazis, I wanted to learn what they had to say in private for themselves. In these talks they were exceedingly courteous, full of sweet reasonableness, ostensibly candid, scrupulously careful to differentiate between German and other brands of Liberalism, eager to answer questions and to invite my opinions (which I gave promptly with the careless freedom of a free citizen of a free country), and passionately desirous that a great nation like ours should have a sympathetic understanding of the new Germany. I had to listen to much that: was pseudo-philosophical and pseudo-histori-cal. On one occasion I suffered an enthusiastic recital of the history of the German people from the year 1807. I suffered this patiently because it has its importance. What the Nazis teach and what they believe, on this so-called historical basis, is that they are transforming the German people —a "young, unspoiled race," as the Minister of Justice described it recently—into a real nation, with a national spirit, a corporate spirit, and, above all, a spirit of heroic self-sacrifice in furious action. When they talk in that vein they appear to be in a kind of trance. There is indeed something trance-like in the appearance of the thousands of uniformed Nazis I have seen in Leipzig marching to and fro from here to there and back again, with their lighted torches, their swastika banners, their martial songs and their queer expressions of resolute futility. Though to Communists, Social Democrats and Jews it will seem a grim fantasy, they look to me to be living in another dimension. Their ablest spokesmen tell me they intend to raise the intellectual level of the Nazi order. " Unfortunate Mistakes." They make light of the brutalities that have accompanied the transformation, and point out that, even in a bloodless revolution such as this, worse tilings might have befallen. When we euumcrate individual acts of recorded cruelty they express genuine regret at what they call these "unfortunate mistakes" committed by irresponsible persons.

Oil the subject of the concentration camps tb?y are reticent, and I am sure not well informed. As for the Jews, they declared it was [ imperative to discriminate against them because they had proved themselves to be anti-German and anti-Social. But they would not be destroyed. They would be given a place under the new German law in German society; and many of them were already finding their proper level. "In any case," explained one of these apologists generously, "we treat them and shall continue to treat them better than Americans treat the negroes." The Communists and the millions who think Communist and have voted Communist? Well, the majority are Germans first; and in due course, v/hen Hitlerism has made Germany prosperous, they will be reabsorbed as patriots into the German Nazi State, and the Social Democrats of the younger generation will go Nazi, too. That is how Nazi "intellectuals" see in brief the course of events internally in a political order which openly damns democracy as "unjust and immoral." Though they admit that the permanence of the new regime must depend to a great extent on the fulfilment of their pledge of economic recovery, they believe devotedly in the coming of the promised land. . Their economies they regard as fool-proof. One of their best writers on economics complained to me that some English economists had totally misconceived the elements of Nazi economies. "The idea that we are not profoundly interested in our export trade is absurd. We shall sell to those who will buy from us, we shall develop our> foreign trade scientifically, we shall trade with our neighbours and particularly with our friends. We shall make our trade go hand in hand with our politics." 4 The claim has been made that economic conditions in Germany are improving. All the evidence I possess suggests the opposite. Though no analytical test is available, and none will be made available, no informed person believes the official assertion that the Nazis have reduced the unemployment figures by two and a half millions. The Miracle of the Age? But, while it is true that in the long run no regime in any country can be secure in the face of economic disaster and widespread disillusionment, it would be folly not to acknowledge the great strength and the absolute domination of Hitlerism to-day. It would be equally foolish to make the picture as black as night and to insist that Nazi-ism will never change or that nothing good can ever come from the Nazi regime. Hitler, I think, has more to fear from Communism than from economic troubles, which he is attacking with crude but vigorous measures. Deeming discretion the better part of valour many young Communists, as well as social democrats, have joined the Nazi party. But the Communists, underground yet disciplined still, are sullenly biding their time.

If Hitler really destroys Communism by diverting it into the channel of an aggressive German patriotism he will have achieved the most miraculous antithesis of the age. Germans, Communists as much as Prussian reactionaries, love to be regimented. What gives the onlooker cause for apprehension is that this new regimentation is utterly military in character. Huge demonstrations take place almost daily in one part of the country or another and they all have a clear military significance. One begins to think of Germany in the terms of a military camp. Even the great gathering of lawyers at Leipzig was more like a military mobilisation than a legal congress. At least a third of the great audience of 20,000 at the opening session wore uniform.

Thousands of Nazis and steel helmets marched about the city morning, noon and night in military formation with bands playing. The streets and hotels were crowded with strutting figures in fancy uniforms. Heels clicked continuously, and the ceaseless exchange of innumerable salutes gave me a headache and the unpleasant illusion that I was back again in the earlier phases of the Great War. A military fervour informs all the propaganda, oral and literary. The' new books are military, and the newest films and even tin. newest toys. Germany's Five-Year Plan. The shop windows are filled with lovely little models of beautiful Nazis marching proudly into battle, sauntering out of battle wounded but triumphant, playing cards and concertinas when the strife is over and the shadows fall and doing all the glorious things that make the soldiers' trade the envy of every other profession. While this cunningly-created martial spirit prevails in Germany, and sweeps like a tempest over ardent youth f is it to be wondered at that there are deadlocks at Geneva? Nazi Germany wants peace. She wants it and needs it urgently for five years. At the end of five years she will very possibly still preach peace and keep it if she is then strong enough to get what she wants without having to fight for it. In other words, Germany is going to rearm—to rearm, as she boldly claims, in her own defence. France will not prevent her from rearming; nor will Britain, nor Geneva, nor a dozen disarmament conferences. The denouement must cause contemporary statesmanship some bitter reflections; no less bitter now that Germany can say with perfect justice to the victorious signatories of the Versailles Treaty: "Many times you were warned; the warnings have come true." — (N.A.N.A.)