ADMIRES HITLER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 56, 7 March 1934, Page 7

ADMIRES HITLER.

AMERICAN NOVELIST. KATHLEEN NORRIS' VIEWS. DICTATORSHIP OR DESPAIR. i (From Our Own Correspondent.) SAN FRANCISCO, February 14. Germany had to choose between Hitler and despair. There was no alternative. In these twelve words Kathleen Norris, novelist and lecturer, of the United States, summed up her impressions of a situation which elie studied sympathetically while on the globe-circling trip from which she has just returned to her California home. She sees a striking similarity between America's stampede to Roosevelt and the German people's swing to Hitler "because only by dramatic leadership could the nation be united into hope." Both Mrs. Norris and her writer husband, Charles Oilman Norris, came back from Germany enthusiastic over what has been accomplished there. While she declared "there is a yeast of new life in Germany" and Hitler has virtually solved the problem of unemployment and poverty, she was wholly optimistic about the future, and saw grave danger in the potential army of three million brown-shirted men and boys who need only guns to be soldiers. "It may be," she said, "that Germany is secretly manufacturing munitions. I do not know what is going on in their minds, but I heard no talk of war, only of defence, after protection against further encroachment." Speaking of the burden of suspicion under which the people struggle, she voiced the fear that "France and Germany will be at each other's throats in a short time, but it cannot last long if America and Great Britain keep out of it." "We cannot understand the power of Hitler," Mrs. Norris insisted, "without realising the terrible state Germany was in before he took charge. When I saw it five years ago I was aghast at the crime, the misery, the abnormalities, the hopelessness. Oermany had been laid to waste by war, dismembered by the Peace Treaty, bled white by taxes, gouged through her vitals by the Polish Corridor. No country should ever have been made to suffer what Germany has suffered. "Something dramatic had to be done to forge the teeming life of young Germany into unity. There was no other way out of it. The only alternatives were Hitlerism—and disintegration." Mrs. Norris bases her respect for Hitler as a "quiet and dignified gentleman" not only on her brief interview with him, but on his accomplishments and on the devotion of his countrymen. She talked with people of all classes, she said, and found that "the leader" was everywhere idolised as their rescuer.