HITLER'S BLUNDERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 50, 28 February 1935, Page 18

HITLER'S BLUNDERS.

SAVED THE WORLD. WHAT NAZI "PURGE" DID. SEVERE CHECK TO FASCISM. (By H. F. ARMSTRONG, author of "The Now Balkans," "Hitler's Reich— Tho First Phase," etc.) For Adolf Hitler the Nobel Prize! He gave pause to the spread of Fascism in Europe, and he helped save the world, for 1934 at any rate, from war. Tho accidents of chronology have indeed been on the side of peace this year. But Hitler has been a great help.

By adding persecution of the Jews and the German clergy to the persecution of Socialists, Republicans and Pacifists, Hitler gave the lie to his own assertion that the Nazis seized power to rescue Germany from Bolshevism. People never have realised that just after tho war the Socialists were Europe's bulwark against Communism. Millions everywhere would have swallowed without examination Hitler's statement that the German Socialists, Liberals, Republicans, Pacifists and intellectuals were in league with Moscow.

But that lie died beyond revival when along with them into tho witches' cauldron Hitler threw Jewish capitalists and scientists, princes of the church and parish priests, Lutheran bishops and ministers, doctors and musicians and historians, and lit the fires beneath with the books of men of genius from Heinrich Heine to Thomas Mann. Killed Most Sincere Followers. Hitler rammed the lesson home when, on June 30, he was stampeded into killing the most sincere (fanatical) and logical (brutal) of his disciples, the Storm Troop leaders. Ho was told a plot was afoot among them.

Of course, there was no such plot in any specific sense. The plot which really did exist was the work of those who wished to hamstring the radical Nazi social programme and hand back German military power to the inheritors of the Potsdam tradition. This last had to be done, not merely in order that the army should not come under the Storm Troop leaders and be used before it was ready, but also as guarantee that in future it would work in harmony with the interests of German industry. This plot succeeded.

But Hitler's treachery to his own intimates had a stunning effect on Fascism abroad. Mussolini realised the damage done his own prestige by his protege's behaviour, and made ready to drop him. That meant that Germany could not count, for the time being at any rate, on the Italian backlng. she; had hoped for in 1914—a hope which played its part in producing the World War. In England the Rothermcre newspapers of June 30 were full of the usual praises of Sir Oswald Mosley's Black Shirts. A day or so later, when the lessons of the Berlin and Munich murders had sunk in, Rothermere threw Mosley overboard.

Simultaneously, there became noticeable in France a tendency for the veteran and young Nationalist groups to disclaim the Fascist label. In June, Flandin would not have succeeded Doumergue without a street fracas, perhaps a revolution. But many people who had approved Doumergue's proposals for Parliamentary and administrative reform had meanwhile become worried lest Doumergue himself might really entertain dictatorial aims.

Heil Hitler! Though the force of his lesson may wane, Fascism, for a. fewmonths at any rate, has been wearing a black eye. But that is not all.

Two Coups d'Etat Planned. Europe began 1934 with two coups d'etat; in preparation. Both were to take place in Austria, one directed by Hitler through Habicht and the Austrian Nazis, the other by Mussolini through Dollfuss and Prince Starhemberg's private army. Mussolini's aim was, by establishing Fascism in Austria, to forestall the Nazi coup which Hitler planned would force Austria into the Third Reich. Mussolini did not succeed in preventing Hitler from making his attempt, but, by the time it matured, Hitler himself had so set the stage that it was doomed to failure. It was not Mussolini who «aved Austria from Germany. The real saviour of Austria was the calendar obedient to Hitler's stupidity.

Austria wa.s saved from Nazi Germany, and Europe from the gravest menace of war in 1034 by a margin of just over three weeks, the period which separated the Hitler purge of June 30 from the Nazi coup d'etat in Vienna on July 25. Three weeks' meditation on what had happened in Germany had chilled even the most hardened Austrian Nazi.

In the Austrian afTair Mussolini showed himself less than quick-witted. A statesman must be one part gambler. But a successful gambler possesses foresight. Especially in foreign policy Mussolini often shows himself too fond of the noise

and movement of little successes to look far ahead. Of course, lie had no way of knowing that, before the Nazi putsch in Austria came to a head, Hitler would have ruined its chances of success by killing like rats just those cronies of his who most favoured an adventurous foreign policy and who were the principal sponsors of forcible Anschluss. Proof of Mussolini's lack of acumen lies further back.

Flattered by the advent of a spectacular disciple in Germany, and seeing a chance to injure those Danubian and Balkan States which he hates, Mussolini had encouraged Hitler in an active policy of treaty revision. In his exhilaration he did not pause to consider that Nazi Germany would never be satisfied with just such gains as he chose to mark out for her at the expense of her eastern or western neighbours. He did not see that the march of treaty revision was going to carry the Nazi flag first of all in the natural and easiest direction —southward through Austria to the Italian frontier on the Brenner.

Fascist Regime For Austria. "When Mussolini finally realised the danger facing Italy in Austria it was too late to do anything oxcept take over and equip the private Fascist army which Prince Starhcmbcrg had raised, and to tell Starheniberg to tell Dollfuss that tho moment had come when he must sot up a Fascist Government under Italian protection. Before that could 1)0 accomplished it was necessary to rout out tho Socialists who controlled Vienna. The February bombardment of the Viennese workingmeii'a flat, and tho destruction of tho Socialists as an active political force in Austria, was successfully accomplished. And, as already pointed out, it was Europe's good fortune that the test between the rickety Fascist Government which Dollfuss then erected and tho Austrian Nazis did not come until after the Nazi clan had been destroyed by tho course of events in Germany itself.

One more paradoxical service to the status quo must bo credited to Hitler: his withdrawal from tlie League of Nations at the end of 1933. Tho German "plebiscite" approving that action, like the "plebiscite" after June 30, 1934, meant just nothing. Strangely enough, even dictators who are reputed to be invincible resort now and then to a mock application of democratic devices. But, approved by the German people or not, Germany's withdrawal from the League turned out to have one happy result: it was the first of the chain of events which so alarmed Soviet Russia that she decidcd to take the place vacated by Germany at Geneva and to throw her great weight on the side of maintaining the treaty settlement and preserving peace. — (NANA.)