EUROPE OF TO-DAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 160, 8 July 1937, Page 20

EUROPE OF TO-DAY.

HITLER'S FUTURE PLANS.

MR. H. J. D. MAHON'S SURVEY.

A comprehensive and penetrating review of the international situation was given to members of the Auckland Grammar School Old Boys' Association at their luncheon yesterday by a past headmaster of the school, Mr. H. J. D. Mahon, who has recently returned from an extensive European tour. Mr. Mahon described Europe as the Treaty of Versailles had left it and briefly touched on the consequent troubles. He mentioned the powerful German minority in Czechoslovakia and the potential powder magazine present in the Polish Corridor. Most of his

address concerned different aspects of modern Germany. He said thjre was a feeling that German eyes lay to the east of Europe; that Hitler wanted to Absorb first Austria, a large proportion of whose population was German, and then the six million and a half Germans in Czechoslovakia. If that were done, then Hitler would be dominant in Europe.

While it was evident that the speaker tflftught that the policy of Hitler constituted one of the dangers present in Europe to-day he was not unmindful of the great good that tHe ruler of Germany had done his nation. He had given it a national pride, and a unity which it had lost after the war, but he had taken away the last vestige of freedom.

Mr. Mahon told' of a conversation he had had with v one German in a railway carriage where, they could not be overheard. While the Germans superficially seemed to be content, his informant admitted to him that in their hearts the German people wanted something different. On the other hand, they all admitted that Hitler had saved them from the one thing that Germans dreaded— Communism.

The speaker said he admired the way in which the two churches in Germany, the Roman Catholic and the Evangelical, were standing up for the rights of Christianity against the tyranny of Hitler. Had it not been for Hitler's un-Christian attitude, he thought that Austria would have been absorbed long ago. Mr. Mahon finished his remarks on Germany with one pregnant thought. One historian had said of Spain that its decline could be traced from.the time ip had thrust out its intellectuals in the shape of the Jews. One wondered if in the long run the banishment of Germany's intellectuals would not \e harmful to the country.