The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. FRIDAY, AUGUST 11, 1939. THE " BATTLE OF NERVES."

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 188, 11 August 1939, Page 6

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 11, 1939. THE " BATTLE OF NERVES."

For the cause that Lacks assistance. For the icrovg that vceds resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that tee can do.

The X.i/is' drive for Danzig -eeius to have entered a new pha.se, but ;i familiar one. Taking their cue front Herr Foerster, who no doubt has had his instructions, Nazis both in Germany and Danzig will henceforth proclaim to the world, with ever-increasing vehemence, the yearning of the Danzigers to return to the Reich and the yearning of the Reich to receive them. They will iterate and reiterate that Danzig is a fiennan city, ami they will stand ti'rmly, however temporarily, by the principle of selfdetermination. They will say that Germany wants peace, and that nothing but the meddling of Britain and France, the malevolence of the Jews and the mendacity of the international Press can cause peace to be broken. As a variation, for internal consumption, they will say that the Poles are committing frightful atrocities upon ail good Germans within their power, that the Poles are Bolsheviks, or that the innocent Polish people ai*> being betrayed by leaders whose Bolshevik inclinations and Jewish ancestry have long been known in the best German circles. They will say also, and alternatively, that Britain and France have no intention of standing by Poland, and that Britain and France are egging Poland to attack the Reich. These things and more they will say, and through repetition they will hope to make other people believe them.

The object of this second phase is clear. It is to isolate the Danzig dispute, to represent it as a purely German affair which should be nobody else's concern, to represent it as an affair of small importance which is being deliberately magnified by Poland at the instigation of Britain, to demonstrate to the outside world that if war should come Britain and France will be the aggressors and Germany the defender. The answer to all this, of course, is that the Sudetenland affair was represented as a Central European local problem, but it is clear now that the Sudeten people were the merest pawns in a game. So it is with the Danzigers. The Germans in demanding full control of Danzig are concerned only incidentally with the rights of the Danzigers; they want Danzig because of the power it will give them over Poland. That is the issue at stake, and no volume or variety of German propaganda should be allowed to obscure it.