The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1939. NAZI FIGHT AGAINST TIME.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 218, 15 September 1939, Page 6

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

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1939. NAZI FIGHT AGAINST TIME.

For the cause that lacks assistance. For the wrong that reeds resistance, For the future in the distance. And the good that ice can do.

Tt is for military, but also for diplomatic ami economic, reasons that the Nazis' onslaught upon Poland is being carried on with every weapon at their command, regardless alike of international law, of solemn promises and of pity. "Totalitarian" war it is, and Polish women and children, the aged and the infirm, are as much the enemies as Polish soldiers in uniform. The object is to shatter the Polish military forces, to destroy Polish economic life, to crush Polish spirit. Thereafter, it is hoped, the Poles will be more amenable to their lot—designed by the Nazis—the lot of a vassal State whose foreign policy will be dictated bv Berlin and whose agricultural* output will supply the munition-making population of Germany. That would be a happy arrangement for the Nazis. As to the Poles, their wishes will not be important if they have been defeated. But it is an arrangement which must be enforced quickly if it is to be enforced at all. If it can be enforced quickly various other neighbours of Germany will heed the lesson, and no military onslaught upon them will be necessary to make them "come quietly." If not, they will continue attempting to preserve their neutrality and, if it should seem that Poland is successfully resisting, they may lean more to the Allies' side. And Germany, in straitened circumstances economically even before the war began, needs all the support .-lie can intimidate her neighbours into giving her.

Germany entered the present war in a very much less favourable condition, economically, than she enjoyed in 1914. Then she was a creditor State, her foreign trade was flourishing, her internal finances were sound. Now she is a debtor State, and under the Nazi regime her shortage of foreign exchange has become continually more embarrassing. "We must export or die," said Hitler this year, but the British fleet has already cut him off frotn many export markets. His Government is forced to undertake the financing of a war which will become more and more expensive, and to finance it from springs whieh before the war began were already showing signs of drying up. What the Government's budgetary position is only a few people know, because no Budget has been published since 1934, but it is clear that it must make heavier and repeated demands upon the purses and the labour of the German people, who will not for long be sustained by a diet of military victories in Poland. These considerations serve to explain the policy of frightfulness in Poland and the threats of air bombardment to force Britain to relax the naval blockade. They serve to eiplain also the hint that when Poland has been battered into submission Germany will be ready to make peace. That suggestion was not prompted by the Nazis' desire for peace, but by their desire for a breathing space before they fell upon another victim. They know that time is against them.