INDEPENDENCE OF AUSTRIA

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22336, 25 February 1938, Page 13

INDEPENDENCE OF AUSTRIA

Anti-Nazi Speech By Mayor of Vienna IDEAL OF PAN-GERMANISM DENOUNCED (UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATION —COPYRIGHT.) (Received February 24, 9.35 p.m.) VIENNA, February 24. The Mayor of Vienna (Herr Richard Schmidtz), who is a strong Catholic, made a surprising antiNazi speech before a large audience. “We will fight for Austria’s independence with the last drop of blood,” he declared. “We reject the Utopians who believe it is -possible to combine the 90,000,000 Germans in one State. “A regime which is hostile to the Church will not last.” The municipality of Vienna includes in its boundaries almost a third of the population of Austria. NAZI LEGIONARIES NEAR AUSTRIA MASSED FORCE INTENDED FOR “SPECIAL TASK” (Received February 24, 7.10 p.m.) LONDON, February 23. The Vienna correspondent of the “News-Chronicle” says that in spite of the Berchtesgaden agreement the Austrian Legion, composed of 40,000 Nazis who fled to Germany after the rising of 1934, is still massed within easy march of the Austrian frontier, recalling Hen Hitler’s recent declaration that the legionaries had been entrusted with a special task. NAZISM CONDEMNED ASANTI-GERMAN” FORMER EMBASSY OFFICIAL’S STATEMENT IN U.S. (Received February 24, 11.5 p.m.) NEW YORK, February 24. Herr E. W. Meyer, who resigned unannounced last year from the post of First Secretary to the German Embassy at Washington, during a speech described Hitlerism as “fundamentally anti-German and antiChristian.” He called the Nazi regime “anti-Christ and an enemy of Western civilisation.” “I could no longer serve a Government opposed to so many things that I had been taught to believe Germany stood for,” he said. “Both moral Jaw and loyalty to the true Germany make surrender to National Socialism impossible.”