An Appeal To Hitler

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 154, 26 March 1938, Page 1 (Supplement)

An Appeal To Hitler

“We believe that the Fuehrer has the will to peace. But a statesman who wills a certain end is perhaps not very likely to reach his goal if he persistently wills the means to that goal’s opposite. This is the crux of Herr Hitler’s problem. He cannot secure for his people the inestimable boon of peace without paying the inevitable price for it. Peace cannot be had without socialibility; and unhappily it must be said that the impalpable but potent bonds of sympathy'that did subsist between the world and the Weimar Republic have been broken, one after another, by the impact of item after item in Herr Hitler’s policy; by his autarky, his militarism, his racialism, his antiSemitism, his anti-liberalism, and his repressive campaign against both of the Christian Churches.'

“The severance of the moral links with the outside world has been reckless, and it is a huge item to be set on the debit side of the account against Herr Hitler’s claims to have improved upon the position in which Germany found herself before he took the helm.

“Is it still in the Fuehrer’s power to reverse the engines if he chooses? Could he, for example, modify his policy of autarky in the direction of the Van Zeeland report? Could he relax his persecution of Jews, Marxists, Catholics, Protestants and Liberals? Could he slow down the pace of his rearmament? If he could do at any rate some of these things to an appreciable extent, he could be sure of evoking in the Western countries so prompt and so warm a response that the broken moral links between Germany and the West would at once begin to re-form. —“The Economist.”