ACCUSING LETTERS

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 226, 19 June 1940, Page 5

ACCUSING LETTERS

Herr Thyssen And Nazi Leaders RUIN SEEN AHEAD Remarkable disclosures are contained in correspondence between Herr l-Ti'z Thyssen, the German industrial magnate, now in exile, ami Hitler an'd Goering immediately preceding tlie outbreak of war and in tlie months that followed. These letters were published by the "Sunday Express?’ In a telegram Io Goering, President of the Reichstag, on August 31, 1939. explaining lii.s inability, for reasons of health, to attend the special session. Herr Thyssen said : “In my opinion it would be possible to agree upon a kind of truce [with Poland | in order to gain time for negotiations. I am against war." On September 20 Herr Thyssen sent, a lengthy memorandum to Goering by special .messenger. It contains one most striking point: “One hundred members were absent at the Reichstag meeting on September 1. The seats of tlie absentees were occupied by officials of the Nazi party. This I consider as grossly anti-consti-tutional.” In this memorandum Herr Thyssen refers to tlie sudden deatli in Dachau concent ration camp of his uephe-w. Herr von Remnitz, who was interned immediately after the Anschluss “apparently because he had taken part in the activity of Legitimists before the Anschluss.” Another letter to Goering on October 1 (which, among other things, expressed frank disbelief of the statement that Goering had received neither the telegram of August 31 nor the letter of September 20) disclosed that Ribbentrop had annexed the property of the dead man. On December 28 last. Herr Thyssen wrote a long letter to Hitler himself, in which the following passages occur:— “Do not forget that you owe your emergence, not to a great revolutionary upheaval, but to a Liberal ordei which you have sworn to sustain.

“But a sinister development followed. The persecution of the Christian religion in the form of cruel measures against the priests, of insults to the Churches, led me to protest in the early days.

“When in 1938 the Jews were despoiled and martyrized, their temples

razed to the ground throughout Germany, I also protested. To reinforce this 'measure 1 -resigned my office as Stale Councillor, lit vain. “Now you have joined forces with Communism. Your Propaganda Ministry even dares to proclaim that the Germans who voted for you as the opponents of Communism are in essentials identical with the revolutionaries who plunged Russia in misery and whom you yourself described [page 750. ‘Mein Katnpf’l as 'vulgar, bloodstained criminals.' ■•When tlie great catastrophe became an accomplished fact and Germany was involved in war without: the assent of Parliament or the Council, I declared quite definitely that I was firmly opposed to this policy. ... It is a crime against tlie German people if its men and, in particular, its representatives, who are held responsible by other countries, are no longer allowed to express their views. “Your new policy [the pact, with Moscow], Herr Hitler, is pushing Germany into the abyss and the German people into ruin. . . . Remember your oath at. Potsdam. ,Give the Reich a free Parliament, give the German people freedom of conscience, thought, and speech.” A similar plea for a return to constitutionalism had been made in one of the earlier letters to Goering: “Germany will have to reinstate constitutional conditions so that treaties and agreements, law and order, may once again have a meaning of theit own.”