GERMAN UNITY

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 65, 17 March 1934, Page 10

GERMAN UNITY

SEVENTEEN STATES

HITLER'S ACHIEVEMENT

POWERS DESTROYED

The German Reichstag has now, on the first anniversary of Herr Hitler's becoming head of the Government, passed into law the Bill for the Reconstruction, of the Reich. Six hundred obedient Deputies, all members of the Nazi Party, put this six-clause measure ' through all '■ its stages in a matter of a few minutes by the simple process of rising to their feet, as an expression of assent, when the first clause was put to them, and not resuming their scats until.the third reading had been satisfactorily disposed of. ■ . *■

They thus accomplished ■ a reform which had been a'definite aim of enlightened German statesmanship for more than a century, and a more or less realised need of the German people for nearly three .centuries, writes E. C. Bentley in the "Daily Telegraph." They brought that people, in other words, under one national Government with full powers, such as every other national' Government in Europe possesses. MAKESHIFT GERMAN EMPIRE. . The Germans are not commonly thought of, outside their own country, as lacking in any of the essentials of nationhood; and certainly they possess most of them. They are'predominantly of one rac.e. They have one language and one culture, . They have an intense national pride and patriotism, which, in ourvowntime have enabled them, as a people, to support unparalleled strain and suffering in the greatest of wars. What Germans- have not, and never have had since they were welded into one nation by Bismarck, is a sound machinery of national government. The German Empire created in 1871 was a makeshift. It was a federation, a grouping together of German States which had existed in independence for centuries, and which had frustrated more than one earlier attempt-to bring them into unity.

Hitherto, in the ordinary affairs of life, the German citizen has felt the control of the State in which he dwelt much more than the control of the Eeich, the central authority. His particular State, too, might be a wellgoverned and progressive community, or it might bo the reverse. ' Yet through the-Middle Ages the Germans were a united people under one strong Government. The immense disaster of the Thirty Years' War shattered their unity. It .has never been restored until now. STATES WITHIN THE REPUBLIC. The Empire of 1871 was no carefullyplanned and -scientific Federal system, such as that of the United States of America. It included great • kingdoms, small grand-ducal-sovereignties, and a few little city States which were not even monarchies. Some had to be brought into the union on their own terms. Up to >the time of the Great War the' Kings of Bavaria, Saxony, and Wurtemberg had the right to be represented diplomatically in foreign capitals; and their armies, though at the disposal of the Eeich, were separately organised. , :..-,-' Every State, great; or small, retained powers such as, in all other modern' countries, belong to the national Government. The very fact that the German Emperor must always be King of Prussia, the greatest of the. States, emphasised the unbalanced and. irrational nature of the central organisation. In essentials, that organisation has existed up to the present day. x Despite the changes made onithe establishment of the Eepublic in 1919, the administrative map of Germany remained, in this age of planning, a manifest absurdity. Prussia still' includes two-thirds of the territory and more than half the population of Germany; other States range in nxtcnt. from the 30,000 square miles of Bavaria to the 100 square miles of Bremen. Independent State powers, though reduced, have remained as a practical handicap on political development, being carefully safeguarded by the Constitution of the- Eepublic. It provided, for instance, that in case of any dispute about powers any State could drag the Eeich Government before » the Supreme Court for a decision. HITLER'S BLOW FOR SINGLE Jj ■ ■ POWER. the Beichstag has now- done, at Herr Hitler's orders, is to destroy all the remaining independent powers of 4he seventeen Federal States. Before Hitler no statesman, and no political force, has been strong enough to root out these hampering Telics of German "particularism." After the war the Constitution-makers at Weimar had the old ideal of unification before them. There was a group that, fought for the abolition of the historic State boundaries, and a rational system of provinces subordinate to the Centre, on the general European model. But no more than a certain extension of the powers of the Eeieh was achieved. . The reform of which Liberal patriots had dreamed ever sjneo the fall of Napoleon seemed far enough away, if it could not be accomplished after every throne in Germany had crashed down in ruin. It had been the rulers, from the Kings of mighty Prussia to the Princes of tiny Lippe, who clung obstinately to a system that perpetuated their own dignity and traditions. It was the peoples of the separate States/kingless and jrrineeless now, who seemed not less loath to be drawn together. Hitler has changed all that; and the astonishing ease with which he has done so is at least as striking a proof of the strength of his movement as anything that has gone before. Until he came to power, the bare suggestion of a measure so sweeping would have aroused overwhelming and furious opposition. Today, without an audible whisper of protest having arisen, even from Bavaria,, the historic storm-centre of "particularist" sentiment, nothing is left but the bare geographical framework of the old States. Even that, as Hitler's own repeated words make plain, is doomed to give way _to a better balanced system of provincial districts with no more powers—probably a good deal less—than those of our own county administrations. He had, at least, given Germany warning enough The final article of the "unalterable" Nazi programme, adopted just fourteen "■ years ago in Munich, calls for "a strong central power of tho State," with "unquestioned authority over the entire Eeich." In his "Mem Kampf," written a few years later, tho leader pronounced the doom of the States' independence. As Chancellor, he made a beginning by appointing State Governors responsible" directly to himself. Last September he stated plainly that it. was the task of the Nazis to "liquidate" the Federal States. ;• ■ ; ... Now they are stripped of everything. Their Parliament are "abolished. All sovereignty is vested in the Eeich, and every State Administration is placed under Eeich authority, exercised by the Ministry of the Interior. In the lifetime of men still surviving there was no German-union, but upwards of a score of German kingdoms. The satire of Thackeray has preserved the type of many of those little

autocracies, in his Grand Duchy of Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickel. In the eighteenth century there were 300 of them, each with its own Court, army, laws, coinage, and customs barriers. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the; Thirty Tears' War and the unity of the first German Empire, there were some 1800 in- . dependent German fragments. By coalescence or simple annexation the number was narrowed''down through the centuries to the • seventeen States of the present. Republic. \ Now they are absorbed in the national unity at last; and this is the work of Adolf Hitler.