GERMAN ELECTION

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 137, 11 June 1936, Page 9

GERMAN ELECTION

RHINELAND AND HITLER PROFITS FROM GARRISONS CATHOLIC OPPOSITION I came into Germany from Luxembourg up to Trier and Cologne on the Sunday before the German "election," says a writer in the "Manchester Guardian." "I should throw all your newspapers out of the window if I were you," said the young Luxembourg frontier official. "Can't I take any of them into Germany?" "Well, I'm not certain, but"—with a grimace—"they get stricter every day." I threw the French papers away, but kept my English. Sure enough an S.A. man (Brown Shirt) announced to me that they had been forbidden for months. This was, of course, quite untrue,'but only small, controlled supplies of foreign papers may come in, nothing casually across the frontier. At Trier station the loud-speaker was already »t work, roaring out catchw.ords about the Fuhrer and German honour. One old lady, seeing so many election posters, exclaimed with a wry grin,' "Just fancy the station being plastered all over!" There were young Taw-looking soldiers about. It all gave a representative, preliminary sketch of the 1938 election in the Rhineland.

A SILENT COUNTRY. Apart from marching columns, military tunes, and loud-speakers—one was wakened by all these things at 6.30 on election morning though voting only began at 9—Germany seems very silent nowadays; people are afraid to chat in trains as they used always to do. But the Kolners are an exception to the silence rule, for they chatter and joke together as only the Viennese may'be able to do when they too are brought beneath the Hitler yoke. Cologne above all other towns abounds in slightly shocking stories at the expense of the Nazis. One spends the same familiar cheery evenings 'there, drinking Rhine wine as if life were carefree as of old; only, after leaving the wine tavern, one of the party will whisper to another, "Did you see that chap in the far corner? Dangerous Nazi—mind what you say when he's about." Re-armament brings plenty of work in Essen and Dusseldorf, but in Cologne the people felt until now that they had had to supply taxes and recruits while gaining nothing in return. On the contrary, factories had tended to shift away eastwards into the interior. , „ . The Rhineland is nearly 70 per cent. Catholic, and many of the Kolners had found the Nazis to be both impious and ludicrous. The churches I went into-were strikingly full on week-days, and I was told it was everywhere so. The Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Schulte, is ailing and old, but though the Nazi leaders now take care to call on him, many of the younger Catholics have maintained a spirited opposition—indeed, it has cost many of them dear.

GENERAL ASSENT. On the Sunday before the election a pastoral letter was read in the Catholic churches which, while encouraging people to vote for Hitler, left a loophole for those who refused to do so. The clergy, as far as I could gather, gave general assent to the full restoration -of German sovereignty, but they believed that if the Republic had survived Germany's international position would by now be a much happier one than it is today. They saw as clearly as ever that the Nazi view of life was incompatible with their own, and they spoke disdainfully of the Nazi fight against Bolshevism, against which, they, said, they had always found spiritual weapons more efficacious. Old "Steel Helmets" before the election, though delighted that Locarno should be destroyed, expressed doubt over the wisdom of Hitler's technique; it remains to be seen whether British reactions may not have destroyed the grounds for this doubt. Though many young people are blind Nazi enthusiasts, it was interesting to hear of six-teen-year-old schoolboys who are sufficiently critical to point out that the Nazis are painting the We l ™" "System" blacker and blacker. Apart from the unshakable opponents of the Nazi regime, the ordinary workmen, groaning under the weight of compulsory and "voluntary" taxation, are most ■ annoyed by the luxurious behaviour of party bosses. When General ing spoke in Cologne soon after March 7 the lunch given in his honour was known to have cost 1000 marks for sixty-eight people.

UNTRAINED TROOPS. There is no doubt that the Rhinelanders had never greatly appreciated a contribution to international relations in the form of their Demilitarised Zone. When the troops first arrived in Cologne on March 7 there seenys to have been a very measured enthusiasm, and some of the older people for a time anxiously watched the sky for Frfench aeroplanes. Gradually, however, the Kolners warmed to the idea. Real soldiers were better than the S.A. and S.S. (Black Guards), and business, it was hoped, would improve. Incidentally the soldiers now in the Rhineland do not appear to exceed the official figures by much, and many of them are strikingly young and untrained. It should be pointed out, perhaps, that the previous presence of some 30,000 men, Whose uniforms are very like those of the Reichswehr, had to some extent taken the *ilt off the gingerbread of the remilitarisation. There will, of course, be barracks to build, but the newly-arrived soldiers do not look as if they had any money to spend and there were no signs of more business in the shops; incipient disappointment, however, was caught up and drowned in the rising tide of Nazi election propaganda in the days preceding March 29. Compulsory attendance at Nazi demonstrations does not, as one would expect in Western Europe, defeat its own ends. MaJhz is perhaps more intensely Catholic than Cologne; not long ago the Bishop's Palace was covered with abusive Nazi comments, and the town was bitterly divided. Though its chemical industries and the Opel Motor Works at Russelsheim neat by Have been flourishing, the locallymanufactured Erdal shoe polish has tot been prospering, and the local wine trade has long been depressed.

OLD MEMORIES.

But Mainz still glows with the memories of pre-war days, when its strategic position made it one of the most famous and flourishing garrison towns; and Mainz, still burns with the tradition of old French invasions and with the recollection of the French „ and black troops who came into occupation after 1918. The black occupation has been posthumously elaborated into an unthinkable nightmare, and it was inevitable that March 7 should sweep many of the Mainz people into the stream of Hitlerism. As a matter of fact the election results for a number of towns as published in the "Frankfurter Zeitung" (there is no particular reason to suppose that the urban figures were tampered with, beyond the fact that blank papers were counted tor Hitler) show Mainz with the high-

est percentage, over 2.75, of anti-Hitler votes. One saw far more Nazi salutes last week in Frankfort than in Cologne. Frankfort, however, is mainly Protestant and uninfluenced by Catholic resistance to the Nazis. And the disfranchisement of the Jews at Nuremberg last September eliminated a noticeable opposition in Frankfort. In considering the published results of March 29 one observes ,that the voting in the Rhineland was much the same as in the rest of Germany. The co-ordinating factor was fear. There is no other explanation, for instance, of the 99.9 per cent, vote in the discontented Saar. Where a terrorised electorate has been made to fear that it will not vote in secret a dictatorship can in practice afford to let secrecy prevail.