ARMY AND PARTY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 99, 24 October 1939, Page 9

ARMY AND PARTY

THE POSITION IN GERMANY

It is now clear that the composition of the German Council for the Defence of the State marks the tightening of the bonds between the Fuhrer and the German army and the relegation to the second line of some of the more extreme leaders of' the Nazi Party, wrote the diplomatic correspondent of "The Times" on September 14. Ribbentrop, as personal adviser to his chief, is still, no doubt, in a strong position. But in some well-informed quarters there is a strong conviction that the "radical" element in the Nazi Party has not, indeed, been thrown overboard, but has been obliged to vacate its first-class cabins. Himmler's special troops have been largely enrolled in the army or are under its orders, and Goebbels's propagandist activities are inevitably subjected to military control. The relations between the army and the party had become distinctly closer before the Czechc-Slovak crisis of last September. The substitution of generals who are in sympathy with Nazi doctrines or are politically "yes-men." however technically competent. they may be, for independent leaders of the type of Field-bMarshal yon Blomberg, Colonel-General yon Fritsch, and General yon Beck, General Keitel's predecessor as Chief of the General Staff. was one sign of the rapprochement. PACT WITH RUSSIA. On the other hand, there are grounds for the belief that the Russo-German Pact, which was long desired by the German General Staff and by the leading German industrialists, has been a concession to the army on the part of the Fuhrer. It has startled those members of the Nazi. Party who took the racial and political gospel of "Mem Kampf" seriously, but they have no opportunities for criticism of an agreement which has greatly strengthened the political position of Great Britain. At the same time the conviction is growing—notably in some neutral countries —that Germany has had to pay a high price for her pact with Soviet Russia, although the nature and extent of the consideration are still a matter of speculation. At the same time the' undiluted floods of Marxist propaganda poured out nightly by the Moscow broadcast in German cannot but be an embarrassment to the- German Government.]