The Evening Star MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 1942. GERMANY’S “NEW ORDER.”

Evening Star, Issue 24103, 26 January 1942, Page 4

The Evening Star MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 1942. GERMANY’S “NEW ORDER.”

“ The Italians and the Germans have one desire,” a correspondent of the ‘ Daily Telegraph ’ has stated. It is the extermination of the Greek nation, by whom their designs were thwarted. A German Press correspondent is reported to have said repeatedly in Ankara; “ Wo have been too kind to the Serbs. It is true we shot over 350.000 of them, but there will be no peace until we shoot the remainder.” The Polish nation will be abolished if Nazis have their way- The activities of the Gestapo and the firing squad are unceasing in other temporarily conquered lands. All this is merely an intensification of—it provides no departure from—the behaviour of Germans in the last war. The invaders then acted merqly in accordance with a natural instinct of their character. Now that instinct has been philosophised and made a system. Nazi administration is nothing, it has been said, if it is not consistent. On the basis that there is only one God, the German race, and that Hitler is his Prophet, a complete technique of government has been worked out, which had its first application in the concentration camps. For one prisoner’s offence the whole camp was punished. Now the punishment for individual offences in the oppressed countries may be visited upon the town, by fine, the countryside, by deportations, on fifty, or a hundred or five hundred innocent compatriots, chosen at random for execution. “ Collective responsibility ” is the name given to this vastly simplifying principle. Nothing is done without a name, or without a quasi-legal explanation meant to justify it as essential to the “ new order.” It might bo thought that, in the small countries at least that arc subject to the Nazi rule, the spirit of freedom and of resistance would have been utterly extinguished before now by those atrocities. On the contrary, it has been bnly inflamed. It is most important that their spirit should persist, because the small States have shown that they can fulfil a most precious part in Europe. Miss Dorothy Macardlo has well said: “ The defects and difficulties of nationalism are evident, but not irremediable. There was immense promise in Europe before the war. Denmark, for instance, had attained a fine standard of living, high education, and an unsurpassed honesty and confidence. All the Scandinavian

countries gave an example of what cooperation can achieve. The Poles were restoring their lacerated nation. There were no more ardent nationalists, sounder economists, or hotter Europeans than the Czechs, in Belgium, King Leopold and Van Zeeland were at work on proposals for international co-operation which might have averted war. The dangers inherent in excessive and selfish nationalism had been recognised. The League of Nations was reforming its Covenant. In America and Europe the idea of Federal Union was being discussed.” All those aspirations towards a bettor humanity Germany would crush out under her iron heel, making tfio world a desolation for all except Nazi brute-conqucrors. it is a savagery which provokes and confirms its own revulsions, making the ultimate overthrow of such a despotism certain.