FRANTIC VOICES.

Evening Star, Issue 25419, 26 February 1945, Page 4

FRANTIC VOICES.

It is a desperate Hitler who has made bis second speech within a month after a lengthy period during which his thoughts had been sufficient occupation for him. It cannot be said that the thoughts have provided any new matter for this latest tirade. The “ unnatural alliance between exploiting Capitalism and Bolshevism which threatens to engulf the world to-day.” with pleasant allusions to the “ Jewish pestilence,” is still the theme, ns it has,been from the .beginning. The occasion was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day on which the Nazi Party programme was first laid down. What Hitler had to say on that day of hopes and promise has not been reported in detail. He was, for the first time, the main speaker, but the audience which he addressed numbered no more than 1.07 people. It has been recorded, moreover, that he nearly lost his chance to speak because the other, party members considered him too nervous and excitable and distrusted his bourgeois leanings. Finally ..he was given twenty minutes, and after that there were

no meetings without a Hitler oration. . Ho took elocution lessons from an t,actor. He learned how to,weep before his audience and implore it in a choked voice to follow his leadership. And a speech which bo made at Munich two years after that first effort is on record, word for word, though no leading German paper at the time thought worth while to comment on it. In his efforts to inflame his countrymen and make them mad Hitler had to work against no small obstacles. He had to argue against various indications that Germans, despite the cruel treaty, were increasingly well off and satisfied. After the war production had begun again, and'it was thought that better' times were coming. Again it was being said that since the war the people had gained rights; the people governed. “ Freedom had come to them ” through the revolution that set up the Weimar Republic in place of KaiMsrisni. It cannot be said that they have had freedom under Hitler. The Fuhrer might point to-day to ruined cities anddevastated homes and an army, deprived of its loot and augmented by boys and the aged, standing desperately and hopelessly at bay as a picture of what his leadership ■ has produced for them. He can only dwell on another picture, which • his henchman Goebbels had elaborated a few hours before, of an Eastern flood pouring upon the West and threatening to engulf the world. Actually, the world was nearly enough engulfed beneath the worst sort of flood quite recently when German armies, at the behest of Hitler, had swept- to the Caucasus, were threatening Britain, and conducting their intrigues in Iran j and Iraq while the Japanese, soon to be his allies, were meditating a like swoop, equally successful in its opening months, from the Far East. The democracies will take care that that I danger is not renewed by the first j Powers that sought to “ close the gates of "mercy on mankind” before they consider imaginary ones. Germany reaps now what she sowed, at Hitler’s incentive. Probably the sowing and the reaping would have been the same in any case, since the German General Staff never laid aside its ambitions-, some other demagogue, in the place of the Fuhrer, would have been found. The “ unshakeable community of peoples ” is not on the German side. The reckoning with Hitler himself will come, all in good time.