GERMAN MENACE

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 July 1933, Page 8

GERMAN MENACE

MUSSOLINI BACKS AUSTRIA. Wickham Steed writes in, the London “Sunday Times”: — There is more than meets the eye in the contest between Austria and Hitlerite Germany. Dr Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor, is determined to check Nazi designs, because he understands what their success would mean for Austria and for the whole of Central Europe. The Austrian Nazis, although officially backed from Munich and Berlin, have had the worst of the contest so far.

Yet Herr Hitler has not lost hope that, within six or at most eight months, Dr Dollfuss may be beaten, and Austria be ripe for effective embodiment in the “community of Germanic peoples,” of which the Hitlerite “Third Empire” is to consist. For the moment the brutality of Nazi tactics has turned three-quarters of the Austrian Germans against Ger-i.-.any and has induced them to support Dr Dollfuss. Signor Mussolini, who has no desire to see the whole weight of a Hitlerite Germany and Austria thrown against Italy’s northern frontiers, is encouraging Dr Dollfuss to stand fast.

The Italian Fascist “Duce” fears both a. Nazi triumph in Austria, and the success of the active intrigues which four German Nazi organisations are already carrying on in German Switzerland with the object of bringing the German Swiss also into the “community of Germanic peoples.” Similar intriguds, conducted by Nazi “cells” after the Communist pattern, are going on among “Germanic” peoples elsewhere. The countries where operations are already proceeding or are contemplated are: — Czechoslovakia, Belgian Flanders, Holland, Baltic States, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Austria, French Flanders, Denmark, Norway, Sweden. The object of these tactics is to create “peoples’ movements” ’ (in a<l (these regions in favour of a “federal” relationship between them and Germany. At the right, moment German Nazi “i spectors” or “commissaries” are to be sent, or appointed as supreme Je; Icrs of these movements.

‘•APEN ON RACIAL STATES. ' 11 outline of this Nazi policy was gi' m on May 25 by the German ViceCh ncellor, JI err Von Papen, to a lai e public meeting at Iburg in IT. ssia. In his speech he claimed ’hit one-th,rd of the German people sti'l lives outside the frontiers of Gt. many in twenty-five different e argued that-the real European pi blem, and the deepest cause of l,r itical chaos lie in failure to recogni ?. I ha i. States must he constituted or a racial basis. It is time, he insi: ed, to replace the present arbitr ry delimitation of so-called “nal.i< ml” States by the observance of i hi her principle. 'here can he no assimilation of one p< >ple by another; and a truly nalit ial Germany would recognise the ri; ’its of other peoples, while claimin' her' own right that all Germanic pc pies should be united in one coinin' nity. ’his' doctrine, Herr von Papen in ed, had been expressed on May 17 in Herr Hitler’s famous speech to llu German Reichstag. ti that speech—of which a full tr: .islation has never been published in this country—he said that, if the, tei ritorial reorganisation of Europe after the War had been carried out on

the basis of true “nationarf rentiers,” the sacrifices of the war would not have been made in vain, and real peace might have ensued. Tie repudiated the ideas of “assimilation” and of “Germanisation” as antiquated, since it was impossible to turn Poles and Frenchmen into Germans or vice-versa. 'rhe Chancellor added: “This conception is foreign to us, and we protest against any attempt to apply it to us. We take the European peoples as they exist. The French, the Poles, and other peoples are our neighbours, and w& know that histori cal evolution cannot change this fact. It would have been a boon if, as regards Germany, the Versailles Treaty had taken this fact into account.” In the light of Nazi tactics in Austria, of the Nazi agitation in German Switzerland, in Bohemia, and in other “Germanic” regions, Herr von Papen’s authoritative explanation of the Chancellor’s Reichstag speech places a new meaning upon Herr Hitler’s repudiation of war. By fomenting movements designed to unite all the “Germanic” peoples—from Flanders, Holland, Denmark, and, eventually, Scandinavia, to the Austrian and the Swiss Alps, without forgetting German “minorities” elsewhere —the Hitlerite dream is to be peacefully fulfilled through the creation of a “Third Empire” that would overshadow the whole Continent and make of Europe a pan-German estate.

This is the reason why there is more than meets the eye in the contest between the Austrian Government of Dr Dollfuss and Hitlerite Germany; and wliy more than the fate of Austria may depend upon its outcome.