NEW OUTLOOK ON GERMANS IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22822, 17 December 1948, Page 6

NEW OUTLOOK ON GERMANS IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA

(From Reuter’s Correspondent.)

(By Air Mail) PRAGUE. Czechoslovakia, where hatred and fear of Germans and Germany are universal, is being asked to accept a new view—that there are democrat Germans with whom collaboration is possible.

Touched of! sorrte months ago by a public statement from President Klement Gottwald, a propaganda campaign has been developing here designed to change, or at least to qualify, the traditional Czech suspicion of Germanism. The latest manifestation of this new propaganda appeared in the partisan organisation’s newspaper Narodni Osvobozeni. It formerly appeared that none rivalled the partisans in Germanophobia. but now the partisans are told that it was capitalism, not Germanism, which was the trouble with Germany; that it Was imperialism, not Hitler; that it is wrong and dangerous to believe in any inherited German desire for hegemony; and that it is necessary to consider the character of Germany as analysed by Stalin and Gottwald, on the basis of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

The reception of trade representatives from Eastern Germany in Czechoslovakia, a beginning of exchanges of visits between Eastern German local authorities and their opposite numbers here, and the appearance in Prague of an accredited representative of the Soviet zone news agency, A.D.N., are all taken here as evidence of the developing campaign to persuade the Czechs that Germans, if Communists, are acceptable.

Former prisoners from Buchenwald have recently been persuaded to link the union they have organised here to a system for helping German exprisoners living in Dresden. The union decided to take the initiative in organising an internatinal committee to provide material help—and it anticipates co-operation from the Soviet Union and Poland. The Narodni Osvobozeni definition of the new attitude to be taken towards Germany appeared in connection with a review of a book called “Superman and Supernation,” an analysis of Germanism and Fascism and Racism, by Raiming Habrina, a publisher in Brno.

The review said that the author really believed that Nazism and its emanations were a manifestation of some “German soul.” It added that he failed to point out the real guilty men, as Stalin and Gottwald had already done before the war, and veiled his ideas with talk about the ancestry of Nazism —which is said was caused by the German philosophers. The review also stated that the author adopted the “dangerous theory” of racism. Habrina, it said, had talked about the Germans “inherited desire for hegemony” and their “irremovable inclination to reign over slaves.” Another dangerous theory of Habrina was that it is useless to expect any healing of this sort of spirit in Germany. The author had failed to see that Hitlerism was built up by imperialism. He had repeated Rosenberg’s idea of "blood and race” and failed to see that Hitler only strengthened the power of capitalists and big industrialists. Tall from Tanksland When he fell from a tankstand on Wednesday, a 7-year-old boy, Daniel Welham, son of Mrs. M. Welliam, Northcote road, suffered injuries which -necessitated his removal to the Cook Hospital. He was reported to be comfortable this morning. „