HITLER’S SPEECH

Grey River Argus, 13 December 1940, Page 8

HITLER’S SPEECH

London Press Criticism SUBDUED TONE SUGGESTED [British Official Wireless] RUGBY, December IlFamiliar features of Herr Hitler's speeches, such as tirades against Britain and falsification of history, reappeared yesterday in his utterance, but there is general agreement that it was pitched in a more subdued tone than usual, arid that he was on the defensive, and lacking in his usual display of confidence. A lack of confidence in ultimate victory was 1 detected in Herr Hitler’s discussion of prospects in the event of defeat. “The Times” says: “It can only be because Hitler reads British policy in the light of his own designs that he predicts that a loss of the war by Germany will mean an end of the German people and dispersal of the German nation. This view has already been refuted in a British statement of the purposes for which Britain entered the war. Refutation will find an appropriate place in any future definition of British war terms and every effort should be made to bring it to the knowledge of the German people. It is no part of British interests or British intentions to destroy Germany, or, as Herr Hitler alleges, to impose a Westphalian peace. No European order can be complete from which Germany is excluded, and among the, most important of Britain’s war aims is a Europe in which Germany occupies an .equal, but not dominant place. This aim can be achieved only through _ the overthrow of Herr Hitler and Hitlerism.” .

Regarding Herr Hitler’s vigorous repudiation of a suggestion that he was feeling any inferiority towards England, the “Daily Telegraph’’ says: “When a man vows that he never has had anv, inferiority complex, he gives the clearest of -all proofs that fear has him in its grip.” Th e “Daily Herald” says: “If Herr Hitler believes that the masses of this country hanker tor the destruction of their trade unions, suppression of free speech and fre e voting, or (for concentration camps and all the beastialities of Jhe Gestapo, he fools himself. Much more probably he is trying only to fool his hearers.” “It is assumed that Herr Hitler was attempting an essay in a lighter vein when he declared that there is a world of difference between'Eton Coll'eg P and the Adolph Hitler School,” “The Times” remarks. “That is true enough, though it is, perhaps, worth recalling that the present Nazi Foreign Minister, during his residence in England, made som P effort to send hl« own son to that particular institution, which Herr Hitler appears to regard as further from his own ideal. Unlike Nazi Germany, Britain recognises the virtue of more than on e form of education.”