CRIMES OF HESS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXI, Issue 142, 17 May 1941, Page 8

CRIMES OF HESS

MORE PLAIN SPEAKING. NEWSPAPER’S WARNING. (United Press Association —Copyright) (British Official Wireless.) (Retv J2 noon.) RUGBY, May 16. Although the interest in Rudolph Hess is not being allowed to obscure the wider issues of the war, speculation is still rife regarding the motives tor his escape from Germany and the meaning of the contradictory contortions of Goebbels’s propaganda machine to explain the astounding event in a manner palatable to the Nazis. The fact that it was revealed to-day tliat the letter from Hess which the Duke of Hamilton immediately handed to the authorities contained a suggestion for a meeting on neutral territory to discuss peace certainly lends colour to the latest Nazi picture of

H ess as a messianic (pertaining to the Messiah) idealist, but it is no reflection whatever on the sanity of the man who may have thought a negotiated peace was the only possible hope] for Germany in the dangerous situa-j tion to which her war adventure It*j leading her. , At the same time the picture of Hess as an idealist, as the latest figment of the overworked imagination of the German propagandists, hardly squares with the truth as stated by the Daily Telegraph: “Hess more than any other man but Hitler is responsible tor the form of the abominations of the concentration camps and the Gestapo. He lived and throve and made himself important by murder, torture and persecution. Such is the Fless religion.” The Telegraph adds the timely warning: “Though one of the chief Nazi gangsters has deserted, that does not diminish by one iot the urgency of the development of our utmost fighting power now. We must not be deflected or deterred from the toll and sacrifice of our task by the fantastic melo- •. drama of Hess.”