What Are Hitler’s Real Aims?

Northern Advocate, 15 December 1939, Page 9

What Are Hitler’s Real Aims?

What are Germany's aims? asked J. Emlyn Williams in the “Christian Science Monitor” at the end of August. (Mr Williams was one of the last foreign correspondents to leave Berlin.)

This question-—a question which must be answered in something more than the superficial repetition of official German statements —is the preoccupation of the peoples of Europe, awaiting the German reply to British and French reaffirmation of their pledges against aggression. In Germany the tension is much less than abroad because the German people are still unclear regarding the attiuide of the Western democracies.

The oft-repeated declarations of the British Prime Minister and the French Premier are not reproduced in Germany, or only in part. Further, the Germans are still told that Reichs-fuehrer Hitler is a great lover of peace and not likely to risk war.

Taking the. Risk

Rut now it is clear that he is taking that risk and, according to the communique issued after the visit of the British Ambassador (Sir NevileHienderson) to Berchtesgaden on August 22, Germany has no intention of renouncing “its vital and important national. interests,” being prepared to let Britain do what it will about its after the Russo-German non-aggres-sion pact.

Two Different Worlds

Strange, one may say—but it is tragically accurate. For Germany and the Western democracies have long lived in two different worlds, and the tragedy has been that so many democratic statesmen have only now realised it. But whether war comes or not it is clear that Germany has set its course for the achievement of certain imperialistic ends summed up in the term “Lebensraum.”

That is ultimately the importance to the world of the German-Soviet Pact. It was plain evidence that the Third Reich is willing to abandon most of the fundamental National theories for new imperialist acts, obligations to Poland. In other words, Herr Hitler considers that Germany’s “vital and important national interests” may be worth a European war. This is the conclusion the average man in the democracies must draw, for it must be repeated that Herr Hitler’s advisers still believe that Britain and France won’t fight, especially Self-determination, “blood and soil,” and anti-Communism have all been renounced in favour of “lebensraum” —a word which in the English translation of “living space” fails to convey the full meaning of dynamic expansion that the (German term contains.

Conception and Lebensraum

Whatever be the final outcome of the new German-Russian rapprochement its purpose is to serve the next aim of the Third Reich’s foreign policy, namely, removal of Poland from the ranks of the great Powers. Germany’s conception of “Lebensraum” has been defined a number of times as the German political and economic hegemony of Europe east of the Rhine to the borders of Russia.

It seeks to turn the smaller countries of the Danube and the Balkans into political fiefs and economic vassals who will all take commands from Berlin.

“Today we number 80,000,000 Germans in Europe,” Herr Hitler writes in “Mein Kampf,’’ “but the correctness of that foreign policy will not be established until hardly a century hence 250,000,000 Germans are living on this continent.” *

The First Task,

The first task then is the settlement of East Europe according to German ideas. Then a turn would be taken against the west, for a fight against one nation at a time is more to Germany’s ideas. Then it can dominate, for it is clear that the German-Russian Pact is intended not only to satisfy the Germans’ European plan. Surely the Soviet would not agree to that alone. Whatever Moscow may think, there can be no doubt' that Berlin is thinking of something far greater and of world-wide extent. ;

It is hardly necessary today to say that the so-called Anti-Comintern Pact was directed only theoretically and for propaganda purposes against Communism.

In reality it t was against the Western democracies, especially Great Britain and the Empire, and America, while the Reich held to the belief that France is decadent.

That Joachim von Ribbentrop, originator of the pact, could sit at a conference table in Moscow with those whom the German Press and he had reviled beyond recall but a few months earlier, indicates the thin veneer of the “anti-Communist” drive.

World Alliance?

And it is not beyond expectation that if the circumstances are favourable Germany will attempt to form a world alliance of totalitarian States against the democracies. Whether it will succeed is another question with Russia and Japan at variance and the Sino-Japanese Avar still on. The Third Reich, it is obvious to all who have followed its policy during the past two years, is out to “settle accounts” with the British Empire.

It hopes to achieve this end through disintegration among the democracies themselves, and to arrive at a time when Britain will be forced to yield, not simply the colonies which Germany lost, but also its present economic domination.

The National Socialist policy is a challenge to. democracy, that is, to the very basis of Western civilisation. Its Weltanschauung (philosophy) shows that it is out to fashion a new world. National Socialism calls itself peacemaker, but it is probably more true to say that it is a peacemaker for some new change. But to think that control of Poland or Hungary or Yugoslavia is the goal is to do injustice to the magnitude of National Socialism’s conceptions and extent of its ambitions.