Nelson Evening Mail SATURDAY, JUNE 15, 1940 NIGHTMARE OF NAZISM

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXIII, 15 June 1940, Page 6

Nelson Evening Mail SATURDAY, JUNE 15, 1940 NIGHTMARE OF NAZISM

HERR HI TLER has made it quite clear that guile and treachery and deception are a major part of his equipment. He has both preached and practised duplicity. Of that fact there is increasing evidence. He had signed a non-aggression pact with Poland, but that did not prevent him from invading that country and he would have seized the whole of it if Russia had not intervened, and occupied more than half of it. He professed to recognise Belgium’s independence, and Germany with other Powers agreed that the soil of Belgium should be inviolable. In spite of his protestations he invaded both Belgium and Holland. To-day, as all know, Belgium and Holland are incorporated in the Reich. Hitler told the Scandinavians he wanted nothing of them, but German troops have taken Denmark, have occupied Oslo, and now dominate the whole of Norway. He declared he had no territorial ambitions in Europe, and he has annexed (besides the country of the Czechs), Austria, Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium. At the beginning of the war he tried to divide Britain and France by saying he had no quarrel with France, but only with Britain; and now he is violently invading France on a huge scale, so that he may subsequently deal with Britain by making use of the Straits of Dover. The attempt to separate France and Britain having failed —it never had the remotest chance of success—the enemy is attempting to eliminate France from the struggle by means of furious offensives and air-attacks upon unfortified towns, and bylying propaganda which represents the evacuation of Flanders by the British Expeditionary Force as a flagrant desertion of the French nation. "Similar propaganda was used to prepare the Italian people for Italy’s entry into the war this week. The French Prime Minister’s recent broadcast to his fell ow-countryrnen and the world at large declares in unmistakable terms the unalterable determination of the French nation to wage ceaseless war until danger of German domination is completely removed. That determination will be increased by the German occupation of Paris which has followed an unceasing violent attack by overwhelming forces. This latest reverse, which is not of vital strategic importance, has provided Britain with the opportunity of not only paying a well-merited tribute to the heroic resistance and fortitude of the French^—who refrained from defending the great city, so as to save it from devastation—but also of renewing her pledge to stand by her Ally and continue to give her the utmost aid in her power. The ordeal by fire will fuse the two nations together in one unconquerable whole. They will never turn from the conflict “till France stands safe and erect in all her grandeur, till wronged and enslaved States and peoples are liberated, and civilisation is freed from the nightmare of Nazism.’’ The British are of one mind with the French in this mutter. The two nations realise that there can be no peace in Europe while Hitler, supported by the Nazi and Fascist organisations, rules over Germany, and they are united in their policy of resistance to the danger which threatens them. Their unity of purpose is their strength. Furthermore it is now being fully appreciated on the western side of the Atlantic that if France and Britain were to fall, the Germans would become the masters of Europe, and in due course would seek to dominate the western Continents. The United States’ undoubted attitude is one of sympathy with the two great European democracies in their resistance to the totalitarian Powers which desire to crush them. There exists in America to-day a strong body of opinion which perceives that the Allies, by boldly facing the German menace, are waging a battle which in an ethical sense is as much the Americans’ as it is that of France and Britain. The President and the Government of which he is head have now promised to afford the Allies every assistance short of active intervention with armed troops, and there is no doqbt that such support is of great value and heartening to the Allies, and will

strengthen them in their titanic struggle with the powers of barbarism which threaten to dominate Europe. Ex-Ambassador Gerard (who represented the United States in Brussels when, in the Great War, the Germans that city) has bluntly expressed the opinion that his country “is cooked, unless she joins the Allies,” and Senator Pepper has declared that “Plitler is already at war with America, as he has sent a ‘Fifth Column’ there, and that is intervention.’’ It is well that the Americans are now fully realising the danger which Nazism and now Fascism —are to civilisation.