HITLER'S GERMANY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22131, 10 June 1935, Page 6

HITLER'S GERMANY

STERN AUTOCRACY DECLINE OF LIBERTY NEWSPAPERS MUZZLED TRAGEDY OF THE JEWS The decline of liberty under the stern ssazi regime is the principal phase ol life in present-day Germany which is dealt with in to-day's article by Mr. Aubrey L. Williams, special European correspondent of the Jvew Zealand Herald. The National-Socialist . Pfirt y> he shows, is the sole power in the land, all opposition—whether of 1 arhament, platform, or press—being either shattered or driven underground.

Having handed themselves over body bnd soul to the National-Socialists, many Germans are now wondering ■where the process of the deprivation of their liberties will end. Externally, Hitler's Germany presents an appearance of-freedom. Within, as only too many Germans are aware, it has some of the characteristics of a prison. My friend •was right when lie described the regime as " grim." This is the more apparent now that the ■' ballyhoo " —the tumult and the shouting—which marked tho early stages of the revolution has died away. It is revived on special occasions, such as the great May Day parade at the Templehof Field, in Berlin, and, alas, that rosy rapture should fado so soon, attendance thereat is now compulsory for the workers. Indeed, prior to the delivery of Herr Hitler's dramatic blows at the hated Treaty of Versailles, a deep apathy, so I was informed, had come to possess the people. They may be disunited upon matters of internal concern, but they are as one man in their desire for the reassertion of Germany's prestige in foreign eyes, no less than for their own satisfaction. Reichstag as " A Rubber Stamp " The Reichstag still exists, but it is merely a rubber stamp for the occasional endorsement of the decrees of the junta, which really governs Germanv. All opposition elements have long* been excluded. " Gleichschaltung " (unification) in the totalitarian State, 'that is the objective. " People, party and State must become identified in the Third Reich," so Dr. Goebbels declared a year ago. There is only one party, the National-Socialist Party, only one press, the Nazi Press. Everything must serve the National-Socialist State, and that only. The opposition has been shattered or driven underground. It is rather difficult to gauge the attitude of the workers to the new regime. They are very closely shepherded by Herr Himmler's secret police, and they dread to find an agent provocateur in the apSarentlv disinterested inquirer. The ocialist Parties no longer exist, but, somehow, the Communists retain their cohesion, in spite of the absence of a Communist press. All manifestations of the intellect are rigidlv controlled. The German intellifentsia has either been silenced or has een driven into exile. It is a bad advertisement for National-Socialism that Einstein and the brothers Mann, t ■writers of eminence, should be driven from Germany. Even Music in Chains German films are puerile these days; intelligent people, I was informed, never see them. Music, Herr Hitler's sole cultural interest, also is in chains. Herr Furtwangler, the great conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, boldly protested against the repression of the modernist musi<s of Hindemith and the application of the Aryan clause to musicians. He resigned his offices, but he has since made his peace with the leader, upon terms as yet undisclosed. . The German Press is a shadow or its former greatness. All surviving newspapers have been Nazified. Tile Berliner Tageblatt is a sorry affair these days. The party press is as puerile as the party films, an insult to the intelligence. Alone the Frankfurter Zeitung retains some of its prest.ige. It is used, I understand, by the Foreign Office to reach foreign opinion. While I was in Berlin a series of decrees was promulgated by the Propaganda Ministry of Dr. Goebbels, which can only have the effect of utterly destroying any semblance of liberty the German press might still have enjo3 r ed, and which will bind it still more closely to the Party-State. By these decrees, ■whose avowed object, surely ironical, is "to safeguard the liberty of the press" newspaper proprietors and beneficiaries must prove their Aryan descent back to, 1800. Their effect is to give Nazi supervisory organs unlimited powers of press control. Tragedy ol the Jews There are still about 2000 persons detained in concentration camps. Abuses have been suppressed, so it is stated, but there is an impression abroad that Bome prisoners still receive rough handling by the S.A. guards. The drive against the Jews is continued with unabated energy. They have now boen debarred from citizenship and they may not hoist the Reich colours—the swastika banner in particular —above a priyate or business house. It is an aggravation of the tragedy of the Jews that the Nazi press is specially privileged to vilify their race. A friend of Herr Hitler's, a certain Herr Julius Streicher, who holds party ticket No. 7„ publishes Der Sturmer, a " German weekly paper to uphold the truth," which is a disgrace to Germany and to the press. I purchased a copy of this precious journal. Its front pao-e asserts in large letters that « Jewish doctors are betrayers ot women and murderers " and that the Jews are our misfortune. An article tells the reader " Why the Jew wants to change his name," while sinother describes a ritual murder which allegedly took place in Endingen, in the Upper Rhineland, in 1462. There are numerous references to "Jewish rapers and " Jewish brutes." Exaggeration of Horrors

The anti-Jewish drive is mainly against Jews in the professions—the law, medicine, university professors, etc .Jews in business have not been moiested to any great extent. Measures proposed against department stores, largely * Jewish owned, were stayed when their probable effect upon uncinplovment was realised. The heads of the Jews still remaining in Berlin may, figuratively, be bloody, but they are unbowed, * although naturally those Jews observe a wise restraint. The Jews' tragedy is great, but in justice to the Nazis it should be stated that because international Jewry is financially strong and controls or influences many vehicles of opinion tho extent of the horrors of the purge has been exaggerated. As evidence of this exaggeration it suffices to remark that more than 10,000 Jews who fled abroad at the outbreak of the oppression have 6ince returned to Germany. To me it is a mystery why the far less tragic, in its intensity and in its cost in life and suffering," Nazi oppression of the Jews should be made to loom more darkly in the world press than the Jewish oppression of the Russian people, since most of the Communist leaders are Jews. The aristocratic and bourgeois Russians in Russia have been disfranchised. Scores of thousands of decent Russians, most of whom had no complicity in Tsarist misdeeds, are existing in poverty and worse in foreign lands, and more than three million Russians in Soviet Russia,- have perished in what parlour pink Bolshevists in London and , elsewhere are pleased to call " this interesting experiment." This fact does !§ condone the Nazi treatment of the ; +v Wß> it at least demonstrates that Wy! r ° not singular in their baaf