HITLERISM AND THE PRESS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22102, 4 November 1933, Page 10

HITLERISM AND THE PRESS

The release from durance and the expulsion from Germany of Mr Noel Panter, correspondent of the Daily Telegraph at Munich, ring down the curtain upon an episode which would be ridiculous but for its international significance. The sensitiveness of dictatorships to criticism is notorious. As the Hitler Government has been the latest to demonstrate, one of its first steps after the Seizure of power is to muzzle the press. The offence of the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent was that he sent to his paper an account of a Nazi demonstration in which he included descriptive details of a kind which , the German Government does not wish to see published. The effect of the incident upon foreign opinion can only be to encourage the belief that the German Government has been endeavouring to conceal the military aspects of these Nazi celebrations. Otherwise why should it be perturbed because Mr Panter mentioned the firing of salutes in Herr Hitler’s honour, the inspection of the ranks by the chief of staff, and the participation of the Reichswehr? The arrest of Mr Panter apparently represents an attempt on the part of the Hitler Government to exercise abroad a censorship comparable to that which it has established within the boundaries of the German Reich. The example that has been made of Mr Panter is to serve, no doubt, as a warning to . the correspondents, of other British and foreign journals. Had the German authorities gone the length, as seems to have been seriously contemplated, of putting him on trial for espionage and high treason, they would have carried their foolishness to a still higher point of absurdity, with intensification of the bad impression which their high-handed procedure has been calculated to create abroad. Nazi Germany’s apprehension of being misinterpreted abroad is amusing when it is considered in the light of the utterances of her leaders and the decrees and actions by which they are apparently content to ibe judged. To the British mind a Government which is afraid of the free expression of public opinion displays weakness rather than strength. The freedom of the press is bound up with the whole idea of change and progress. As has been pointed out in' the Manchester Guardian, which came at an early stage under the ban of Hitlerism, Germany had become a highly industrialised country, a leader in science and arts, and possessed of a press which for variety and full treatment of all aspects of human life was second to none. “But with the access to power of Fascism many hundreds of newspapers have been suppressed or have been prohibited from entering the country, and a rigid uniformity of thought is imposed by every device of brutal intimidation, even to mention which is punishable in Germany by death.” The contrast is striking. , s