GERMAN UNITY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22259, 11 May 1934, Page 16

GERMAN UNITY

SEVENTEEN STATES HERE, HITLER'S ACHIEVEMENT. The German Reichstag has now, on the first anniversary of Herr Hitler's becoming head of the Government, passed into law the Bill for the Reconstruction of the Reich. Six hundred obedient deputies, all members of the Nazi Party, put this, sixclause measure through all its stages in a matter of a. few minutes by the simple process of rising to their feet as an expression of assent, when the first clause was put to them, and not resuming their seats until the third reading had been satisfactorily disposed of. They thus accomplished a reform which had been a definite_ aim of enlightened German statesmanship for more than a century, and a more or less realised need of the German people for nearly three centuries, writes E. C. Bentley in the Daily Telegraph. They brought that in other words, under one national Government with full powers, such as every other national Government in Europe possesses. MAKESHIFT GERMAN EMPIRE.

The Germans are not commonly thought of, outside, their own country, as lacking in any of the essentials of nationhood; and certainly they possess most of them. They are predominantly of one race. They have one language and one culture. They have an intense national pride and patriotism, which in our own time have enabled them, as a people, to support unparalleled strain and suffering in the greatest of wars. What Germans have not, and never have had since they were weided into one nation by Bismarck, is a sound machinery of national government. The German Etnoire created iri 1871 was a makeshift. It was a federation, a grouping together of German States which had existed in independence for centuries, and which had frustrated more than one earlier attempt to bring them into unity. . Hitherto, in the ordinary affairs of life, the German citizen has felt the control of the State in which he dwelt much more than the control of the Reich, the central authority. His particular State, too, might be a well-governed and progressive community, or it might be the reverse. ■ ■.' Yet through the Middle Ages the Germans were a united people under one strong Government. The immense disaster of the Thirty Years' War shattered their unity. It has never been restored until now. ■'■'. ■ '

STATES WITHIN THE REPUBLIC. The empire of 1871 was no carefullyplanned and scientific Federal system, such as that of the United States of America. It included great kingdoms, small grand-ducal sovereignties, and a few little city States which were not even monarchies. Some had to be brought into the union on their own terms. Up to the time of the Great War the Kings of Bavaria, Saxony, and Wurtemburg had the right to be represented diplomatically in foreign capitals; and their armies, though at the disposal of the Reich, were separately organised. Every State, great, or small, retained powers such as, in all 'other modern countries, belong to the national Government. The very fact that the German Emperor must always be King of Prussia, the greatest of the States, emphasised ?he unbalanced and irrational nature of the central organisation. In essentials, that organisation has existed up to the present day. Despite the changes made on the establishment of the Republic in 1919, the administrative map of Germany remained, in this age of planning, a manifest absurdity. Prussia still includes two-thirds of the territory and more than half the population of Germany; other States range in extent from the 30,000 square miles of Bavaria to the 100 square miles of Bremen. Independent State powers, though reduced, have remained as a practical handicap on political development, being carefully safeguarded by the constitution of the Republic. It provided, for instance, that in case of any dispute about powers any State could drag the Reich Government before the Supreme Court for a decision. HITLER'S BLOW FOR SINGLE POWER. What the Reichstag has now done, at Herr Hitler's orders, is to destroy all the remaining independent powers of the.. 17 Federal States. Before Hitler no statesman, and no political force, has been strong enough to root out these hampering relics.of German " particularism." ■■- * " . ' After the war the Constitution-makers at Weimar had the old ideal of unification before them. There was a group that fought for the abolition of the his-, toric State boundaries, and a rational system of provinces subordinate to the Centre, on the general European model. But no more than a certain extension of the powers of the Reich was achieved. The reform of which Liberal patriots had dreamed ever since the fall of Napoleon seemed far enough away, if it could not be accomplished after every throne in Germany had crashed down in ruin. It had been the rulers, from the Kings of mighty Prussia to the princes of tiny Lippe, who clung obstinately to a system that perpetuated their own dignity and traditions. It was the peoples of the separate States, kingless. and princeless now, -who seemed not less loath to be drawn together.. . . ■ Hitler has chanced all that; and the astonishing ease with which he has done so is at least as striking a proof of the strength of his movement- as anything that has gone before. * . ; , >. Until he come to. power, the. bare suggestion of a measure so sweeping would have aroused overwhelming and furious opposition. To-day, without an audible whisper of protest having arisen, even from Bavaria, the historic storm-centre of " particularist" sentiment, nothing is lett but the bare geographical framework of the old States. Even that, as Hitler's own repeated words make plain, is doomed to give way to a better balanced system of provincial districts with no more powers —probably a good deal less —than those of our own county administrations. We had, at least, given Germany warning enough.' The final article of the "unalterable " Nazi programme, adopted just 14 years ago in Munich, calls for "a strong central power of the State," with " unquestioned authority over the entire Reich." :.'"••■■ . In his " Mein Kampf, written a few rears later, the leader pronounced the doom of the States' independence. As Chancellor, he made a beginning by appointing State Governors responsible directly to himself. Last September he stated plainly that it was the task of the Nazis to "liquidate" the Federal States. Now they are stripped of everything. Their Parliament are abolished. All sovereignty is vested in the Reich, and every State Administration is placed under Reich authority, exercised by the Ministry of the Interior. In the lifetime of men still surviving there was no German union, but upwards of a score of German kingdoms Thp satire of Thackeray has preserved the type of many of those little autocracies, in his Grand Duchy of Kalbsbraten-Pumper-nickel. - In the eighteenth century there were 300 of them, each with its own court, army, laws, coinage, and customs bar- , riers. ... .

After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War and the unity of the first German Empire, there were some 1800 independent German fragments. By coalescence or simple annexation the number was narrowed down through the centnres to the 17 States of the present Republic. Now they are absobed in the national unity at last; and this is the work of Adolf Hitler.