THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES FRIDAY, March 1, 1940. DARKNESS IN EUROPE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24236, 1 March 1940, Page 6

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES FRIDAY, March 1, 1940. DARKNESS IN EUROPE

In his eloquent address to an audience at Oxford University the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, remarked that always it was the spirit behind the application of force which made or marred its value. “ What is at stake in this war,” he said, “is whether the nations that desire peace must perpetually be faced with war if they are not prepared to accept any settlement that force may seek to impose upon them.” At an earlier stage Lord Halifax had named German youth as being the driving force behind the Nazi movement. The youth of Germany, he declared, had been deliberately deprived of the elements of true judgment; they had made National Socialism and still sustained it. “ Their point of view stands in stark opposition to yours,” the Foreign Secretary told his hearers. “ They do not understand your way of thinking. Your ideals mean nothing to them. They have their own ideals, which to our minds are distorted and deformed, but for which hundreds of thousands of them are prepared without a moment’s hesitation to sacrifice their lives.” The tremendous responsibility of Nazi-ism for producing this present result may be recognised and admitted. Yet the truth goes deeper than the comparatively recent appearance of Herr Hitler and his ruthless party machine. For centuries, as is a matter of record, the idea of a German Reich has been imperialist and anti-European in conception and in its practical consequences. The Reich, a recent historian has maintained, has never shown itself to be “ a good European.” . . . Only and always has it been concerned with the imposition on a recalcitrant Continent of the pax Germanica. It would be exceedingly difficult to find evidence in history to show that “ Reichspolitik ” has ever limited itself to the idea of an Empire of all the Germans. The Nazi technique of raising first the cry of “ selfdetermination ” and then, when the efficacy of the slogan has been exhausted, the less morally camouflaged demand for “living space,” is a technique far older than National Socialism. It has had its counterpart in every forward period of German history. Herr Hitler himself, when he achieved power and saw himself in the position to attempt the realisation of a nightmare ambition, was able to look back upon four wars “ wantonly begun in a lifetime ” for spreading German territory, or for making other peoples subject. His own performance shows plainly that he found inspiration in a study of the German tradition. Each of the four wars—of 1864, 1866, 1870 and 1914—was as parefully planned as the fifth, in which the Fuhrer has now embroiled Europe. This confession of aim, in “ Mein Kampf,” is sufficient to illustrate the point:

To-day we number 80,000,000 Germans in Europe. But the rightness of my foreign policy will not be established until, inside a century, 250,000,000 Germans are living on this Continent —and living, moreover, not herded together as workshop coolies for the rest of the world to exploit, but as peasants and workers, assuring each other’s livelihood by their products.

The world knows how the process of demonstrating the “ rightness ” of Herr Hitler’s foreign policy was begun. It also knows, or most of it knows, that it will end with this war. What Lord Halifax was perhaps concerned to show, in his Oxford address, was the formidable extent to which the pan-German concept of a Teutonic Empire had received expression at the hands of National Socialist Germany. It is recognised as the truth that German youth has been absorbed utterly by the movement that is represented by Hitlerism. Regimentation and early training in Germany take no account of sex. There are tasks for all and a state of mind to produce in each youthful citizen. The young man commences his actual soldiering at about 20 years of age, but he has already been for years a member of the Hitler Youth and has had six months of training in a labour camp. His apprenticeship has been served, he is malleable material for the army instructor and, more importantly, for the needs of the State saturated with National-Socialist ideas. The military training does nothing to alter that mental state. He trains and gradually comes to feel himself “as soldier, soldier, soldier, and nothing else—and grows to be proud of it.” That, in part, is what Lord Halifax had in mind when he spoke of the “ impenetrable barrier ” dividing the German youth from their British contemporaries—the barrier that would have to be broken down if the youth of Europe was to avoid living always in a waste land, and if the European temple of civilisation was to deserve and win a “ rekindling of the lamps.”