UNHAPPY RETURNS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24896, 21 April 1942, Page 4

UNHAPPY RETURNS

The world will not have rejoiced upon the occasion of Adolf Hitler's birthday. There is not a nation throughout Europe, and certainly none elsewhere on this troubled sphere, that loves him. There is not one that even likes him. If any significance in this rather wretched anniversary is to be sought, it lies in the restrained transports with which even the Nazi hierarchy are celebrating it. Dr Dietrich has recommended that the day should be passed in meditation. No doubt it will be, for the German people have much to meditate upon as their Fuhrer passes another annual milestone in that singular career which has made him the uneasy master of the greater part of Europe, and has plunged half the world's peoples into the miseries of privation and the agonies of war. They can meditate upon victories which have brought them no rewards; upon a million of German lives spent vainly and sacrificed ruthlessly in the satisfaction of the ambitions of a paranoiac; they can meditate, with acute discomfort, upon the visits of the R.A.F. to their cities, which Marshal Goering had assured them could never be bombed; and, most grimly of all, they can meditate upon the future that awaits Germany in a Europe which has learned in oppression to execrate the name of Hitler, in a world that will have risen in arms to overthrow a tyranny on a scale and of a violence without precedent in the turbulent pages of history. Nor will the period of meditation, perhaps, be confined to Herr Hitler's subjects and vassals. The Fuhrer himself, who is reaching an age when more sober philosophies become a man than those contained in " Mein Kampf," has cause for sombre thought. His struggle, nowadays, is not going well. Russia, that " gigantic Reich of the East," which as long

ago as 20 years he wrote was " ripe for a collapse," and whose defeat his spokesmen actually announced some months back, is unsettling his most certain predictions. In the west the United Kingdom, having withstood the shocks and blasts of his Luftwaffe, is now responding in kind, to a degree which translates the incomparable air power of Germany into the past tense. From the New World of America men and materials are pouring into the battle zones, to co-operate with the democracies already hardened in the furnace of war in making the fiftyfourth year of the Fuhrer's existence one of acute difficulty for him. It is not his happiest birthday that Herr Hitler celebrates, esconsed uncertainly behind his battered Nazi lines somewhere in Russia. His own silence acknowledges the fact, and the invisibility of one who on earlier occasions made his anniversary the spectacular occasion for parade and peroration accentuates it.