THE CRISIS IN EUROPE

Southland Times, Issue 22915, 13 June 1936, Page 7

THE CRISIS IN EUROPE

HOW GERMANY FEELS FEAR OF WAR ON TWO FRONTS Here is the second of four articles in which leading authorities explain the causes of the present crisis in Europe. Yesterday M. Bertrand de Jouvenel put the case for France; to-day Mr T. P. Conwell-Evans tells how the German feels. The articles have been published in the News Chronicle, London. I was in East Prussia in May, 1933, when all leave for the Reichswehr was •called off because an attack in that region was feared. A feeling of nervous excitement ran through the university at Konigsberg and the students left their studies to acquaint themselves with the use of the rifle, and there were not enough rifles to go round at that time. Professors, including those maimed in the Great War, entered their names for immediate service. Had the Poles attacked, the province could not then have been defended successfully. Fear gripped the population.

In May, 1934, I stood on the borders of the Saar territory and sensed the helplessness felt by the German population as I looked upon the area across the French frontier where lay the terrific fortifications of the Maginot Line. Gunfire from these impregnable defences could shatter the Saar towns almost overnight. In the autumn of 1923 I was in Berlin and saw the effects on the people of actual invasion by the French of the Ruhr industrial district in the West. _ Nation of Proletarians. Germany suffered thereby a defeat worse than Versailles, for the consequent inflation ruined the middle-class and made of Germany a nation of proletarians, as later elections were to show, when 75 per cent, of the votes were cast for on? or other of the revolutionary parties, Socialist, Communist, or National Socialist. The Ruhr invasion in the West gave the Lithuanians their oportunity in the East; they took possession by force of the Memel district, which had been German since 1430. Two years earlier German volunteers were effectively prevented by the French from defending their country against a Polish incursion into Upper Silesia, the future of which was to be decided by plebiscite. A score of British officers laid down their commissions in protest. In the West the French made use of their occupation to connive at a conspiracy which aimed at separating the Rhineland from the Reich. Such were some of Germany’s trials since the Armistice—incursions from the East and from the West: the forced flight of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children across the new frontiers east and west; 120,000 from Alsace-Lorraine. 800,000 from Poland into the diminished and impoverished Reich, left prostrate after a blockade which, continuing seven months after the Armistice, was, according to a committee of doctors responsible, directly or indirectly, for the death of 1,000,000 children. Simultaneous Invasion. The effect of the undernourishment of those years on the temperament of the youth and young men to to-day should not be ignored. Simultaneous invasion or its threat from the East and the West and sometimes from the North as well, has been Germany’s history; in the seventeenth century, during the Thirty Years War which literally decimated half the population; in the eighteenth century during the Seven Years War, when Frederick the Great had to deal in turn with the attacks of the members of a coalition of Russia, Austria and France; in the first years of the nineteenth century, Napoleon’s conquest of Germany and his meeting with the Tsar of Russia at Tilsit, in East Prussia; in the twentieth century, in .1914, when the French came to Russia’s aid and in a secret agreement Russia agreed to the fulfilment of the French ambition, entertained since the days of Cardinal Richelieu, to make the Rhine her frontier. The fear of war on two fronts: That is the main element of the German psychosis, nourished on a movement of events which have been continuous to our day, as I have shown. To the German mind the FrancoSoviet Pact of 1935 gives the movement a new and irresistible impetus; and the Russia of to-day is vastly more efficient, rapidly industrializing herself, impelled by an idea which has the explosive force of a religion, finding powerful instruments in centres of Communism in every country on the Continent and not least in Germany. Strength of Opposition. Bound to Russia by a military convention are the Czechs, bringing Russian bombing planes within half an hour’s striking distance of Berlin. France and her military allies, Poland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Rumania, together furnish front-line armies of 1,500,000 men and 3400 front-line aeroplanes. Russia’s

recent adhesion to this coalition brings to its support an extra 1,300,000 frontline troops and 3000 aeroplanes; the coalition together forms (without England) 2,800,000 first-line troops and 6400 aeroplanes against Germany’s 550,000 troops and 1500 front-line aeroplanes. This sudden accession of strength to the coalition against her caused intense nervousness in Germany, and in this mood of fear she sent her troops into the Rhineland. Fear of Slav expansion westwards is also based on the fact that the birthrate in Poland and Russia is several times greater than in Germany. If the German relaxed his vigil for a generation or two the Slav would crowd westwards as far as the Oder; the Poles had already pushed across the Vistula and in the years 1919-1925 ousted large numbers of Germans from West Prussia—the district popularly known as the Corridor—and East Prussia is threatened. The German minorities in Poland and Czechoslovakia suffer disabilities at the hands of the Slav which vary only in their harshness. Another group of elements of a different order in the German psychosis may be described as an acute sense of unfairness dating from the abandonment of the Wilsonian principles of peace and the punitive character of the Versailles Treaty. To illustrate, the demilitarized zone was disliked by the Germans, not merely because it withheld full sovereignty from their country; in that dislike was something more intimately hurtful. In the German view the zone was imposed because Germany was regarded as the aggressor in the last war, and she must be prevented from repeating her evil deed. “War Guilt Falsehood.” Everybody who has lived in Germany knows what a disastrous effect the war guilt falsehood has had upon the German soul. It is the revolt against this unfair charge that makes the entire German people greet every liberating act of their Leader with an exultation that is almost religious in character. Unfair discrimination in the sphere of armaments, and in the non-applica-tion of the principles of self-determina-tion to Austria and to Danzig and to the German colonies, were the subjects of protest by the Socialist Chancellor Muller, by Stresemann and by Bruning. One set of moral standards for the Allies, another for the Germans. The exclusion of Germany from vital conferences affecting her interests has been and is acutely felt; the most recent being the meeting of the Powers of the Disarmament Conference in Paris in June, 1933, excluding Germany, though she was still a member of the Conference; the Stresa meeting in 1935—the “front” that divided Europe into hostile camps; lastly, the exclusion of Germany from the collective deliberations of th’e Locarno Powers at the present time, although Italy, which, unlike Germany, has violated the Covenant and the Kellogg Pact, is invited to confer with the Powers on the Abyssinian question. Is it fair to condemn Germany tor refusing to make treaties of mutual assistance (in Eastern Europe) which would oblige her to spend life and treasure for the maintenance, for example, of the Polish corridor? Ought we not to recognize that .o pledge herself not to resort to force to change such frontiers is as far as human nature can be asked to go? Again, German friendship with England is interpreted as an attempt to isolate France. This distrust I know to be deeply deplored by the German Chancellor, who stated to me that he had chosen Herr von Ribbentrop as his Ambassador-at-Large because the latter had made it his life task to bring about reconciliation between France and Germany through Britain’s mediation. Lord Lothian in a recent speech stated that unless we were prepared to admit that Germany had a case, we would inevitably drift back to war, and everyone will agree with his concluding statement that all peace must be founded on justice.

On Monday an article will be printed in which Sir Norman Angell examines the root cause of the failure ojj, Britain’s policy.