GERMAN PEOPLE

Southland Times, Issue 23376, 7 December 1937, Page 11

GERMAN PEOPLE

ENTHUSIASM FLAGS HOME REFORMS WANTED No dictatorship has ever contrived to kill criticism and opposition outright; neither in Russia after twenty years, nor in Italy after fifteen; neither in the ancient Rome of Sulla, Nero, Diocletian, norm Nazi Germany. Education means independence and criticism, says a writer in The Economist. Germany plunged into dictatorship four and a half years ago, adds the writer, with the most highly educated middle class of all the Great Powers and the best educated working class. During the last few months discontent with, and criticism of, the Nazi Party-State and regime has grown very much in both these classes; among the well-to-do traders, landlords, industrialists, functionaries, bankers, and professional men, and among their clerks, labourers, craftsmen, assistants, and artisans. Despite the party’s endeavour to mitigate the steady reduction in real wages by sharpening the attack on industrial profits and the pronertied class, the workers have shown that they want social reform, not foreign glory; better conditions at home and in the factory, not conscription ending in death on unknown battlefields; socialization of the chief consumption-goods industries and services, not State control of them for reasons of Wehrwirtschaft. NO IMPROVEMENT After the three and a half years of diplomatic triumphs, the last year has given neither employers nor workers any foreign triumph or any domestic improvements. The Reichswehr s and Party’s experimentation with men and machines in the Spanish quarrel has brought no glory; only disturbing reflections for the Reichwehr and the bereaved relatives of men “accidentally killed on manoeuvres” alike. Thus a dry-rot enthusiasm for the party regime has developed to a point at which the local party organization has had to stem a return of the popular tide towards the Churches and the family circle, where liberty of expression has had a renascence. Youth, too, has begun to show signs, not of rebellion against party drill and discipline, but of that dangerous boredom which is born as soon as none sees to what concrete achievements the drill and discipline conduces. University students, too, have recently begun to seek out the remaining tutors whose independent spirit and objective philosophy underwent no profitable sea-change with the advent of the dictatorship. Thus, the inquiring spirit of man always highly developed among Germans, even in the very young, has begun to probe beyond the bounds laid down by the party. This has led to a lack of Nazi-guar-anteed young civil servants; for more and more of the young go cheerfully into the Reichswehr or busmess, the two realms within the Third Reich where the party writs run slowest.