The Southland Times FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1939. Transfer of German Minorities

Southland Times, Issue 23947, 13 October 1939, Page 6

The Southland Times FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1939. Transfer of German Minorities

THE wholesale repatriation of German citizens from the Baltic countries has puzzled observers, who are attempting to decide whether Hitler is ready to give Stalin a free hand in the northern region, possibly in return for support elsewhere, or whether Stalin has issued orders which the Nazi leader is not in a position to disobey. According to one Soviet statement the exodus has been arranged in Moscow as a means of removing the motive for intervention found by the Nazis in the existence of “oppressed German minorities. This may be part of the explanation, although it should not be beyond the powers of Hitler and his advisers to find other and equally useful excuses for aggression if the opportunity occurs. Moreover, the Nazis have already carried out a large-scale transfer of population in the £>outh Tyrol, where 210,000 persons were forced to return to the Reich at short notice. (“Return” is not quite the word to use in this case, for thousands of families had been established in the Tyrol for generations.) It will be remembered, too, that in his Reichstag “peace” speech Hitler spoke of a new order in Europe “based on ethnographic conditions.” If he means to extend the method of forced migration to other parts of Europe he will have to face difficulties, not only in the internal distribution of population in Germany, but in the ramifications of a policy that implies a crude and erroneous conception of national life.

Dangerous Fallacy

The idea that States should be racially homogeneous is unreal in theory and dangerous in practice. In a continent like Europe, where a wide variation of racial types exists in almost every country, an attempt to separate German people from the environment and social relations that have been developed over long periods, in some cases for centuries, must cause hardship, discontent and a spreading sense of insecurity. Migrations take place in response to a strong communal impulse; to reverse the process and to arrange a violent uprooting of families and societies is to deny the last value of human freedom. Unfortunately the totalitarian States have shown an increasing tendency to organize the mass transference of populations as if individuals had been reduced to the status of cattle. Even while the Germans are being shipped in thousands to the Reich, trainloads of Poles are- following the melancholy route to Siberia. During the struggle between the Soviet Government and the peasants of the Ukraine a few years ago hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were herded in cattle trucks to the forced labour camps of the far north. This utter indifference to humane considerations is one of the most tragic results of totalitarian doctrine. In Germany it may contribute to the downfall of the Nazi regime, for it cannot fail to mean the appearance of centres of discontent in a population already troubled and bewildered by wartime hardships.

Balkan Frontiers

It has been suggested that the transfer of minorities will be used for the rectification of frontiers in the Balkans, and it is not impossible that the Nazis and the communists will co-operate in a racial distribution intended to fix ethnical boundaries in the disputed regions of the south-east. Crude action of this kind might arbitrarily bring about a frontier revision; but it would create more causes of friction than those which might be removed, and it would almost certainly lead to a swift change of policy in Italy. Racialism has been used by Hitler as the background for a national revival in Germany, where its fallacy has already been exposed. Apparently he now believes that the principle can be extended to the wider field of international politics. There can be no great difficulty in recognizing it as the negation of all the values to be found in political and social evolution, and directly against the idea of the potential unity of mankind which remains the only true basis for peace in Europe.