HITLER’S HUMILIATION PREDICTED

Southland Times, Issue 23948, 14 October 1939, Page 11

HITLER’S HUMILIATION PREDICTED

Politician Who Was Appalled

By

Nazi Methods

JN spite of his threats and loud- * mouthed boasts of invincible military power, Hitler daily draws nearer the hour when he must suffer the humiliation of seeing the collapse of all his vaulting ambitions. War or no war, Nazi Germany’s plan to dominate the whole world by force is doomed to failure.

This is the reassuring message of a man who knows the Nazi Party and its aims from the inside —Hermann Rauschning, Prussian patriot and former Nazi chief, who, in his book, “Germany’s Revolution of Destruction” (Heinemann), makes a sensational attack upon the evils of a regime in which he once believed.

Rauschning, former wealthy land owner, joined the Nazi Party because he saw in it the salvation of his beloved Fatherland. He had fought and been wounded in the Great War. He yearned for the day when Germany would once again take a proud place among the great nations of the earth, and he saw in Hitler the man to lead the country back to recovery. Appalled AND so he became a leader of the National Socialists. He took his place in the Danzig Senate as Nazi President. He was prepared to make any sacrifices for his country—but before the naked, unscrupulous methods of the Nazis he halted, appalled. When they tried to force him to arrest Catholic priests, disfranchise the Jews and suppress rival parties, he turned his back upon them in disgust. In “Germany’s Revolution of Destruction” this man, who once enjoyed the confidences of Hitler, Goebbels and other party leaders, turns the spotlight upon Nazidom and paints a grey picture of its future. It is, he declared, doomed to fail. The Nazis, says Rauschning, want the earth, and they think they will get it. The return of Germany’s colonies would not satisfy them. It would only be a prelude to greater demands, for they look upon world domination as their “Heute gehort uns Deutschland. -- TTT-ll- ”

Morgen die ganze Welt. . . . [“Today we own Germany, tomorrow all the world.”] These are lines taken from a marching song of the Hitler Youth Movement. Thus do the young men and women sing as they march to and fro at those enormous youth rallies that are an important part of modern Naziruled Germany. But even in this marching—perhaps the most effective and most characteristic method of domination employed by National Socialism—Dr Rauschning finds a weakness. “These eternal night marches, this keeping of the whole population on the march, seemed to be a senseless waste of time and energy,” he writes. “Only much later was there revealed in it a cunning purpose, based on a well-judged adjustment of ends and means. “Marching diverts men’s thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality. ’ The ordinary German man-in-the-street listening to the Fuhrer is swayed by the lighting effects, the special platform, the ordered applause and all the other gadgets of a glamour machine. Hitler is deliberately and unceasingly held up to masses as a deity.

Startling Actions ONE of the principal devices for securing National Socialist dominance is the deification of the man. The Messiah-figure of the leader is the indispensable centre of their propaganda, as carefully devised as the whole apparatus of power. “Some time before the seizure of power,” Rauschning writes, “a prominent National Socialist expressed to me his opinion that the figure of the Leader must be withdrawn more. and. more into seclusion and surrounded with mystery. . “He must only come visibly into the presence of the nation by means of startling actions and rare speeches at critical moments in the national destiny.” But Rauschning himself is unimpressed by such methods. “Party members,” he declares, “are beginning to laugh at the Leader’s spiritual outpourings, his- sermons on art, his mediocre German, his crude economics. “Party leaders are getting apprehen- * sive about his speeches; they are ‘dreadful.’ Only among the faithful laity are they still taken seriously as revelations of supreme wisdom.” Crude Conceit

IT is Rauschning’s view that any new revolution in Germany will come, not from the workers, but the young men within the Nazi Party.

Behind a few well-worn cliches of loyalty to the Leader and about the German nation there is concealed an outlook of undiluted materialism and a lust for every sort of violence which

will never be drilled out of the Storm Troops again. The simplicity and crude conceit with which these men flaunt their brutality as though it were something to be proud of shows the results of their education. “They are full of desperately dangerous ideas,” says Rauschning, who, while he was a member of the party, was approached with a proposition to murder an unpopular Senator! But there will be no uprising from the people, he maintains, so long as they believe what the Nazis tell them. When the scales fall from their eyes—anarchy! At the moment the nation is held in bondage by the same methods of autosuggestion that keeps a mesmerized fowl inside a chalk-drawn circle, and meanwhile the poison of unfreedom goes on working.