BITTER AMERICAN

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 58, Issue 4188, 24 May 1939, Page 9

BITTER AMERICAN

VILIFICATION OF NAZIS. AMBASSADOR’S DAUGHTER. Life in Nazi Germany is a nightmare of horror, a purgatory on earth, the horrors ot which are intensified and accentuated by vices, suspicions and. treacheries that used to be associated with an Oriental despotism. A nation once pre-eminent in music and philosophy has degenerated under the cruel yoke of Hitlerism into a submissive race that is too terrified to utter a protest, too cautious even to permit itself to think about the horrors under which it exists.

That is the impression one gets from “My Years in Germany," which has been written by Miss Martha Dod, the daughter of a former American Ambassador in Berlin.

She describes the life that the Ambassador and his family had to lead as “purgatory on earth.” Her father, a close friend ot President Roosevelt, returned to America heart-broken, disillusioned and aged; her .mother came home to die; her brother returned to enter American politics to fight Fascism to the bitter end; and Martha has stormed through 320 pages of the most sustained invective ever hurled against Hitlerism and its soul destroying horrors.

That is what Nazi-ism did to the family of a scholarly old professor who had taken his doctorate in Germany as a young man, and returned as Ambassador, hoping to draw closer together the American and German nations. LACK OF SYMPATHY. In Australia, in South Africa, even in England, he would have been a great success, homely, scholarly, friendly and accomplished in what Rosebery called “the Tom, Dick and Harry business.” For Nazi Germany he was hopelessly out of his element; and his daughter, Miss Dodd, appears to have developed an unreasoning hatred of the Nazis, and has drawn a picture of modern Germany that is unrelieved by light or shade; and in it she has included Ambassadors of Other countries, and foreign journalists in Berlin who would probably rather not have opinions they uttered at Embassy dinner tables broadcast to the world.

The story of the terrorised German people, as Miss Dodd seem them, of the national vices that are destroying domestic happiness, and of the vitiating atmosphere of espionage, suspicion and treachery which nobody can escape, runs throughout the book. Miss Dodd was there in the bloodstained purge of 1934, when men who were worshipped one day with irrational idolatory were shot on the following day as traitors. She say the campaign of hatred loosed against Jews and Communists over the Reichstag fire, and says bluntly that it was caused by Nazi leaders and that Hermann Goering and Rolf Diels, who

was then chief of the Secret Police, knew all about the foul conspiracy.

And before she returned to America last year she saw throughout the whole country the degrading effects of the oppression upon the people, the ferocious vices which it had generated in Nazi followers, and the vices of hypocrisy and pretence that it had generated in those who hated the administration but dared not utter a word against it. Life in Nazi Germany, she says, develepoed into “a system of terrorism that can hardly be matched in the annals of history,” and she believes that the race lias been so degraded that “it will take perhaps generations for the people to put the clock forward again.” “Every human life (she says) has been affected by a system of terror and fear before which the Inquisition, in methods both subtle and base, would pale. As far as human freedom and the liberty of the subject are concerned, Germany is in the Dark Ages.

“The German nation and the German people live by the laws of the savage, by violence, by fierce destruction, by cruelty, persecution and oppression unmatched in civilisation’s history. . . Germany has returned to the rule of the jungle, where man’s primitive and bloodthirsty instincts have been elevated to the law of the land. The Nazi wolves have devoured a nation.”

UNBALANCED CRITICISM. “My years in Germany" is a torrent ot invective that cascades and cataracts from chapter to chapter, growing in intensity until at the end she is shouting in "passion and hope” for American citizens to get ready before it is too late to stem the advancing tide of Fascism.

In her chapters giving personal impressions of the Nazi leaders she is shrewd and illuminating, though here again the pictures are drawn without lights and shades. Hitler is insolent and arrogant, the most nearly insane man and the most fanatical who rules any country of the modern world. He has his charming and delightful moments, but was never known in his conversation to be witty, brilliant or wise. "This tantrum-torn” creature leaped into power with a poorly concealed arson trick, backed by irresponsible gangsters. He has the wiliness of a cat, and at times the blundering brutality of a bull, and he will seek his Holy Grail ot a Nazifled Europe and a Hitlerised Nazidom if, in his frenzied dreams, he has to wade through Hie mire blood, and war inferno of a devasated Europe.

Hermann Goering, once slender, blonde and handsome, is a huge, paunchy blob of flesh that is lumpy and protruding. His vanity and egotism are colossal, his mind and emotion as morose and grandiose as that of Hitler himself. He is greedy and fat, a gourmand, ( and a gourmet, and a most vicious, reckless and dangerous man in Nazi Germany, being ambitious on a grandiose scale, brutal ami ruthless, cold and full of vengeance, fanatical and conscienceless. He- has pursued a ruthless policy of murdering, or eliminating in other ways, all his rivals upon whom he could lay his hands. Dr Joseph Goebbels, the official Jew 'baiter- and controller of the entire German press, is the brains of the Nazi movement, but he has a rodent's ' face as well as a rodent’s mind. He

controls and dictates all Nazi propaganda, arranges all Nazi "circuses,” and he is generally regarded by the German people as tlie relentless fiend of the Third Reich. But lie would be far more dangerous if he were not so unpopular. He is the most hated man in Germany, suspected by everybody excepting by Hitler, and it is certain that if Hitler should die or. be overthrown that Goebbels will be one of the first to go.

In this way Miss Dodd brings scores of leading Nazis under her critical and contemptuous eye, and turns it also on the Ambassadors of other countries, on British politicians, and foreign journalists; repeating Embassy conversations and remarks by her father of different high personages with whom he had dealings, and concludes with some withering references to Mr Chamberlain and M. Daladier, -of France; and tells America that unless she drops her isolationist policy she will find before long that she must fight destructive international Fascism with only Russia as her possible ally.

Miss Dodd calls her book “My Years in Germany.” Many others, possibly her own President, and most likely the Embassy of her own country, will thing of it as “The Blazing Indiscretion of an Ambassador’s Daughter.” At least, however, she can tell a good story, and seems to be unhampered either by good taste or official reticence. She says she wrote the book in "passion and hope.”

Nobody is likely to doubt the passion. That is manifest in every chapter, and almost on every page.