GERMAN ACTIVITIES

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 63, Issue 4490, 15 October 1941, Page 7

GERMAN ACTIVITIES

HITLER’S AGENTS IN JAPAN. NAZI FIFTH COLUMN. Every Japanese ship that left San Francisco in July-August carried to Japan some of the German officials who found their occupation gone since the American Government closed the German Consulates, said a correspondent of “The Times.” They were the organisers and paymasters of the Fifth Column in the United States, and they were sent to Japan to reinforce the column which takes its orders from Major-General Eugen Ott, the German Ambassador in Tokio. So important is their mission that when Captain Fritz Wiedemann, German Consul-General at San Francisco, and Dr Johannes Borchers, German Consul-General in New York, were prevented from sailing in a Japanese steamer they made frantic efforts to avoid being sent home across the Atlantic. MANY AGENTS. When all the trade channels were open German residents in Japan numbered a few hundred, mostly business men. To-day there is no trade whatever between Japan and Germany, yet more than 3000 Germans live in Japan. The small colony of teachers and traders at Omori, outside Tokio, has become a large community. Most of the Germans in Tokio are registered with the Japanese police as technicians, business men, journalists, and plain tourists, sightseeing in a world at war. Although the Nazi Press has been “unified,” German correspondents in Tokio outnumber those of all other nations combined. D.N.8., the official news agency, maintains a large office. The various “Beobatchers” have their resident correspondents, and an astonishing number of provincial journals are able to station representatives in Japan. Not all are devout Nazis, but all are regular in their attendance at the German Embassy. The Fifth Column is perhaps the only practical form of propaganda in a country sealed against all ordinary public communications. In Japan to own a wireless set capable of receiving short-wave broadcasts is a criminal offence. Imported sets are altered by the police before they can be installed. The Press is censored; the only news agency is part of the Government’s publicity system. The two formerly independent newspapers, one British, the other American, which a few thousand Japanese used to read for information, were recently bought by emissaries of the Foreign Office and transferred to Japanese control. ANTI-AMERICAN. To keep England and America apart has always been one of the primary aims of Japanese policy. In the early stages of the China war, Japanese readers were fed with the false news that England was the main source of supply to China, and the prime leader of international opposition to Japan. American antagonism was merely a sentimental tendency to sympathise with the underdog and a misunderstanding of Japan’s true aims. Several innocent Japanese editors who undertook “goodwill missions” to the United States were disillusioned by the popular anger they encountered from coast to coast. After Washington had abrogated the treaty of commerce and navigation it became impossible to maintain the fiction of American benevolence. Germany does not rest content with the influence she can bring to bear indirectly on the Japanese reading public. In 1938 a Tokio Tammany politician bought control of the “Hochi Shimbun,” then about to be sacrificed by its creditors. The “Hochi” became more German than the Germans. It and the “Kokumin Shimbun” are to-day the principal propagators of the idea that German victory is as good as won, and that now is the time to attack Singapore and seize the Dutch East Indies. The aim of the German inspirers of this publicity is war between Japan and the United States. CONTACTS WITH ARMY. Contact with the Japanese Army is maintained through the special military experts and liaison officers assigned to the German Embassy for the exchange of information. Japanese soldiers have always had an inordinate admiration for the German Army. They are attracted by its arrogance and contempt of civilians, its lofty position in the State, no less than by its disciplinary and strategic traditions. Its defeat in 1918 was a shock; the fiction which ascribed the lost battles to a collapse of civilian morale was nowhere more gratefully swallowed than in Japanese officers’ lecture rooms. General Ott’s men cultivate their opposite numbers, the young staff officers who are the real driving force of the still half-feudal and virtually autonomous Japanese Army. German victories furnish their “talking points,” and whether the inside information they offer deals with the tactics of mechanised war, or aerial terror, or the technique of planting quislings in Norway and “tourists”

in Rumania, it is welcome to Japanese professional soldiers who have nothing to give in exchange except their potent political influence. One of the most notorious reactionaries in Japan is Seigo Nakano, leader of a Fascist party whose members include some of the toughest bullies in the underworld of “patriotic” politics. Nakano visited Berlin and was impressed to find an organisation like his own running the Government. The Fifth Column in Tokio established contact with him on his return. NAZI PROPAGANDA. The Fifth Column feeds Japanese vanity. Early in its history a wellknown Hamburg magnate made a long stay in Japan and exercised his great knowledge of business to convince Japanese commercial leaders of

j the innocuousness of the Nazi regime. I Later the Duke of Saxe-Couburg- [ Gotha, interesting to Japanese as the grandson of Queen Victoria, went twice to Tokio, ostensibly on International Red Cross business. The affable old prince certainly did not view himself as a Fifth Columnist or preach the National-Social doctrine in its full strength. His function was to demonstrate to Japanese aristocrats its high responsibility. Recently some German mission has arrived in Tokio every other week with special credentials to some organised Japanese interest youth, education, athletics, commerce, or art. The missionaries have gone through all the ceremonial which has bdcome patriotic good form in Japan. An effective instance of the publicity value of this performance was furnished by the arrival in Tokio of

some Germans taken from a Japanese liner by a British cruiser and subsequently released. Their first act was to parade to the Imperial Palace and testify gratitude for their deliverance with bows and Nazi salutes. In the smokerooms of Pacific liners' those same men, according to the testimony of neutral fellow - passengers, were not backward in expressing their contempt for the “yellow dwarfs.”