GERMAN DESIRE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4557, 8 April 1942, Page 6

GERMAN DESIRE

DESTRUCTION OF BRITAIN “The destruction of Britain has always been the main plank in the resonant Teutonic platform. ‘The ill-will against England,’ wrote Sir Max Waechter in May, 1913, ‘is so great in Germany that the masses would have greeted the outbreak of war in 1911 with enthusiasm’—as they did in 1914, a ‘people’s war’ like this one. There was, indeed, widespread disappointment at the avoidance of war in 1905. War propaganda among the German workers had been in full blast since the ’nineties. All German policy, including economic policy, was based on the normality of war. As early as the ‘seventies, for all effective religious purposes, Protestanism in Prussia was dead—even Carlyle saw this. ‘The heart of Prussia was pagan to the core.’ The ‘Spectator’ rightly anticipated at the time that ‘some strange and dangerous form of fanaticism, would come forward as a substitute. The Germans had even then begun to ‘organise their great resources so as to be at the mercy of almost any principle which may spring into the vacant seat of the old religious beliefs.’ There you have National Socialism portrayed two generations ahead of its official birth in ‘the strongest and least civilised country in the world.’ ... In 1917 the Kaiser would have liked to stop the war to his advantage, detach France, and prepare for the Second Punic War—his own words—against England, with the whole Continent ranged behind him. What else is Hitler doing?”—Lord Vansittart in the “Sunday Times,” London.