REPRESSIVE ACTS

Taranaki Daily News, 29 October 1935, Page 8

REPRESSIVE ACTS

LAWS OF NAZI PARTY-STATE.

PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.

The latest repressive acts of Nazi extremism are an ironic commentary on the boasted unity and contentment of the German nation under the Hitler regime, says the Times in an editorial. On all sides the Party-State appears to scent enmity or opposition. Even the Stahlhelm, the staid and patriotic organisation of war veterans, has in most parts of the country been disbanded. The youth and other organisations of the Catholic Church have been dissolved, and its priests conduct their ministrations at the risk of imprisonment. To subjugate the Protestant Church the Party-State is encroaching on its freedom of government, and persecuting pastors and congregations. The law courts, which upheld the opposition Confessional movement in its disputes with the Nazi Reich Bishop Muller, have on that account been superseded by a Government body. All this is in keeping with the general tendency to make justice subservient to State policy, and is one of the features which National-Socialism and Russian Communism have in common. Of the People’s Courts, which have been set up to. adjudicate on political offences according to Nazi sentiment, it can only be said that they are little more than the machinery of party law. And while Catholic and Protestant are harried, the Jew is persecuted with a peculiar virulence. Recently Herr Julius Streicher, Nazi leader in Franconia, and proprietor of an obscene anti-Semitic paper, pilloried the Jews before many thousands of Berliners in an outburst of frantic rhetoric. He demanded drastic legislation, with hard labour and even death for Germans entering into intimate relations with non-Aryans. With the blessing of Dr. Goebbels; if not the approval of the Berlin Government, Jewish visitors are being driven from health resorts, and molestation does not always discriminate between natives and foreigners. The practice of denunciation is encouraged to find German and Jewish victims for the police. By such means the established Government of a great country exhibits its strength.