DIFFICULT TASK.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXIV, Issue 829, 1 August 1933, Page 5

DIFFICULT TASK.

Consul Has to Defend Hitlerism. ] SPEECHES IN SYDNEY. (Special to the “Star”) SYDNEY, July 2(5. 1 The Consul-General for Germany in Australia is certainly in a difficult position. For, like every other official representative of the present regime in Germany, he is compelled, by the responsibilities of his post, to put the best possible face upon Hitlerism for the benefit of the rest of the world; and the task is really beyond the powers of anybody less than a superman. This last week Dr Asmis has once more taken up his parable in regard to the. virtues of Hitlerism and the wickedness of the Jews, and through following his instructions too literally :he has involved himself in a curious ! logical tangle. j In one part of his brief, he has been i instructed to explain that Hitler has ; been compelled to put down the Jews 1 because so many of them have mani- { fested strongly Socialist tendencies, and [ might therefor be regarded as “ Bolsheviks in embryo.” But at a later stage of the argument he proceeds to denounce the Jews as a national danger because they had gained control of all the banks, and monopolised the directorates of all the most important financial and commercial concerns in Germany. But surely a Socialist revolution, which the Jews are charged with planning, would sweep away all private capitalism and would select as its first and most acceptable victims those Jewish captains of industry and “ lords of high finance ” who are supposed to be the excuse for this ferocious outburst of the “ Judenhetze ” in Germany to-day \ This sort of reasoning makes one positively giddy. Dr Asmis is said to be a most worthy person, as a private citizen, and I have no doubt that that iis so; but the best advice that his ! friends here could give hjm would be j to abjure Hitlerite propaganda so far i as Sydney is concerned henceforth and 1 forever.