GERMAN PEOPLE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 77, Issue 34, 9 February 1934, Page 6

GERMAN PEOPLE

MUST BE RACE-MINDED BUT MEANING IS VAGUE DANGER OF THE JEWS The powers that rule the new Germany are determined that it shall, first, last, and all the time, be “raconiindcd,” writes Guido Enderis iu the Now York Times. This race-minded-ness is the one outstanding differentiation between German Fascism and its Italian prototype. No one in or out of Germany knows exactly what is meant by “race” in the terminology of the new Reich, except that it is directed against the Jews, but this very vagueness appears no whit to lessen the magic of the “race appeal.” Somehow, it is assumed, this will generate a now Reich, a new nation, and a new civilisation—a new literature, a new art, and a new system of jurisprudence—purely Teutonic. With the exception of Chancellor Hitler no one in Germany can expound this theory with greater authority than Dr. Wilhelm Frick, Reich Minister of the Interior. Yet even Dr. Frick takes recourse to hi sleadcr’s elucidation of the race problem as incorporated in Nazi dogma. The current issue of the German “Jurists’ Gazette,” the leading organ of the legal profession, accords him its place of honour for a dissertation that aspires to be a defence of the Government’s treatment of the racial problem as dealt with in German legislation. Dr. Frick prefaces his pronouncement with the following quotations from Herr Hitler’s pen: “Miscegenation and the sinking racial level resulting from it are the sole cause of the extinction of ancient civilisations; for peoples do not perish because they have lost wars, but from the loss of that power of resistance which resides only in pure blood. “All in this world that is not of good race is so much trash. And all history is only the manifestation of the self-preservation drives of different races.” The One Way The words of Chancellor Hitler, says Dr. Erick, signalise the importance oi the racial question for every nation, blurting from the conviction that the future of the German people can be safeguarded only through purity of race, the National {Socialist Government, tho Interior Minister asserts, has enacted its racial legislation, and this, he adds, has been exposed both al home and abroad to multiform attacks and misrepresentations. After postulating “purity of race” as the sine qua non for the future Germany, Dr. Frick admits that the Germans do not constitute a pure race at all. “bo many ethnic cyclones nave roared over our old Europe that there is very little left of pure racial stock anywhere,” he writes. All that can bo claimed for the German people, he concedes, is that though it is a mixture of “races” it is still “Nordically accentuated,” A danger to the German people, however, is constituted by tho Jews, according to Dr. Erick, because they are sharply diffeientiated from its racial constituents. He alleges that although aggregating only 15 per cent, of the populaiiou in Germany, the Jews from 1918 onward, helped by an influx of more Jews from Eastern Europe, gained a disproportionate influence economically, financially, culturally and politically. “National Socialism was keenly alive to this danger from its very inception,” Dr. Frick continues. “Its programme, published as early as .1920, took full account and it drew pertinent conclusions. National Socialism is founded on the ‘folk concept’’ and by it stands or falls the party, the movement, and the German Reich that have become one with it.” Basis of Legislation Tho core of the legislation enacted to date, Dr. Erick explains, is the “Aryan paragraph” iu the Civil Service Act; it established a criterion of race instead of mere citizenship. {Subject to such modification as each field required, he points out, the law was extended to ell public servants down to unskilled labourers and to the entire domain of tho liberal occupations, above all the lawyers and physicians, among whom the percentage of “non-Aryans” was even mumhigher than in the civil service. Among the measures for “eliminating or at least reducing these alien elements,” Dr. Frick enumerates the school and university laws. He also lays special emphasis on tho Peasant Hereditary Homestead Act, designed to reserve the land exclusively to pure “Aryans.” Tho Aryan principle has also been applied to spoils and physical training in general, which Chancellor Hitler himself has characterised as “one of the most important cultuial foundations of tho new Germany.” The extension of the Aryan clause to the Protestant churches, Dr. Frick explains, has proved impracticable for the time being and action in that direction has had to be revoked because of “difficulties arising from dogmatic questions as well as legal doubts.” AVith respect to the Catholic Church, Dr. Frick adds, “no such attempts have been made at all.” Finally, Dr. Frick declares, the Aryan clause has been extended also “to the cultural domain as well &s ot private business enterprise.” He only warns against zeal overshooting the mark in these fields. “Germany’s racial legislation may as yet appear obscure and enigmatic to other countries, but the time is not far off when they wil] not only understand it but adopt it themselves,” he concludes. “Until then, at all events, they should exercise restraint in theii adverse criticism and let the German people seek salvation after their own fashion."