NOW AN ANTI-NAZI

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 84, Issue 70, 25 March 1940, Page 3

NOW AN ANTI-NAZI

S SWEDISH ARISTOCRAT BONFIRE OF HITLER’S PICTURES l RELATIVE OF GOERING LONDON, March 2. Count Eric von Rosen, a Swedish aristocrat, who gave the swastika s symbol to the Nazi party 20 years ago, has made a public bonfire of his gallery of tributes from the Nazi chiefs. This is the story, unpublished yet in any Swedish papers, which is going the rounds in Stockholm. i Twenty-two years ago Count von 1 Rosen, famous for his eastern and : African explorations, made a personal , gift of a warplane to the Finnish “White’’ forces then fighting ths Finnish Socialists and their Russian allies. He had it marked with the sign of the swastika. To Sweden a few’ months later came young Captain Hermann Goering, a refugee from the German revolution of 1918. Within a few months he had wooed and wed lovely Countess Fock, a sister of Count von Rosen’s wife. I Back with him to Germany he took ! the swastika symbol and made it—- . turned the unlucky way round —the ensign of Hitler’s fight against Communism. Goering’s first wife died, but he never forgot her memory and a few weeks after the present Finnish war broke out von Rosen visited

Germany and sought out his former brother-in-law. “If your wife’s memory means anything to you,” he said, “if you have any respect for the symbol which the Finnish blood consecrated before your Nazis took it, I appeal to you. Step in and put Germany’s weight in the scale. Save the Finns to-day.” The Marshal’s reply it is said amounted to one word: “Impossible.” The interview was soon over. Count von Rosen returned to Sweden with a set face. He called together the tenants of his great country estate at Rockelstad Manor, 50 miles south of Stockholm. Before their eyes he burned the signed portraits of Hitler and of other Nazi chiefs that he had received since he first suggested to the party its standard.