Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] SATURDAY, 1st JULY, 1933. GERMANY AND COLONIES.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 1 July 1933, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] SATURDAY, Ist JULY, 1933. GERMANY AND COLONIES.

The attitude of Germany towards her lost colonies is a matter to which we should pay somewhat closer attention than as a rule we do.. Complete restoration is the avowed German aim, and since there is no concealment, we ourselves ought not to ignore it. This is no new thing. Even those good souls who believe, or affect to believe, that the Hitler regime has changed Germany for the worse at a single stroke, should realise that there is no real change, but only a dropping of pretences, and that Hitler’s 25 points, openly proclaimed a dozen years ago, included the regaining of the former colonies. An East African journalist contributes to the “National Review” an article on certain phases of this subject which contains a number of vividly revealing statements. How many of us realise, - for example, that “the German Colonial Society has a membership at least twenty times as great as that of the kindred organisations representing the British Empire?” Such a state of things was not produced overnight by any Nazi coup. Dealing with his own particular area, the writer points to the fact that German authors and map-makers still write and speak of “German East Africa,” and that Germany, without a single acre of land in Africa, runs more journals devoted to African affairs than does Great Britain, with all her immense territories in that continent. It may be said, of course, that all this is perfectly natural, and that _ such aspirations are not necessarily to be condemned. But at least it is equally natural for the British in East Africa to resent the notion of a German return. The writer referred to gives ample reasons for this, drawn from both the past and the present. Of these, Hitlerism itself is one of the greatest. His conclusions apply to ourselves. If we wish to test them, we have only to ask whether we would like to see the Germans installed again our own threshold, where many of them plainly say they would like to be. No party among us is prepared to welcome them back unless we count a few sentimentalists who still think that the way to check dangerous forces is perpetually to yield to them —a policy which was tried to the utmost up to 1914, and did not save us from war.