LIGHT ON HITLER’S TACTICS

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20918, 25 September 1939, Page 6

LIGHT ON HITLER’S TACTICS

Britain has done well to publish the official documents exchanged between Germany and Britain immediately before the outbreak of war so that the public might have an accurate record of the attitude of the nations’ leaders. The tragedy of the position is that it w’as obviously possible to reach a peaceful settlement but, as Mr Chamberlain said, “Hitler would not have it.” It is clear that the German dictator deliberately excluded settlement by negotiation from his mind. He was determined to smash Poland —without intervention by the Allies if possible, but even in the face of the certainty of war if there was no other way. For the first time the details of the diplomatic discussions have been disclosed, and those details have brought home the real difficulties that the Allied statesmen faced far more forcibly than could the stiffly formal communiques usually issued on such occasions. The British Ambassador’s reports to his Government describing his interviews with Herr Hitler throw a revealing light on the personality of the man who holds Germany’s destinies in his hands. Herr Hitler’s replies to the appeals of Sir Nevile Henderson were “excited and uncompromising” and his whole attitude that of a man possessed of a burning and unreasoning ambition which would brook no restraint even on the grounds of logic or of humanitarianism. When the inaccuracy of one line of argument was pointed out to him he went off at a tangent and adopted a different method of attack, and when reasoned argument failed he descended to common blustering. The documents reveal that Herr Hitler and Field-Marshal Goering were not of one mind regarding the premeditated attack on Polish independence. Goering admitted to the British Ambassador to Poland, Sir Howard Kennard, that his personal wish was to maintain friendly relations with Poland, and he regretted that his efforts in that direction had come to naught. He no longer had the influence to do much in the matter. So apparently Herr Hitler rejected the advice of his own right-hand man as well as that of foreign diplomats. The documents as a whole are a striking condemnation of Herr Hitler as a national leader and as a man.