FIFTH COLUMNS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 229, 26 September 1940, Page 5

FIFTH COLUMNS.

TECHNIQUE IN U.S.A.

HOW NAZIS WIN SUPPORT.

(By CHARLES. ESTCOURT.)

NEW YORK, August 24.

There is a strange, rather horrible! • | kind of swamp-life going on under the! surface in Yorkville, and, no doubt, in. other Nazi centres of the United States.; The little we can learn gives some idea' of the Nazi technique for building up a| fifth column. It is no secret that the! Nazis have been building up one in Newj York and started the work before evenj they got into power in Germany at the' beginning of 1933. | Up to 1930 the Nazi organisation here was. strictly low comedy. All one had to do to get a job in the fifth column— on a commission, not a salary basis— was to advertise for it. At least one man we know of got a job as a spy by putting an advertisement in the columns of a New York newspaper. He was hired by mail from Berlin, and after a brief, not very lucrative career, got: himself into gaol, where he is now. Nowadays, the organisation k on a much more efficient basis. It operates like a political bandwagon, although the creakings and rumblings it gives off are a lot more sinister. "Friends and Enemies Indexed." For instance, everybody in Yorkville has been told of the enormous card index the Nazis have in Germany, listing the names and addresses of "more than 20,000,000 friends and enemies in the United States." Whether there is such a card index is not as important as the fact that an unknown number of thousands who have to come in contact with Nazis in the course of their daily life are not willing to refuse to believe it exists. The Yorkville people we've talked to are agreed that the German colony is [divided ten, ten and eighty. Ten per !;oent are violently Nazi. It's a career for 'jthem. Ten per cent are violently anti[iNazi, and, unfortunately, there are no,

funds available to make that a career for! them. Eighty per cent want to be letj alone, and the fight is over them. Nobody can be sure exactly how thej fight is going. But one thing is certain: j The Nazi faction is making headway,. the anti-Nazi faction is not. Hitler'sj successes in Europe, and a horde of *non-1 Germanic recruits among people whoi describe themselves as disciples of j Father Couglilin, have made the Nazi; (faction strong enough to keep the SOi 'per cent from declaring their thoughts.l They have been made to feel that] i declaring themselves for democracy or j against the Nazis would put them out; lon a limb.

A Blitzkrieg Film. In this connection, the showing of | the official Nazi army movie, "Feldzugi in Polen," a highly distorted record of the German blitzkrieg against Poland, is believed to have had an enormous effect. This movie was shown to Nor-1 wegian officials last spring to paralyse, according to Press Association reports. ] resistance to the then projected invasion, j The Nazi drive to win over the neutral j 80 per cent in Yorkville was seriously embarrassed by Hitlers march into the Scandinavian countries and Holland. Norwegians, Danes. Swedes, Finns and Dutchmen surround and populate and do a large business in Yorkville. When they, under the prodding of the news ; from their home countries, began expressing their feelings about the Nazis, a lot of German shopkeepers here suffered.

The film was rushed over and put on display, the word was passed around to see it. This business of passing the word around is attended to in a number of ways, but mostly by mouth. Customers walk into shops and ask the proprietors an<T employees there if they have seen it yet. In addition, there was always a crowd hanging around outside the theatre to see who was going in and. presumably, who was not.

Nazi Business Threat The picture itself is heavily edited to; give an impressive display of Nazi : might. There is not a single dead body . in it. There are no signs of even I momentarily successful resistance to the smashing force of the German Army. The only evidence that Germany might have had something in its way on its| march to Warsaw comes in pictures of < abject prisoners and smashed land- ■ scapes. !j

The net effect of the picture in Yorkville is the widespread feeling that nothing can stand up against Hitler and that, since there is a good chance of a Xazified United States coming into being soon, it is only practical to take action to prevent being stepped on.

This ie exactly what the Xazis hare been telling Yorkville for years. They play a two-string fiddle up there. They say that even if there is not a Xazified United States, this country will have to do business with a Xazified Europe; and Hitler, with his card-index system, will take care that Xazis here get in on th» ground floor of that business.