HENLEIN PURGED

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 47, 12 February 1943, Page 3

HENLEIN PURGED

The latest victim of Himler's purge of the Nazi ranks is Konrad Henlein, a leader of the "Sudeten" Nazis and Hitler's most important tool in bringing about the Munich crisis and dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. According to Nase Noviny, a Czechoslovak daily in London, Henlein has been imprisoned.. He shares his cell with Dr Walter Darre, ouster German Minister of Agriculture:. The arrest of Henlein is another sign of continuing disintegration of the Nazi party owing to the strain caused by the unfavourable turn of events on the Eastern front, where the. Germans were able to gain new territories but unable to .crush the Russian armies and achieve speedy victory. Henlein organised, the revolt of the Nazi Germans rn Czechoslovakia. He founded the Sudeten German Party, which started as a parity opposing by legal means the alleged oppression of Germans in Czechoslovakia and later inaugurated the revolutionary movement appealing for outside help from Hitler against Czechoslovakia. From the beginning to the end this party was; supported by Hitler to serve liim as a pretext for meddling in Czechoslovak internal affairs. By employing Henlein as a willing tool, Hitler, posing as a protector of the German minority in Czechoslovakia, succeeded in making of all the Czech people a minority in Germany. The alleged oppression of one group of German people Avas rectified by him by enslaving the entire Czech nation. While the Germans in Czechoslovakia constituted the best treated German minority in Europe—certainly much better treated than the German minority in Italy, Germany's ally—the Czech minority in Hitler's Reich is most brutally persecuted and threatened with annihilation.

Henlein served his master well. But the d : ay of his glory is gone. Apil is not 1 well not only with the Czechs in the "Protectorate" but also with the Germans in the socalled Sudetenland, where consternation Avas caused by the huge losses of men on the: Russian front. Hitler gave his "Sudetens." ample opportunitj r to for their "deliverance," for which they had to pay in Mood;.,

The cost is appalling. The flower of the Sudeten German youth was destroyed in Russia.. Discord and dissatisfaction prevails in the Sudetenland. No number of soothing speeches delivered by Henlein was sufficient to improve the weakened morale of the "Sudetens." To-day the once famous leader of the Sudeten German revolt finds himself, in a German jail.