The Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. WED. AUGUST 14, 1946 GOERING

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 11, 14 August 1946, Page 4

The Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. WED. AUGUST 14, 1946 GOERING

Rat Week At the last meeting of the Whakatane Borough Council, notification was received from the Department of Health that it was the intention of the Department to inaugurate a Rat Week in the near future. Commenting on the proposal, His Worship the Mayor, Mr B. S. Barry, stated that Whakatane would naturally fall into line. A letter was also received from Messrs. Dalgety and Co. Ltd., following the recent demonstration of a new flame thrower, at which representatives of the Council were present. The Council decided that they would not be interested purchasers.

HERMANN Wilhelm Goering, former German Reichsmarshal and statesman, has been ruthlessly stripped of false glamour in the Nuremberg courthouse, and his “hail fellow well met” approach has been revealed as but a cloak covering a character so cruel and vindictive as to earn for him a reputation of being more dangerous than Hitler. The bluff and friendly atmosphere, so long and so well maintained, deceived even many of Britain’s politicians, and there was a time when it was said that if Goering superseded Hitler as Fuhrer it would be a better thing for the world in general and for Germany in particular. Goering had many poses, and the appellation of playboy, assiduously encouraged, seemed apt. For a long time he earned most publicity for his devotion to hunting on his Bavarian estates, and for his love of uniforms and medals. The world laughed about these things, but as it laughed Goering saw that the slogan he himself coined. “Guns before butter,” was no idle catchword, and he saw, too, that the Luftwaffe, of which he became chief, was built up into a formidable force—yet, in the end, not quite for midable enough. Goering was an advocate and supporter of total war, and his interpretation of total war was seen in the Luftwaffe bombing of Rotterdam after the Dutch had laid down their arms, in the bombing of Belgrade, the attack on Coventry, and the slaughter from the air of thousands of defenceless refugees. He was, according to the evidence laid before the Nuremberg tribunal, the central figure in the Austrian anscliluss and the instigator of a particularly cold-blooded slave labour scheme. His actual position in the Nazi Party at the finish has never been clear, but the man who had said no British bombs would ever fall on Germany and that if Berlin were bombed his name would be Meyer, unquestionably suffered some eclipse, and was far from being Nazi No. 2 as in the earlier days. After the unsuccessful Nazi putsch in 1927 Goering fled to Sweden. There his excessive use of narcotics led to his incarceration in a mental asylum. Of these facts there is no doubt, in spite of the repeated Nazi denials—evidence exists in Stockholm Police Department records. Goering was always a drug addict, and after his capture last year he underwent an enforced “cure” at Allied hands, which seems to have been successful. The former New Zealander, cartoonist David Low, after a visit to Nuremberg during which he sketched the prisoners, wrote of Goering: “Well, Goering turns out to be about sft Bin., still fat despite weight lost in prison; jolly, you would say, until you noticed the cruel cut of his mouth; vital, with periods of rumination, when the countenance is sicklied o’er with desperate worry. Goering stands out by a mile as the boss in this company. He is a restless prisoner, leaning this way and that, flapping his pudgy little hands about, patting his hair, stroking his mouth, massaging his cheeks, resting his chin sideways on the ledge of the dock. - Goering is not permitted to make speeches, but he manages to get a good deal of expression across with facial action. Nods, shakes, and eyeplay, suggestive of mamma’s innocent Til Hermann wrongfully accused of stealing the jam.” And that is the former fanatical Nazi today; a prisoner of the United Nations, indicted, and already condemned, on four charges of conspiring to commit and committing crimes against the peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. ,

Voice from Holland An indication of conditions in Holland, and in particular on the siland of Walcheren, is given in a letter recently received by Mr J. Shannahan, of Greymouth, from a Dutch pen friend. “In Holland, and especially on Walcheren, we need everything you can mention,” states the letter. “We lost everything we had in May, 1940, but we say, and it is true, £ a drowned Walcheren for a liberated Europe.’ Food is sufficient, but we need clothes, furniture, beds and a thousand things more,” the letter continues. “We want to work for the rebuilding of Holland, but we need help and need it soon.”