Evening Post. THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 1933. BACK TO DESPOTISM

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 69, 23 March 1933, Page 10

Evening Post. THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 1933. BACK TO DESPOTISM

The streets of Potsdam were appropriately decorated with flowers and flags and soldiers and Nazi | slogans when President yon Hindenburg, personally conducted by Herr Hitler, his Chancellor, Showman, and Dictator, arrived at the head of a triumphal procession to open the Reichstag. The ings were appropriately divided between \ a church reeking of Hohenzollern militarism" and the Kroll Opera House, but the apportionment is not made quite clear in the excellent report supplied by the Press Association yesterday. ;

I The ceremony, we were told, was of a quasi-military character. . Generals and admirals wore their old. -uniforms, while Nazi deputies and. the Brown Shirts, all in uniforms, packed tho church. The Socialists and Communists were absent. President yon Hindenburg, beforo taking his seat, faced the Imperial box occupied by the ex-Crown Prince, and saluted with his batqn.

Can this Imperial box and this interchange of secular salutes have been in the church? Apparently it was so,, though whether it was in the church or in the theatre is not of great importance in a matter which was essentially i theatrical rather than religious. It is at any rate certain that the church was the scene of the two important speeches.

Overlooking the vault of Frederick tho Great in the Garrison Church, says our report, President you Hindenburg urged the,nation to do everything to assist the Government in its difficult work. "This place," he said, "reminds us of the old Prussia. May tho spirit of the glorious scene inspire the present generation to unite us in the consciousness of moral regeneration for a united, free, and proud Germany."

As the church in which- Frederick the Great lies buried,, the Garrison Church-of. Potsdam-was well chosen for the delivery of such a speech. Frederick'll, to use his official title, is northerly Prussian Frederick to be buriea in. Potsdam. ' Frederick. 111, known, in the county of his consort, the Princess Royal of Great Britain, as Frederick the Noble,, but suspected and distrusted 'in his own land from nis sympathy with her democratic ideas, is also buried there. . But his tomb is in' the Friedenskirche—^the Church of Peace, a fit resting-place for the King whose humane creed • had incurred • the hatred of the Prussian fire-eaters. The Church-of War, as the church i which holds the tomb of one of the greatest of the world's soldiers may by contrast be called, was, however, the right choice for the uses to which it was put on Tuesday. In his famous description of the scene in Westminster Hall on the opening day of the impeachment •of Warren Hastings, Macaulay says: "The place was worthy of such a trial."' As he has said of Frederick the Great that "he drilled his people as. he drilled Sis grenadiers," Macaulay would surely have recognised in the Garrison Church at Potsdam a worthy place, not indeed for the impeachment of German democracy, but for the pronouncement of its death and the call for a reversion to despotism. What Lord Rosebery says of Frederick will serve to con? firm the fitness of the choice.

It is a peculiarity of great men that they cavo a tendency to wreck tho thrones on which they sit. Take Frederick tho Great—he led the life of a drill sergeant, of an estate steward,' of a bureaucrat in one, making the details of every department of government centre in himself. He gradually absorbed everything, and riothing could be dove without his sanction, and knowledge. Such a man jnakes himself the mainspring of tho machine, and when he withdraws ' the machine collapses and has to be constructed afresh.

In. the emphasis which he lays on the tendency of great men "to wreck the thrones on* which they sit," and on _ the burden of reconstruction which they impose upon others Lord Rosebery might have been supposed to have one eye upon a more recent Hohenzollern than .Frederick * the Great. But it was at a Cromwell Tercentenary celebration that he was speaking just fifteen years before the strength and the weakness of Wilhelm II set the Great War going [which was to make him fit the text. ! Nobody could then foresee that he was to become the greatest thronesmasher of our time, perhaps the greatest of all time, seeing that he brought down the Romanoff and Habsburg thrones as well as his own, and certainly a royal HumptyDumpty not easily to be paralleled since Nebuchadnezzar, In saving

this we are quite aware that we have the authority of the present Chancellor against us. He says that "neither the Kaiser nor the Government, nor the people desired war." If- he is right they certainly had a funny way of showing it, but his authority is not infallible outside of Germany. For outsiders it is discounted by a sense of wild and warlike speeches beside which the worst of the All-Highest's excesses in his sabre-rattling days are compelled to "pale their uneffectual fire." The Chancellor's authority is farther weakened by his inclusion of himself among the "sincere friends of peace." The sincerity which has been scaring Europe during the last six months bears a strong family resemb--lance to that which plunged the world into war in 1914. But, to be quite accurate, Herr Hitler does not call himself a sincere friend of peace. What he actually says is: "We want to be sincere friends of peace." The Nazis would like to become sincere friends of peace, but they do not know how to do it. All they have learnt so far is to lurn their own country upside down, and to fill: their neighbours with fear that the same fate is in store for them. _ * .,l If tliiy Chancellor had really desired 'to produce a first-hand and infallible witness on the war-guilt issue he was to have been had for tho asking. The way in which he has been treating the ex-Kaiser is really shocking. Almost immediately after v Herr Hitler's appointment a pathetic picture was sent us from Amsterdam of the exile of Doom Availing with : his luggage ■packed to book his passage for Berlin in order to share in the Nazis' triumph. But the Chancellor fobbed him with the pretext that "his immediate return might disrupt the election."- Wilhelm junior was accordingly privileged, with a ybungej brother, to represent the family in the limelight and the hysteria of the Maikowski funeral, and to place wreaths on the coffin. The Nazis have since won the election, yet Wilhelm the elder still languishes in exile, and it was again his son who was honoured on Tuesday, receiving "' the President's salute in the Imperial- box of the Hohenzollerns. What does Herr Hitler mean by this reputed and aggravated insult to the most eminent representative of the old Prussian autocracy whose spirit he is so eager to recapture? Not till these two equally sincere friends of peace are firmly linked together will the \voxld feel quite safe.