MINORITY ISSUE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 84, 6 October 1938, Page 10

MINORITY ISSUE

A TOOL FOR HITLER

USED FOR AGGRANDISEMENT

CASE FOR THE CZECHS

"The Economist" recently published a most illuminating contribution on Europe's minorities, and the facts which it gives are worthy of careful consideration. "The Economist" said: — "The problem of minorities is really one of 'where the shoe pinches.' The shoes with which Europe is uncom-. fortably shod today are the four peacetreaties that were worked out, and imposed on the vanquished countries, in 1919-21 at the Peace Conference of Paris. The first test of the post-war political map of Europe is a comparison with the pre-war map. On this test the present map comes out well. "The statesmen at Paris did make a genuine attempt to redraw the map more in accordance with the principle of nationalities, which is recognised today by most people as the proper bass for the articulation of Europe into local States. "The peace settlement brought back on to the map a number of nations (Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Finns, etc.) which for'generations had possessed no independent national State of their own, while to others (Yugoslavs, Rumanians, etc.), which had been partitioned between different sovereignties, it gave national unity under their own flags. "As a result, and it is an admirable result, the subject populations with a grievance—or, in the current term, the 'minorities'—on the post-war map represent a much smaller proportion of the total population of- Europe than they amounted to on the pre-war map. STATUS RECOGNISED. "More than that, the status of minorities has been juridically recognised, and their rights defined and guaranteed, in the minority treaties or declarations which a number of successorStates (the Little Entente countries, Greece, Albania, Poland, and the Baltic j States) have concluded with the principal Allied and Associated Powers or made to the Council of the League of Nations. "Unfortunately, however, there have been changes for the worse as well as for the better. While, on the one hand, the aggregate minority element in the population of Europe has been substantially reduced in numbers and has been given legal protection (on paper), on the other hand, the bitterness of feeling has been accentuated by an intensification of the national fanaticism of both the subject and the dominant elements. "It has been further aggravated because there has been a widespread reversal of roles—the pre-war top-dog becoming the post-war under-dog, and vice versa, c.1., as between Magyars and Rumanians in Transylvania and between Germans and Czechs in Czechoslovakia. "These new post-war difficulties have been aggravated by the rise of a totalitarian form of State with which the whole conception of toleration for minorities is virtually incompatible— as is forcibly illustrated by Herr Henlein's minimum demand of territorial autonomy under a Nazi dispensation for the German minority in slovakia, as part of the Czechoslovak State. 7 --v.L .7 • -■-rj MOST DANGEROUS. "The German minority in Czechoslovakia is the largest and most dangerous piece of the largest and most dangerous minorities problem in Europe today: the problem of the German populations whom the peace settlement left outside the frontiers of the Reich. If we leave out of account the Germanspeaking Swiss and Alsatians, who are not Germans in national feeling or aspiration, the Germans outside the Reich on the pre-Anschluss map amounted to more than 13,000,000, of whom nearly half were in post-war Austria (6,500,000). . "Of the remainder, nearly half, again, are in Czechoslovakia (3,123,000), while the other half is distributed between Poland (1,059,000), Rumania (713,000), Hungary (551,000), Yugoslavia (505,000), Danzig (306,000), Latvia (201,000), Italy (199,000), Memel (59,000), Denmark (35,000), Lithuania (29,000), Estonia (13,000). There are also remants of once flourishing German settlements in Southern Russia; as far east as the Volga. BEST AND WORST TREATED. "These German outlanders (Auslandsdeutsche) may be classified in several ways. The Germans in Italy (South Tyrol) have been perhaps the worst treated, those in Denmark/perhaps the best treated, subject minority in post-war Europe. Again, the Germans in Poland, Danzig, -Memel, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Yugoslavia have undergone the painful change of status from top-dog to under-dog, since all these minorities were formerly included in either prewar Germany or pre-war Austria. "The rest were under-dog before the • war, when they were included either in pre-war Hungary or in pre-war Russia; yet even these have changed their status for the worse, since they , used to be the next-most-favoured nationality after the Magyar or the Russian ruling race, while some of them —e.g., the Baltic German barons and the Transylvanian German burghers—used to be in a position of privilege. "Finally, we may contrast the German minorities in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Danzig, Denmark, Memel, and Italy, who are contiguous to the Reich, with the rest, who are scattered so thinly and flung so far and wide that they could only be united to the Reich through an outright annexation of the whole of Central and Eastern Europe. THE CHAMBERLAIN METHOD. "Herr Hitler is using these German outlanders as Joseph Chamberlain used the British uitlanders in the Transvaal before the South African War. He is playing upon the feelings of the Reich Germans by harping on the misery of their brethren under foreign yokes. "But he is not making the most of the really worst cases. He is silent on the grievous Italian oppression of the Germans in the South Tyrol and on the rather serious Polish oppression of the Germans in the lost Prussian Ostmark. He is vocal about the less unhappy Germans in Czechoslovakia, and he is also making trouble for Denmark, whose treatment of her tiny post-war German minority has been exemplary. "For Herr Hitler the existence of the German outlanders is primarily a lever for the^ political aggrandisement of the Reich along the Mine of least resistance; and along this line Denmark and Czechoslovakia come before Poland and Italy. "Politically, Czechoslovakia is a splendid field for German manoeuvres, since there is a Hungarian and a Polish, as well as a German, minority within the Czechoslovakian frontiers. Thus, in browbeating Czechoslovakia, Germany can enlist the sympathies of two allies. "There is also a Hungarian as 'Well as a German minority in Rumania,