THE SOUTH TYROL

Evening Star, Issue 23368, 11 September 1939, Page 8

THE SOUTH TYROL

AN UPROOTED PEOPLE DESERTED BY HITLER News of the agreement between Germany and Italy compulsorily to evacuate the German-speaking population of the South Tyrol must have come as a shattering blow to those people (writes a special correspondent of the Loudon ‘ Daily Telegraph ’). They are intensely attached to the soil on which their ancestors have lived and worked for 1,300 years, to the mountains without which they may well die of homesickness, and to all their environment, which is so largely the work of their own hands or those of their fathers. South Tyrol, the section of the Tyrol ceded by Austria to Italy under the Peace Treaties, is the region between Salorno and the 'Brenner Pass. The population in 1921, according to the census of that year quoted in the ‘ Enciclopedia Italiana.’ consisted of 223.000 Germans, 6,000 Italians, and 21.000 Ladines. The last-named, although claimed by the Italians as a Latin race, have actually always thrown in their lot with the Germans. Historically, racially, and sentimentally South Tyrol is the most nndividedly German of the territories coded under the Peace Treaties. In fact, Salurn has become one of the most clearly marked racial and linguistic frontiers in Europe, and one might have expected that the problem of drawing a just racial frontier between Germans and Italians would have been one of the easiest tasks of the Peace Conference. THE ITALIAN DEMANDS. The racial frontier had indeed been recommended by President Wilson, in No. 9 of his Fourteen Points, but the Italians had been promised the Brenner frontier, which they considered strategically necessary to them, as one of the inducements to break their pledges to the Triple Alliance and join the Allies. And at Versailles Italy stood out for her “ rights.” Italy’s intention to obtain South Tyrol was protested against repeatedly by the Austrian Government and by the South Tyrolese, who sent to Paris a manifesto signed by every German and Ladin community in the country, but in. vain. The democratic Italian Government made, solemn assurances that the rights of the German minority would be respected, and won the day. At first their rule was indeed comparatively moderate; it was only in 1922, when Mussolini rehearsevl the march on Rome by a march on Bolzano, that serious persecution began. Tolomei, the veteran irredentist, drew up a programme for the denationalisation of South Tyrol, which has been adhered to ever since. Its main features were the elimination of the German language by the suppression of German schools and cultural institutions, the replacement of locallyelected community councils by Italian officials, and the infiltration, by settlement and industrialisation, of a strong Italian element in the population. NAZI ASSISTANCE WITHHELD. Modifications have been promised now and then in deference to foreign political expediencey but have never been carried out, anal in 1938 the threat of expropriation was added. The Italian Government had long pursued the policy of buying up whatever land came into the market, and settling State-aided Italians on it, and in 1936 had founded a bank to finance this process. Progress, however, was slow and expensive, and in January, 1937, the Expropriation Law enabled the bank to claim any property it wished at short notice against compensation at its own valuation. This menace, although but seldom put into action, has been an added burden to the peasant farmers, who struggle, besides, under the .exorbitant taxation of the Government and the communal indebtedness due to the questionable administration of the Italian officials. They suffer severely, too, from the fact that the natural market in South Germany for their chief products, fruit and wine, has been cut off from them since the war by Customs barriers. Moreover, there is deep concern about the breakdown of cultural standards produced by the closing of German schools and the inadequate education in a foreign tongue provided by the Italian ones. Even private instruction in German is illegal, and many sentences of deportation to Southern Italy have been passed for teaching the mother tongue in secret. Official protests came from successive Austrian Governments and from democratic Germany. South Tyrol was one of the main objectives of the campaign of the Volksbund fuer das Deutscbtum im Ausland (People’s League for Germanism Abroad), and Germany took up its cause as one man. Money and organisation were devoted to the task of keeping alive the German spirit in South Tyrol and a steady (low of organised tourism kept up the links with Germany. But the Nazis realised early the necessity to them of the Italian alliance, and, although Point One of their programme is “ the union of all Germans in a pan-German State.” they admitted as early as 1923 that Italian friendship could not bo jeopardised for the sake of a too rigid insistence on principle in tho matter of South Tyrol, and with a consistency that they only sometimes show they have adhered to this view. CHECK ON PRIVATE WORK. The Nazi Government has consistently refused to use its influence in Italy effectively on behalf of the Germans in South* Tyrol, and has recently put a severe check on all private efforts to help them. In adopting this atti-

tude it has ignored all the facts of history. The German character of South Tyrol dates from the end of the sixth century, when, after the breakdown of the Roman Empire, it was settled by Bavarians who pressed on from North Tyrol, which they had already colonised. Tho whole of present-day Tyrol was part of the Empire of Charlemagne, who appointed, officials called counts to administer it. These countships became hereditary and still existed when the Emperor Konrad If. incorporated tho whole region in the German Empire in 1027. In the course of time the Counts of Tyrol, a castle near Meran, acquired by marriage or conquest the whole territory between the Bavarian frontier and a point rather to the south of Salorno. 'Thus it was that in 12.50 an able and virile family originating in South Tyrol achieved the unification of the county. From one of its weaker members, the famous Ugly Duchess, Tyrol passed in 1363 into the hands of the Habsburgs, who were its rulers until 1919.

Dining the Middle Ages, Tyrol acquired great commercial as well as political and cultural importance, as the transit’onal region between Germany and Italy, so opposed to each other in some respects, complementary in others ; but in spite of the considerable intercourse between Tyrolese and Italians, South Tyrol remained Gorman and the German language was firmly established for all purposes bv the fifteenth century. Art and architecture followed distinctive German linos. THE TYROLEAN MOUNTAINS. Although a few flourishing ‘ towns grew up on her three international trade routes, the strength and the soul of South Tyrol has always been in her mountainous countryside and its peasant population. Her rich valleys and sunny slopes are some of the host fruit and wine growing country in Europe. Here and, even more, in the high mountain farms, hard conditions have bred an indomitable race of peasant proprietors, whose character is founded on inalienable devotion to their inherited 1 land, traditions, and religious faith. It was the peasants of South Tyrol that Kaiser Maximilian learned to love so well in the closing years of the fifteenth century; it was they who 200 years later saved Austria from the French attack in the wars of the Spanish Succession ; it was from their ranks that came in the Napoleonic Wars Tyrol’s national hero, Andreas Hofer. who led his countrymen in glorious but unsuccessful risings against the Bavarian interloper and was captured and shot at Mantua in 1810.

How often has bis spirit been invoked in the last 25 years. The Italian declaration of war in May, 1915, found (■south Tyrol, the Austrian south front, defenceless, since her men had gone, in the famous Kaiserjaeger regiments, to the Galician front. Boys and old men seized their rifles and for two months held a front where they could often only post one defender every 200yds, against the Italian attack until German reinforcements and later their own Kaiserjaeger arrived. AFTER THE ARMISTICE. A strategic front-line having been established early in the hostilities, not one inch was yielded until the end of the war. Only after an armistice had been declared did the Italians set foot in South Tyrol, when they treacherously took prisoner and sent into a long captivity many thousands of its defenders. Tliis is the legion that now Herr Hitler is deserting. No doubt it will be claimed that the population is given the chance of living in. the Reich, and this should be good enough for any good German; the alternative is to move to alien Italy. Italy is to be relieved of what would' perhaps have been a danger spot to her in any difference of opinion with Germany, while the military collaboration of the Axis Powers is to be free of a critical audience at the junction of the two countries.

How Hitler is to justify to the Tyrolese, to the Germans of the Reich, and to the world his abandonment of the interests of 250,000 people of German race, and of a territory that bears every outward testimony of its German character, while ready to imperil the peace of the world by his demands for territories whose claims for “ return to the Reich ” are far less well founded, is hard to imagine. Might not the Germans of Danzig, too, be offered the same solution of their problem?