GERMAN MACHINE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 163, 10 June 1940, Page 8

GERMAN MACHINE.

COLLAPSE INEVITABLE. ' FOUNDED ON EVIL. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, June 8. A prediction that the Germans would crack suddenly was made by Mr Harold Nicolson (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Information), speaking in Edinburgh this afternoon. “If the 'Allies hold out,” he said, “Hitler will not last the pace. When he realises that he has missed his tiger spring and that the great resources of our Empire are day by day and hour by hour accumulating against him—forces of destruction far greater than he can command—then the nerve of the German people will crack suddenly and their great edifice of aggression will crumble to the ground.” Mr Nicolson referred to the German national character. There was a tradition that the Germans were not merely a highly efficient race but also stubborn and solid, but though the Germans were able to perform great feats of endurance and sacrifice themselves almost blindly for an ideal, yet essentially they were a neurotic, race and as such subject to periods of doubt, despondency and self-distrust if once misfortune overtook them. DISASTER AHEAD. “The German army,” said Mr Nicolson, “drives onward like some great machine, relying upon the perfection of its mechanism. Yet the steel of which it is composed contains a flaw and the very mechanical nature of this dreadful engine of destruction exposes it, when disaster occuts, to complete collapse. It was this that happened in 1918 and it is this that will happen" again.” Mr Nicolson went on to discuss the issues at stake in the present conflict. He 6aid: “We do not always realise how unendurable is the evil against which, we are/ now fighting. It is not only that Hitler and his confederates have for seven years been skilfully planning the destruction of the French and British people. It is not only that they are determined to seize our possessions and suppress our liberties. , x “It is not merely that they aim at obtaining complete mastery first of Europe and then of the world and at forcing the symbol of Christianity into the crooked, tortured shape of the swastika. It is not merely that they are declared enemies of all those virtues which mankind in 2000 years of gradually expanding civilisation lias sought to establish, namely, the virtues of truth, gentleness and honour. It is not merely that they seek to crush the 60ul. of man, destroy the liberated mind of man and .reduce individual independent thoughts to the level of a swarm of bees in a hive. SURGE OF ANGER. “It is that they have brought back into the world the two greatest evils which mankind lias known, namely, cruelty and fear. “When I contemplate the savagery of their attack,\ when I reflect on the turpitude of their methods, when my heart is wrung with pity for those small but valued nations whose liberties they have trampled in the mud. when I think how the ambition of these evil men has spread death and fire over peaceful cities or over fields basking in the, loveliest summer there has ever been, when I look rorward with sorrow but without fear to the ordeals to which our own beloved country is to be exposed, I am filled with profound unhappiness that such wicked things should come to pass. But when I realise that behind all these iniquities is the greatest iniquity of all—the ’ revival of cruelty and fear—l find that ’ my sorrow and my unhappiness are 1 but weak things in comparison to the ’ surge of anger which arises in my , soul.”