GERMANY'S AIMS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 451, 8 February 1933, Page 7

GERMANY'S AIMS

threefold reaction DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC BEING CHOKED TO DEATH. ANTI-LAB OUR TRADITION. The German people have rebelled against their own Republic choking it "perhaps to death," and have returned to the old standards of Prussianism, Edgar Ansel Mowrer, chief of th'e Chicago Daily News Bureau in Berlin writes in "Germany Turns the Clock Back," a hook published simultaneously in U.S.A., Germany and England. The German reaction, he writes, was fundamentally threefold — anti-repub-lican, anti-foreign, anti-labour. "By its successful refusal to submit to the civil authorities, the Reichswehr slowly cholced the democratic republic, perhaps to death," he writes. "By its emp'hasis on immediate and one-sided Treaty revision and military preparation it deliberately diminished still further what little hope remained of substituting peaceful means of international settlement for war. "It is anti-labour because it continued the old Imperial tradition, selecting its leaders primarily from among the aristocracy and upper middle class, and resented the factj that Labour in Germany, hiav^ing borne most of the burden and reeeived none of the promised benefits of the late World War, showed little enthusiasm in preparing another one." Hatred of the Poles is general in Germany, he says, and the feeling is almost as strong against the French. An investigation among 11 and 14-year-old uppils in the common schools all over Germany carried out this year showed that 69 per cent. of the children admitted hating the French and 92 per cent. hated the Poles. Children shout "Hail Hitler," in class- ; rooms, and strictly draw political party lines in deciding friendships and enmities. He says that Hitler was "doubleerossed" by his natural allies, the "very conservative, nationalistic groups," and that it took him three months to realise it. Behind the German reaction, he j says, were "the allied makers of the Versailles Treaty, and the early Ger- , man Republicans." "Thanks to a bad peace treaty," he j writes, "the German people illogical- j ly became nationalistic and reverted I to natural autocrats, all because Clemenceau was a vindictive patriot, Wil- j son an ignorant moralist, Lloyd , George a weak politcian, and the '' German Republicans suffered from an inferiority complex." ' He says that the German struggle for treaty revision is not merely a ' foreign policy; it has become almost a fundamental fact of German national | life and a chief cause of the German ' reaction. J