UNDER THE SWASTIKA

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 591, 24 July 1933, Page 3

UNDER THE SWASTIKA

NAZI GERMANY RACIAL ANTIPATHY IN ALL PHASES OF LIFE. LIFE IN GERMANY TO-DAY. 1 A visit to Germany to-day is calculated to bring out with disconcerting vividness "the speed with which a highly developed national culture can distintegrate when democracy gives way | to lawless and arbitrary dictatorship. For, whatever may be the differences in social and political goals professed ' hy the various dictatorships which now prevail in Europe, they possess one : distinctive trait in common. Intellee- > i tuals are their first objects of attaek ! i and persecution, and contribute much : the highest quota of political, prison- [ ers, says the Manchester Guardian. j | The comparisons which present de- _ iVelopments in Germany suggest are ( ' extremely painful to anyone who apipreciates the greatness of Germany's contribution to world literature, music and science. For every day one is irresistibly reminded of the American Ku Klux Klan or of the most back- j ■ ward country of Eastern Europe. Some years ago the .picturesque Mayor of Chicago, "Big Bill" Thompson, aroused shouts of international merriment by announcing his intention to take all "un-American books out of the city libraries and burn them on the shores of Lake Michigan." "Big Bill" was regarded as something of a clown, and his proposal was never carried out. i But his idea of ransacking libraries and burning objectionahle books has | been put into effect not in Chicago, ; hut here in Berlin, with its streets | named after Goethe and Schiller and ,Rankie' and Pestalozzi, its Ilegelplatz, its statues to the Humboldts. Commission Appointed. I The Oherhurgermeister of the city, Dr. Sahm, solemnly appointed a commission of three members, one being a r.epresentative of the Kampfbund fur ■ Deutsehe Kultur — "Militant Union for German Culture" — and the other two ! being Nazi party members, to purge • the city libraxy of all books of a "Marxist" and "un-German" tendency. From Breslau, Halle, and other prol vincial towns, one gets reports of self1 appointed student and Nazi groups which inform hooksellers, with appropriate threats, what volumes they may or may not sell, or who assume the function of voluntary spies and inform ers, denouncing indiscriminately individuals, magazines, books and newspapers wkjioh do not conform with the ideals of the "National Revolution." i Legal and organised anti-Semitism has always been the distinctive feature of countries of low cultural and •educational standards. With extraordinary speed Germany, since the advent of the Hitler regime, has fallen actually below the level of Poland and Roumania in this field. The official attitude towards the Jews is hased on the following curious prophetic venture in Hitlers "Moin Kampf": — "If the Jew with his Marxist profession f faith, wins the victory over the peoples of the world, his victor's crown will be the death wreath" of humanity, and this planet will fly through the other bereft of human beings.", On Racial Grounds. Hundreds of professors have been dismissed from universities and colleges purely on grounds of racial ori_ gin; Jewish officials are only tolerated in the State service if they can prove , that they lost a son or a father in the war, that they were themselves front-trench soldiers, or that- they were in the service before 1914; Jewish doctors are systematically dismissed from hospitals, and Jewish lawyers in many cases are forbidden to practise in the courts. The 'Nazi shop and office organisations which exist • in every large factory and store often bring pressure on the employers for the dismissal of Jewish workers and employees. iRacial fanaticism has invaded every field of art, science and sport. A wellknown woman tennis player, Nelly Neppach, recently committed suicide from future international competibecause of her prospective exclusion tions. There is a long and growing list of men of distinction in various branehes of art and thought who have been compelled to give up their work in Germany or who have laid down their offices as a protest against the ■ ever more intense racial discrimination. The purging of the universities is by no means confined to professors of Jewish origin. Any German professor with the slightest taint of "Marxist, ' Liberal, or pacifist tendencies is likely to find himself on the proscription lists of dismissed professors for which the , Prussian Minister of Education, Aut, has already made himself famous. The effect of this o.n the academic standing of the universities cannot fa.il to ' be deplorable, especially as the present generation of German students seems to display more capacity for burning books than for reading them. Yiolent Stories. Another sign of the. times in Ger'many is the sweeping flood of plays and films glorifying nationalist and militarist themes. Yisiting three cinema theatres at random in Berlin I found in one a film depicting the exploits of General Yarck in initiating 'the War of Liberation in 1815; in a second a tale of the Tyrolean uprising against the French, with a maximum of shooting, varied hy an avalanche of stones let down on the heads of French i soldiers by the insurgent mountain- ; eers; in the third a highly tendencious • picture of German history before, dur,'ing, and after the war, which endeavoured to bolster up one of the 1 historical fictions on which the Na- ' tional Socialist regime is hased; that i the German army was fighting vici toriously in the field until some wret- | ched scoundrels in the rear suddenly .'upset the Government and so stabbed ; the army in the .back. The chief State , theatre has been devoting many of its performances to the play "Schlageter," . hy Hans Johst, which depicts the life and death of the national hero of the 'Ruhr occupation, Albert Schlageter, i who was shot hy the French for committing aets of sahotage. Another national playwright has gone to the

remote Dark Ages and fished out a Gothic chieftain named Totila as the hero of a Teutonic raee drama. It is taken for granted that art must serve th'e ideals of national. and racial glorification, even though Dr. Joseph Goebhels, Minister for Propa. ganda, stated that he would have more hope of making good National Socialists out of a gifted artist than of making a satisfactory artist out of a National Socialist without arfistic gifts. lGermany is in an orgy of artificially * whipped-up and stimulated national and race consciousness; and the Totilas, the Schlageters, the militant films ■fit in with' the general atmosphere of uniforms, parades, nationalist songs, and manifestations.