ALSATIAN AUTONOMY

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 579, 4 February 1929, Page 9

ALSATIAN AUTONOMY

FRENCH PREMIER’S SPEECH

REPLY TO SEPARATISTS (Australian and NJZ. Press Association) PARIS, Saturday. The Premier, M. Poincare, spoke for 10 hours in the Chamber of Deputies on the subject of Alsace. He aroused the anger of those who are in favour of autonomy for the Alsatians by giving quotations from their speeches which clearly showed a separatist tendency. Each time the autonomists endeavoured to minimise the importance of these quotations M. Poincare retorted: "Oh, you disavow them.” The Premier argued that when the Alsatian autonomists supported the thesis of national minorities they awoke the echoes across the Rhine. The speech is to be published in pamphlet form and distributed throughout Ads ace.

POINCARE’S TAUNT

GERMAN PROPAGANDA FUND (Australian and N.Z. Press AssociationJ BERLIN, Saturday. It is reported in Berlin that M. Poincare, in the course of his speech in the French Chamber of Deputies, taunted Germany with having a propaganda fund amounting to £4,525,000. The German Foreign Minister, Herr Stresemann, states that the fund only amounts to £1,075,000. The chief items are: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, secret service, £300,000; promotion of news services abroad, £120,000; news services at home, £20,800; promotion of humanitarian and cultural relations in foreign countries, £300,000. Herr Stresemann argues that the £400,000 allotted to the Ministry in charge of Occupied Territories could hardly be regarded as propaganda money, because, after all, the occupied zones are part of the German Empire and require special care.