CASE AGAINST HITLER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 July 1938, Page 7

CASE AGAINST HITLER

NOT A FRIEND IN EUROPE. Writing of the European situation in “Maclean’s Magazine” (Toronto), Mr Beverley Baxter, a member of the British House of Commons, says:— Adolf Hitler is a son of the war that drenched Europe with blood in 1914. It created his philosophy, it gave him his dreams, it taught him intolerance, it showed him the dreadful power of propaganda, it poisoned his mind, it gave him vision of his own destiny. Don’t let us underestimate such a man. Measured in crude values of sheer human accomplishment, he is a colossus. Unfortunately, he is an even greater curse. x The case against Adolf Hitler takes clearer form as each month goes by. His mind never had any frontier beyond his passionate and savage love for the Germanic race. He has never heard of humanity. The word “civilisation” is to him a form of cowardice. Democracy disgusts him, and freedom is an insult to his creed. , He claims to have extended Germany’s frontier. Physically, yes. Spiritually, he has closed it for at least a generation. Germany has not one friend in Europe today. She holds Italy in chains as an ally, but the basic hatred between Italians and Germans is still there. Austria has been wedded to the Reich to the music of airplanes droning in the sky and tanks rattling over the roads.

The hatred of Hitler in Austria is underground now, but it is intense. There has been no bigger lie in the muddy post-war record of European, politics than the braggarts’ claim that Austria, by a huge majority, longed to be a province of Germany.

In a recent article I tried to show how Germany uses hatred as a weapon of national policy. Think, though, what an Empire of Hate towards himself Herr Hitler has created. The Catholics are against him, and the Pope has condemned him openly. The Jews of the world are his enemies to the death. The Protestant German Church is against him. Tire trades unions, the Liberals, the Communists, and the industrialists of Germany fear and detest him. The German army is waiting for its revenge on him. Where once he had a tolerant and benevolent following in Britain, he has destroyed that following in a day. France is ready to fight him; determined to fight him if his madness is not arrested.

Russia waits. She is the imponderable. She knows that the Bolshevik revolution has failed, but feels that this German mystic with his smouldering eyes and his Charlie Chaplin moustache .will bring about the world revolution that Russia could not impose.

The horizon of Hitler’s frontiers of hatred extends every day. The whole world is against him unless we exclude the Japanese. Discussing in a previous article the question whether Germany’s policy was being shaped with a view to an early war, Mr Baxter said:— Hitler never wanted war. Of that I am convinced. He wanted, by a series of dramatic strokes, to secure the domination of Europe and make all other nations economic vassals to Germany. Had he gone on more slowly and kept a semblance of political decency, he might have got away with it. But he overplayed his hand and in the end he may be forced to fight. But I believe we shall see his collapse before that time.

He might have done great things for the world. He might have made Germany a real power for stability and progress. Now it is too late. The hatred which he intended eventually to use against Britain will gradually turn against him.

It was in Austria that Hitler’s life began. Austria may well mark the point where his political life has entered into its decline.