Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1938. AN INDICTMENT WITHHELD.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 September 1938, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1938. AN INDICTMENT WITHHELD.

a. REPORT transmitted yesterday that the Government of Czechoslovakia was setting the machinery of the, law in operation against Herr Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans has been denied promptly. Lresumably this abstention is regarded as a necessary contribution to a peaceful solution of the Central European crisis. It is, however, a strange state of affairs m which an organised and competent government, like that of Czechoslovakia, is restrained from taking legal action against an unconcealed attempt to stir up armed rebellion in the territory under its control.

An indictment of Henlein besides being .justified on the apparent facts of the situation, would have laisec conspicuously very much greater issues than, those t /turn on the conduct or fate of an individual.. ® have been at the same time an indictment of Nazi Germany, on whose behalf Henlein is acting, and an assertion of the independent sovereignty of Czechoslovakia. The whole point of the existing position is that the Sudeten agitation, in the character and proportion's it has now assumed, is meaningless save as a deliberate and calculated extension of German aggression.

The true nature of this agitation, and its fundamental insincerity, are to he perceived even in what is being said in furtherance of the Sudeten claims. Tn the broadcast proclamation which was reported yesterday, Henlein said in part: —

We want to live as free Germans. We want peace to work in our home. We want to go back to the Reich.

Tt is familiar knowledge, however, that in the Reich with which Henlein desires reunion, Germans are not living in freedom, but are slaves to the Nazi tyranny which subordinates all other aims to those of military expansion and aggression. Tn their first four years of rule the Nazis raised taxes to one-fourth of the national income, while lowering the general standard of nourishment by about twenty per cent. The exactions and oppression to which the people of Germany are subject evidently have not been lightened this year. The Germans in their own country are a people exploited almost to the limits of endurance by a ruthless tyranny.

While it is not denied that the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia have some legitimate grievances and are entitled to the liberal measure of local autonomy they are now offered, their fate has been happy in comparison with that of the. people of their homeland.

On this subject, Sir Alfred Zimmern, a British authority of the highest standing on international affairs who has been visiting Australia as a delegate to the British Commonwealth Relations Conference, said in the course of a recent address that the German and other non-Czech elements in the population of Czechoslovakia who were sincerely democratic were devoted to the cause of that country because they enjoyed there a freedom that was denied them in neighbouring States. The minority problem, such as it was, in Czechoslovakia, Sir Alfred declared, was negligible compared with the other minority, problems with which Central and Eastern Europe was bristling.

If the German Government was really concerned for the material and moral welfare of the Germanspeaking people in that part of the world (he added), it would be turning its attention to the 200,000 Germans in Italy, south of the Brenner Pass, who were being systematically denationalised, or the large groups of Germans in Poland, Hungary, A ugoslavia, Rumania, and other European countries. But the fact was that, for the German Government, the grievances of the Sudeten Germans -were really nothing more than a pretext. It picked out that particular minority, not because of its oppression, but because it lay in the direct road of the German advance to the south-east, as foreshadowed in the pages of Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf.”

The fact that Henlein and others have not been arrested and indicted shows pretty clearly that the Czech Government is being restrained from taking the action it normally would take in upholding its sovereignty and maintaining order in its territory. It may be expedient that this restraint should be exercised, but there will be no just settlement of the total problem that centres on Czechoslovakia if full weight is not given to the fact that only German aggression prevents the questions that are raised from being brought speedily to a peaceful and satisfactory adjustment.