HITLER AS PEACEMAKER.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 January 1939, Page 4

HITLER AS PEACEMAKER.

JUST about five years ago, following on Germany’s depart lire from the Disarmament. Conference, Herr Hitler offered twenty-five years of peace in exchange for an army of 300,000 men for Germany. Now, with universal conscription fully re-established in the Reich and with all its armament industries working at full blast, the Fuehrer declares in his New Year proclamation that Germany’s tasks for 1939 are, firstly, the continued education of the people for unity; secondly, further strengthening of the armed forces; thirdly, further extension, of the four-year plan. Having set out these details, Herr Hitler adds that “Germany’s one desire is that it may be possible in the coming year to contribute towards general appeasement.”

The position to be faced, and one that, not even the most amiable desire to make the best of things will alter by a jot, is that German policy, as it is being shaped day by day and year by year under Herr Hitler's leadership, is making it. progressively less possible to hope for the maintenance of world peace. While he talks of peace and appeasenient, all the Fuehrer’s actions make for war. His “education of the German people for unity” is nothing else than efforts to perfect the enslavement of the people to a military tyranny,,so that the nation may become as a whole a military machine. His “further strengthening of the armed forces” speaks for itself and “the further extension of the four-year plan” means that, Germany is increasingly to concentrate on the plans of economic selfsufficiency which are part, of her military policy and is to continue to close the door on the developments of international trade in which she might build up peaceful relationships with other nations.

If there is any element of hope in the outlook thus opened it rests on an assumption that there are limits to what even the submissive German people will endure under an overbearing military tyranny and that, there may be a growing perception in Germany, as well as in other countries, that war, as Herr Hitler has himself admitted on occasion, would be a disaster for all concerned.