Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1939. HITLER AT A LOSS.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 November 1939, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1939. HITLER AT A LOSS.

APART from the fact that an attempt was made upon Ins Ide, the occasion of Herr Hitler’s oration at Munich appears to have been singularly lacking in interest. What has been reported of his address, delivered, we are told, in a fatigued and hesitating voice, suggests that he found nothing better to do than act upon the maxim : “No ease, abuse the other side. Whether or not he still retains a sufficient command over he German nation to induce it to spend itself in attacks upon the Allies, the Fuehrer emphatically is a man who has no case. In the estimation of any normally constituted human being he stands'exposed today as a discredited adventurer, imbalanced if not in a larger sense insane, and otherwise remarkable only in the amount, of harm he has done and the misery he has brought upon the German nation and others.

What Hitler has to say about the evolution and contemporary standing of the British Empire is little.to the pomt. In his verbal onslaught on Britain, he wandered freely li’oin the truth, as his habit is, and left out of account, for example, sueli not unimportant factors as the existence and development ol the self-governing Dominions. That and much besides which (mured in his tirade is of small importance, however. What matters is that Hitler visibly and obviously is a man totally unfitted to give the German nation the worthy and constructive leadership it supremely needs today. The extent to which the people of Germany have as yet failed to grasp that very apparent truth is unfortunate for them, the Allies and the world at large.

On the lips of one worthy to speak tor Germany, the Fuehrer’s references to the Great- War settlement and Io Ihe League of Nations might have carried weight. Although the Allies took their stand in the last war, as in the present one, primarily against aggression, it is true that the settlement in 1939 was a caricature of what it should have been. It is probable that the Allies then had an opportunity of establishing in great part what they are intent on establishing now m the way of safeguards of just and enduring peace.

It is on the basis of a perception and frank admission of the mistakes of 1919 that the more enlightened leaders of the Allied nations, with the support, it may be hoped, of a great body of awakened public opinion, are now endeavouring to approach the establishment of conditions offering some better assurance of international justice, peace and security. It is one thing, however, to admit, frankly and fairly, that injustice was done to Germany in 1919 and in the years that followed and quite another to concede any merit to Hiller’s ranting abuse of the British Empire and the Allies.

If Hitler is entitled to any consideration at. all, it is on the ground that he is one of the consequences of a bad and unjust peace settlement. His influence first and last has been deplorable and he has intensified vastly whatever evil was wrought by the Treaty of Versailles. . Under his leadership, the German nation has been subjected to a grinding, oppressive and debasing tyranny. It is necessary to move back through centuries, of history to find a parallel to the bestial brutality with which Hitler and his associates have treated the Jews and all who ventured to oppose them and have trampled on the rights ol small nations meantime subjugated.

For a time, Hitler was able to claim that in his course ol violence he was at least achieving results in an extension ol the Reich frontiers. In his dealings with Russia, however, he has obviously been checkmated and befooled, with results seriously prejudicial to Germany. Before involving his country in war with the Allies, Hitler had reduced it to desperate economic straits of which the full rigour would become instantly apparent if a halt were called in expenditure on armaments. As part of his mountebank politics, Hitler still talks as if only the wicked and unscrupulous would attempt to separate the German people from their present Government. On the facts, however, it is reasonable to believe that sooner or later, and in one way or another, Germany is bound to cast off the frightful incubus of Hitlerism. Should the event come speedily, peace would at once be brought into near prospect.