NINETY MILLIONS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 November 1939, Page 7

NINETY MILLIONS

GERMAN WORLD COm'MUNITV NUMBERS OUTSIDE REICH. MANY IN UNITED STATES & LATIN AMERICA. Who and where are the members of the "German world community." frequently referred to in the German Press, and again stressed by officials -.it the recent opening of the nationallycelebrated "German - consciousness” day? "If by German, one means Germanspeaking. of German parentage, or near-descent, the world’s total populationunder this classification would be roughly between 90 and 100 million people,” says a bulletin from the Washington headquarters of the National Geographic Society. “MINORITIES” IN EUROPE. “Within the political boundaries of Germany, according to official figures, are some 79,600,000 inhabitants, not counting the citizens of Memel (also largely Germanic) and those of the former Czech-Slovakian provinces of Moravia-Bohemia (almost entirely non-Germanic). "In other European countries the Reich claims blood kinship with socalled German minorities of France. Poland, Rumania, Hungary. Yugoslavia. Italy, Latvia, Denmark, Lithuania, Estonia. Belgium, the Crimean Soviet Rupublic and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. German-speaking inhabitants of these lands are estimated anywhere from a million and a-half in France to about 16,000 in Estonia. In Hungary, a member of the BerlinRome Axis, some 6 per cent of the population is Germanic. Italy, on the other hand, has a proportion of less than 1 per cent. “Certain European nations are cither 100 per cent German-speaking (such as Liechtenstein and Luxembourg), or hold- a large Germanic majority. like Switzerland, where some three-fourths of the people speak German.

“Yet the inhabitants of these countries, developing outside Germany, have evolved a culture and tradition of their own, different from that of their racial cousins. Such, for example, is the German group settled along the middle Volga River of Soviet Russia, comprising more than half the population of the antonomus Volga-Ger-man Republic. Another, nearer to the Reich, is the independent little principality of Liechtenstein which is so well satisfied with its ruler and the country’s present economic ties with Switzerland that some 95 per cent ol its 2.600 voters went on record this year in a public declaration against any economic union with Germany. MANY GERMANS IN U.S.A. “Of foreign stock in the United States, the Germans are by far the predominant element, amounting to more than 17 per cent of the total foreign population. There arc over six and a half million people of German stock' in the United Slates, including those born in Germany and those of German parentage on one or both sides. "New York States leads the Union in the number of German-stock- inhabitants, with more than a million. Ohio. Illinois, and Wisconsin have over half a million each: while Pennsylvania has less than a half-million. "Pennsylvania however. contains more German stock than all of Uncle Sam’s northern neightbour. Canada, with about 473.500 residents of German stock. "In Latin America, where the swastika competes for front-line trade position against the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack, there are roughly 1.000.000 people of German blood. Of these, the largest group is in Brazil with between six and seven hundred thousand, including recent refugees from the Reich. “Germany’s former colonies in Africa. Asia, and the Pacific are relatively unimportant. All together they contain less than 50.000 Germans. There are still. however. many

‘islands' of Germans, like those ol other national groups scattered around the world. Among the international settlements in China, for instance. Germany has a share, according to figures before the present conflict, of nearly 2.000 nationals in Shanghai: some 300 out of 780 foreigners in Tsinglao. and 108 out of 294 in now devastated Nanking."