HATE & DEFIANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 January 1940, Page 5

HATE & DEFIANCE

NAZI LEADERS’ NEW YEAR MESSAGES GOERING THREATENS ATTACK BY AIR. HITLER’S WILD ASSERTIONS. By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright. LONDON, December 31. In a New Year message to the troops, Herr Hitler said: “For the ensuing year we want to ask the Almighty, who in the past year so clearly took us under His protection, to vauchsafe again His blessings and strengthen us in the fulfilment of our duty, for ahead of us lies the most serious struggle for the existence or non-existence of the German people.” Opening a message to the Nazi Party. Herr Hitler said: “We enter the most decisive year in German history.” The Fuehrer said that eighty millions of people could not be kept from participation in the world’s wealth. “All the measures we have taken hitherto have neither robbed nor harmed the rest of the world,” he declared. “They merely gave the German people things that other nations have.” He repeated the charge that Britain and France did not want peace while Germany did. He affirmed that Central Europe was pacified in 1939 by a succession of epoch-making events, including “the destruction of the Poland of Versailles.” HOPES OF DECISION. “To the Nazi Party may 1940 bring a decision, and that decision will be our victory, come what may,” he said. Admonishing the nation to bear its war burdens, Herr Hitler continued: “We have a precise war aim for Germany. Europe must be liberated from oppression and the constant threats which today, as in the past, originate in England. This time the arms must definitely be wrenched from the hands of "the war-inciters and war-declarers. “We fight not only against the injustice of Versailles but for the prevention of a greater injustice with which it would be replaced. We fight for the construction of a new Europe because, unlike Chamberlain, we are convinced that it cannot be shaped by the outmoded forces of a decaying world by so-called statesmen who are unable to solve the most primitive problems of their own countries.”

Field-Marshal Goering and his army and naval chiefs, General van Brauchitsch and Admiral Raeder, sent New Year messages to the fighting forces, affirming their confidence in victory. Field-Marshal Goering, in an article in the “Voelkischer Beobachter,” admitted for the first time the use of mine-laying planes. He declared that the German battleplanes are only awaiting the Fuehrer’s command. No land was more vulnerable from the air than the British island, and when the German air forces counter-attacked the assault would be such as world history has never experienced. “This war is a struggle for national existence,” declared Dr Goebbels in a New Year broadcast. “The coming year will be hard. Victory will not be given to Germany as a present; everyone must earn it. On the front lines and at home Germany is ready for any attack.” On political, economic, military, and moral grounds, Dr Goebbels added, last year was the greatest and proudest in history. Germany had thrown off her shackles and reappeared for the first time after her collapse as a great Power. He repeated the charge that Britain was responsible for the war. Britain’s “war guilt” is given promin-, ence in long reviews of the year in all the morning papers.