VOICES FROM ABROAD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 January 1940, Page 5

VOICES FROM ABROAD

NAZI FEAR OF ENEMY BROADCASTS

CONTRAST BETWEEN CONDITIONS IN ENGLAND. POINTED AMERICAN COMMENT. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, January 29. Three brief interruptions which occurred during the first part of lhe speech by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr Churchill, in the Manchester Free Trade Hall on Saturday, when three men in different parts of the hall, but all apparently adherents of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Fascist Party, each in turn shouted some slogan, has aroused interesting and pertinent comment in the New York “Herald-Tribune,” which draws a contrast between the conditions in Germany and Britain. While Fascists were in. a position to heckle Mr Churchill, the Germans are told they must not listen to foreign broadcasts, the paper comments. The Ministry of Information’s daily survey of world comment gives the following extract from the “HeraldTribune” article: “Because the British believe in free speech they respect the power of words, but are not afraid of them. The Nazis have no respect for words —so they say—but they are apparently terrified by the magic properties which they themselves assign to them.

“They themselves have used words as shells in consolidating their system. Now they are taken in by their own necromacy and do not consider death too harsh a punishment for anyone who contaminates his Nazi soul by listening to foreign incantations and sells his chance of entering the pro-Nazi Valhalla by yielding to the devil when he offers him an earphone and secretly spreads the carnal world of other broadcasts before him.

"The idea that any radio broadcaster could disseminate his personality so fully that death alone can be considered an adequate antidote is a compliment to the profession so extreme as to be staggering in its implications. With death or the penitentiary hanging over the Germans, they are apparently listening-in to every bit of Allied propaganda which gets through, and every bit which gets through must for this reason be twice as effective because of the horror which the Nazi regime professes to entertain concerning these voices from abroad. “One can well understand Mr Churchill’s impulse really to test the strength of a system which is put together with such fantastically unnatural bonds as these.”