ECONOMIC DISASTER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 June 1940, Page 6

ECONOMIC DISASTER

A PROSPECT IN EUROPE AS A RESULT OF NAZI DESTRUCTION. PENALTIES OF THE WORSHIP OF FORCE. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY. June 22. The gravity of the conditions likely to obtain shortly over a large part of Europe claims increasing attention in London. The Nazi efforts to create a formidable military machine for years distorted and impoverished the German economy itself. The Nazi leaders brought Germany to the brink of financial collapse and starvation. Then, after plunging into war, they plundered and wrecked the-economic systems of every territory that fell to Hitler’s aggression.

Poland was ruthlessly devastated and her people reduced to conditions of slavery. Elsewhere military precautions in other threatened States began to drain upon their productive resources. The deterioration spread alarmingly as the invasion of Norway and Denmark was followed by systematic and scientific plunder by the invaders. Then came Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg—destruction, disorganisation. mass flights of populations, severance from normal markets and normal sources of supply. With the collapse of France one of the principal economic entities of the world is in ruins.

Such dislocation cannot fail to bring great suffering. The Germans themselves will suffer, as well as the peoples which the Germans under Nazi leadership set out to conquer, and which they brutally deprived of their independence. That appalling misery will be attributable by inescapable logic to the irresponsible ruthlessness with which the Nazi leaders chose to subordinate the welfare of ordinary men and women everywhere—inside the Reich as well as outside —to their own lust for power and blind worship of force.

It is fully realised here, however, that the Nazi propaganda technique will be feverishly applied to evading guilt for the calamity which Hitler’s ambition is bringing upon the whole continent.

It will be the aim of Goebbels by a campaign of suggestion so to distort the facts as to make it appear a plausible assertion that it is Britain’s legitimate use of economic pressure as a weapon in her fight against Germany which has wrought chaos in Europe. He will hope in this way to enlist on behalf of the Nazis both the humanity of the outside world and the despair of the afflicted themselves. He will try to contrive so that the hopes of the victims, as also their sympathisers, seem to rest on the triumph of the very forces which ravaged and impoverished them, and which still seek to impose a like fate on the remainder of the world.

He will hardly succeed. There is considerable confidence in London that the countries in the new world whose humanitarian instincts Goebbels hopes to exploit are by now very well aware that as the weekly journal ‘Economist’ express it. “the organisation of scarcity has long been one of the chief occupations of the Nazi regime.” This journal reaches the conclusion that German Lebensraum becomes synonymous with starvation, disease, and sickening misery.