PEACE OVERTURE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 May 1941, Page 6

PEACE OVERTURE

CARRIED BY HESS MEETING o-GGFSTEU. ON NEUTRAL TERRITORY. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, Noon.) RUGBY, May Although interest in Hess is nof being allowed to obscure the wider issues of the war, speculation is still rife regarding the motives of his escape from Germany and the meaning of the contradictory contortions of the Goebbels propaganda machine in its efforts to explain the astounding event in a manner palatable to the Nazis. It was revealed today that a letter from Hess which the Duke of Hamilton immediately handed to the authorities contained a suggestion for a meeting on neutral territory to discuss peace. This certainly lends colour to the latest Nazi picture of Hess as a Messianic idealist, but it is no reflection whatever on the sanity of a man who may have thought a negotiated peace lhe only possible hope for Germany in the dangerous situation to which her war adventures are leading her. At the same time the picture of Hess as an idealist, as the Latest figment of the overworked imagination of German propagandists, hardly squares with the truth as stated by the “Daily Telegraph": “Hess, more than any other man but Hitler, is responsible for the abominations of the concentration camps and the Gestapo. He lived and throve and made himself important by murder torture and persecution. Such is Hess religion." The'“Telegraph" adds a timely warning: “Though one of the chief Nazi gansters has deserted, that dees not diminish by one jot the urgency of the development of our utmost fighting power now. We must not be deflected or deterred from the toll and sacrifice of our task by the fantastic melodrama of Hess."