Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 1941. HITLER AND THE AMERICAS.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 November 1941, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 1941. HITLER AND THE AMERICAS.

JN his Navy Day speech, at the end of October, President Roosevelt said he had in his possession a map, prepared in Germany by Hitler’s Government, showing the lines on which the Nazis proposed to reorganise South America and Central America. A spokesman was put up in Berlin to accuse the President of having given publicity to “forgeries of the crudest and most impudent kind,’’ but it was reported yesterday from Buenos Aires that the acting head of the Argentine Congressional Committee ■which is investigating subversive activities, Senor J. A. Solari, declares that- he has evidence continuing President Roosevelt’s reference to the German map.

This is an interesting development and one that will be exceedingly unpalatable to Hitler and his accomplices, but confirmation of President Roosevelt’s charge of course was not needed. Ample evidence is available of active intrigues and conspiracies by the Nazis directed to gaining political and military control of the American Latin republics. In recent times there have been many explicit and public exposures of subversive intrigue by the Nazis in a number of American republics, and in September something in the nature of an undeclared war between Germany and several of these republics was precipitated when vigorous anti-Nazi moves by Argentina, Chile and Brazil, in the words of an American correspondent, opened “a whole new phase in South America’s relation to the world crisis, with ‘strict neutrality’ rapidly going into the discard.”

Writing in the “Christian Science Monitor,” the correspondent mentioned, Mr Roland Hall Sharp, stated that: —

For the first time Berlin is striking back hard at South Americans who have dared to expose and suppress Nazi “fifth columns.” By arresting Chileans and Argentines in Europe, the Nazis have aroused hitherto apathetic opinion in those countries. By launching a bitter Press attack against Argentina, Berlin has offended a proudly independent people who reluctantly opened their eyes to the Nazi plots being hatched in their midst. In swift sequence, Argentina has arrested ringleaders of Nazi under cover cells, has seized tons of propaganda, and censured the German Ambassador for exceeding his diplomatic privileges. Chile, sharing until recently the older Argentine view that the Nazi menace had been exaggerated, keeps pace with the Argentine patriots. Arrests continue to be made as Chile uncovers new centres of Nazi intrigue.

These are only late and outstanding examples of very necessary anti-Nazi action that is extending widely through South and Central America. The small democracy of Uruguay, at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, gave an honourable lead and dared to expose and suppress the Nazi “fifth column,” as Mr Sharp observes, before any of its powerful neighbours, including the United States, had taken comparable action.

More recently, however, the tide of action against the Nazis has spread from Bolivia, through Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and most of the other American republics—one of the most recent examples being in Panama. Even President Vargas, of Brazil, who formerly showed a distinct leaning to the Nazis, has of late aligned his republic with the free nations.

It would be running well ahead of the facts to suggest that Nazi influence has been eliminated completely in the Latin American republics and all centres of Nazi .intrigue uprooted, but it is claimed, on apparently substantial grounds, that there is a great and wholesome trend in that direction. In part it accounts for this change that by means of credits, loans and trade adjustments, the United States has done a great deal to modify and relieve the difficulties into which the Latin republics were thrown by the loss of their European markets. One very important development is the transfer to American control of a large proportion of the air lines developed by the Germans in South America.

It is recognised by the South American countries that the economic arrangements which are enabling them meantime to carry on are of a temporary character, but their new attitude is declared to be based ultimately upon a confident belief that the United States will do whatever is necessary to ensure the defeat and overthrow of Nazism by the free nations. There is, Mr Sharp states, a release of “South America’s pent-up desires to live in a world of free men, and to help build such a world.”