“WHAT IS TO COME”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 March 1942, Page 4

“WHAT IS TO COME”

HITLER ON GERMAN WAR AIMS HOPES OF BEATING RUSSIA AND DOMINATING EUROPE. 1 SAYS AMERICAN EFFORT WILL COLLAPSE. IBy Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 10.45 a.m.) LONDON, March 15. In a speech at the annual ceremony in memory of those killed in the last war, Hitler said: “Behind us is a year; not only of the hardest battles in tlw world’s history, but of 'the severest trials of our people. We have had to face not only the apparently unlimited masses of the enemy, but a winter such as has not been known for forty years. What is to come can only be) easier than what is behind us. Only today do we realise the full extent of the preparations of our enemy, but there is only one possible solution —to fight until victory is assured and the enemy destroyed. “The German Army has been able to avoid the fate of Napoleon,” Hitler went on to observe, “and summer will decide whether the tremendous loss of lives of Russians thrown into the fight has been justified. There can only be one end to the war —the total destruction of the enemy. The Bolsheviks, who could not defeat the German troops and our allies in one winter, will be annihilatingly defeated in the coming summer. The Bolshevik colossus must be held at a remote distance in its definitive frontiers. While in the Far East the heroic Japanese nation, provoked, scorned and economically strangled like the German and Italian peoples, is destroying its democratic plutocratic oppressors in vast battleson land and sea and in the air, here in Europe the ground is being prepared for the true independence of this continent. How the rest of the world runs its life is a matter of indifference to the German people, but any attempt of a non-continental power to interfere in the internal affairs of Europe, particularly of our people, must be stopped. What sort of world President Roosevelt chooses to live in is a matter of indifference to us, but his idea of exploiting Europe for his own requirements and overthrowing our world which we love will not only fail, but will collapse. “The French war guilt 'trial at Riom,” Hitler continued, “is characterised by the fact that those responsible for this war have not been mentioned in a single word of the proceedings, which merely deal with insufficient preparations for war. This mentality appears to us incomprehensible, but reveals perhaps better than anything else the causes of this war.” Hitler concluded: “May God give us strength to continue to carry out what duty demands of us.” Hitler spoke in the Zeughaus, in Berlin, where captured Russian standards are reported to have been displayed. Later Hitler placed a wreath on the war memorial in the Unter Den Linden and took the salute when picked battalions, preceded by sixty regimental colours, marched past.