GERMANY TO-DAY

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20911, 16 September 1939, Page 13 (Supplement)

GERMANY TO-DAY

ONE FACT is made clear to the visitor to Germany to-day; here is a land in which war is considered a necessary instrument and in itself good. I knew before I came that that was the official view, but the extent to which it is generally held is surprising. It is most certainly inadequately explained as the reaction of a proud nation to compulsory disarmament. I have recently heard from Germans of the generation which experienced the Great War the opinion that a war over Danzig with the prospect of getting back the whole of West Poland would definitely be a good thing. And the younger people go farther; they expect it to be done soon; as one of them said to me the other day: “Hitler promised us at the beginning to get back all that was taken from us.” Needless to say, Poland is not the only country concerned; we and France are to be forced to give back the colonies (the method to be employed is not stated, but the propaganda is in full swing), and all Germans are taught from youth to look upon the Baltic countries as German Lebensraum (living space) Permeated with German Culture. All are quite convinced that Germany would win in any war. Even in families where the older generation do not so easily reduce opposition to a negligible quantity the children think differently, and it is, of course, on the youth that the Government depends. The influence of the propaganda to which boys of seventeen have now been subjected since they were eleven years old cannot be exaggerated; in almost all cases it completely overshadows home training and influences. But there is something more positive, which concerns British people directly, and which it seems to me the duty of every British person resident in Germany to make known to those at home. It is the attitude adopted to us as a nation. Instead of that certain measure of respect which most Germans did once have for Britain, the young

A British Observer’s Impressions

(“North Briton,” in Manchester Guardian.)

have been taught to have something very like contempt; they think of England as doomed to early dissolution. Our youth is described as degenerate, of bad physique, and unenterprising, our internal situation as hopeless, and the Empire as ready to split up into independent countries at the first sign of a situation which calls for common action. The German newspapers are increasingly occupied with descriptions of our poverty, our unemployment (with photographs of some of the worst slums), and bloodthirsty accounts of the cruelty of our administration during the last two hundred years, with witnesses from the Red Indians of America to the Arabs of Palestine. An illustration: In a boys’ book, of a North American Indian Chief, the Nordic young are invited to see a close parallel between the fate of their own race and that of the courageous andenoble Indian, persecuted remorselessly by the Savage British Settlers. The title of a placard displayed evarywhere this week reads: “British Youth Sees Through War Agitation and Encirclement Manoeuvres,” and accompanying it is a picture of British youths with notices inscribed: “I Refuse Conscription”; here the German good can best be served by representing our pacifists as friends of Germany. Perhaps the most important duty of the English nation is to make known to the new over-confident Germany, for the sake of both countries and of Europe in general, that although we remember the past, and cherish certain inherited ideals, we are at least as equal to the present as those who prefer to think they first became really great in 1933. The only way to show them is by action; hence nothing could have had a better effect than the introduction of conscription. Great Britain had previously been counted out of any serious opposition to their plans, so the rulers of Germany had a most unpleasant shock, which could not be disguised by the immediate attempts at belittlement.