DANZIG’S FOERSTER

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20911, 16 September 1939, Page 10

DANZIG’S FOERSTER

LEAP TO LIMELIGHT ARDENT ANTI-SEMITIC ENORMOUS ROFITS MADE If you heard Gauleiter Albert Foerster shout: “We Danzigers want to go home to the Reich,” you would think that he was born and bred in Danzig. He was not. Foerster, whose announcement of Danzig’s return to Germany just preceded the outbreak of war, was a young Nazi M.P. when, in 1930, he was sent to Danzig by Hitler. His task was the organisation of the Danzig Nazi Party, which was then still a tiny group of unorganised radicals. He gradually succeeded in turning Danzig into a Nazi stronghold. Who is this man of 37 years who claimed the political limelight? Unlike some prominent Nazi leaders, Albert Foerster has never been in prison except on the day when he was born. His father was then governor of the municipal prison in Fuerth, the sister town of Nuremberg. Meets Famous Jew-Baiter The accident of his place of birth is also responsible for young Foerster’s political career. For whom should he meet, with whom was he to form the first intimate friendship of his life? It was Nuremberg’s Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiter, editor and proprietor of the notorious antiSemitic news-sheet, “Der Stuermer.” Foerster at the time of this meeting was just out of his teens. When he lost his job as clerk in a local bank Streicher came to his help, offering him work on the advertising side of “Der Stuermer.” The job did not promise much money, nor was it very interesting and Foerster found plenty of time to indulge in political activities as one of the first ardent anti-Semitic Nazis. This was ten years before Hitler came to power. Foerster is the ideal “little Hitler.” He does not only walk like his Fuhrer, his mannerism of speech is exactly that of Hitler. And he faithfully remembers what Hitler tells him to say. It was not always like that. After he met Hitler for the first time in his life he confessed in an article a few years ago: “He (Hitler) looked at me with his penetrating eyes, pressed my hand, and said a few words which I was too excited to remember ...” But Hitler remembered Foerster, and gave him the Danzig job. He moved into the Gauhaus, the headquarters of the party. Foerster later became Gauleiter (or Nazi district leader), a Reich M.P., a councillor of State, an S.S. group leader, the owner of the “Danzig Vorposten,” the leading Nazi paper of the Free City, and President of Danzig (illegally). Little Original Thought The young Gauleiter is a fighter in the truest sense of the word. His political debut in Danzig was a pubbrawl, from which iall participants went away with bloody heads. Politically Foerster is a person with little original thought. He works according to established Nazi standards. His insults against Poland have been as numerous as his earlier assurances of loyalty to Poland. In 1935 lie wrote in Ihe “Voelkischer Beobachter.” the official Nazi organ, that “Danzig wanted nothing but to live within the framework of the exisling treaties” and in 1937 he declared in a speech that, “Danzig knew its obligations towards Poland.” Foerster is a rich man and one of the few Nazi leaders who enjoy the undisputed confidence of Germany’s j heavy industries. After all, he has done a lot for them. Whenever Danzig’s financial and monetary system underwent a sudden change, timely information meant enormous profits for Foerster’s friends, and, some say, for him. too. The first time that the name of the unknown young Nazi Albert Foerster leapt into the headlines was when be violently attacked Ilindenburg after his election as President.