Hitler without the moderates Fenruary 1938

Head of the Army and Everything 
The German press has returned to silence, said the BBC in one of its witty moments, 
and all is apparently well again in the Reich. 
The international situation has been little affected by the recent manifestation of 
disunity in Germany, but one thing remains  clear after all the excitement; A Dictator
is not necessarily as firm in the saddle as he appears to be, and as he would like the 
world to believe. appears to be, and us he would like the World to believe.

What Will Hitler Say?
The whole of Europe is wondering what Herr Hitler will say
to this Reichstag; on Sunday, when he is to make his first
public statement since the great changes in the chief offices
of State which have set him still more firmly in the saddle.

No Room For Criticism
It would seem that the general. effect of the upheaval is that Herr Hitler has removed 
from power high officials who were not entirely in sympathy with his policy, but reserved 
their right to criticised. Nazism has no room for criticism. In 1934 Herr Hitler disposed 
of his critics by having them shot; this time he has adapted the more humanised way of 
replacing them with men who will do his bidding without question.

The dramatic events of the beginning of the month brought into the light of day much ignore 
than was happening at the time. The true position of the last few years stands out clearly 
for all to judge. All during these years the Nazi Party has proclaimed that it hats stood
solidly and entirely for Germany, and that the throne on which Herr Hitler had installed 
himself by their energies  was without at flaw in its structure.
All was unity and perfection, and there were no critics i the Reich because there was 
nothing to he criticised.

Generals Dismissed
And yet, after rumours the strictest censorship could not suppress, the world learned 
that two of the main supports of this perfect organization had been set on one side, 
and a new kind of structure put in position to maintain it. The causes of this revolutionary 
change in the control of the Reich were so grave that the Commander-in-Chief and the Chief
of Staff (Marshal von Blomberg and General von Fritsch) of the most famous army in Europe 
had to surrender their high positions, together with thirteen other generals and many officers
of high rank. The Foreign Minister surrendered his high office and took a lower office in 
what is called a Secret Cabinet. The new Foreign Minister is Herr von Ribbontrop, who has 
been Ambassador in London and has  the advantage of knowing this country and its desire for 
World peace.

The immediate result of the changes is apparently that Herr Hitler has given himself more 
power than ever. He has made himself head of the Army, which he controls through National-
Socialist officers. He has put the Civil Service under a. more uniform  control than hitherto. 
In short, the new men and the new ideas have been brought to the test against the traditional 
ideas of the long established servants of the State, whether in foreign, military, or civil 
matters, and they have prevailed.

Only time can show what underlies this vast upheaval. Herr Hitler himself has frequently shown 
that he is averse from the reckless actions proposed by his fanatical followers. He porcelains
himself stronger today than in the past: can he continue to check his extremists without  
the support of the moderates who have gone.

The Crystal Gazer

 HlTLER’S FANTASY OF IMPERIAL DOMINATION


 " The German Chancellor" said Mr Chamberlain in the House of Commons on
01st September. " has not hesitated to plunge the world into misery in order to serve
his own senseless ambition." What form that ambition takes is described below.

  Just as 1914 Kaiser Wilhelm and his fellow Pan-Germans planned and worked for a
German Empire which should stretch from the North Sea to Bagdad and possibly far
beyond, so Hitler dreams of a great nazi dominion. Under Hitler however, the Drang
nach Sued-Osten (The Drive to the south east) of the Berlin Bagdad railway, of Mittel- 
Europa, has been reinforced by a religious urge.

   Like the Kaiser, Hitler believes that he is inspired by God -- the "good old german god" 
of whom we heard so much in the last war -- but he displays a mystical fanaticism which
would have been altogether alien to the character of the Kaiser, brought up as he was on
the lines of Victorian evangelism. Hitler see himself as the captain of a crusade aiming
at the domination of Europe's lesser breeds by men of the pure Nordic or Ayran race. With 
fanatical fervour he has preached his gospel from a thousand platforms and in all the
seven hundred pages of  "Mein Kampf" -- than book which is put into the hands of every
newly-married couple in the Nazi Reich.

  There is imperialism enough in all conscience in "Mein Kampf," but it is still more clearly in
evidence  in that book which has been called the New Testament of Nazism - "The Myth of
the Twentieth Century," published in 1930 by Alfred Rosenberg, the Russian refugee of 
German extraction who greatly influenced Hitler in his most impressionable early years,
and who has become the priest and prophet of Pan-German Aryanism.

  In this remarkable effusion, which is now in its 110th edition and of which more than half 
million copies have been sold, Rosenberg visual

ises a German empire which shall i
include not only Germany but all the adjacent lands in which there is a German or an Aryan
population. First Austria, he prophesied, would come into the fold, and next the Sudeten
Germans; somewhat later the Teutons of Alsace-Lorraine, Switzerland,  Luxenberg, Belguim,
Holland, Poland, Lithuania, Russia and Hungary will follow suit. Sometimes the union will
be effected voluntarily; sometimes force of arms will be neccessary. But no obstacle, however
great, can stop this growth of Germany as the imperial power of ceneral and south-eastern Europe,

  Not only the German-speaking parts of the continent are to be come under the Reich. The 
Germans will play their part as the supermen of Nietsche's creed, and they will have their 
willing and devoted slaves many other races on their border lands. Denmark, Sweden, Norway,
and Finland are to form a "Northern Germanic Federation"; Jugoslavia, Rumania, and Bulgaria 
are to  constitute the "Balkan Protectorate"; Lithuania, Latvia, and Etsonia are to be a "Baltic
Dominion"; and finally, the Russian Ukraine, together with Ruthenia and the Polish Ukraine, will 
form the vast "Ukrainian Dominion.'

More Room for Germans!

  "We demand land and soil (Colonies) for the nourishment of our people and the settlement of
our surplus population," declares the third article of the original programme of the Nazi party,
issue in 1920, four years before the birth of "Mein Kampf"; and in "Mein Kampf" Hitler urges again
and again the German right to unhammpered expansion. Before the end of the twentieth century,
he says, the world shall see 250 million Germans flourishing in the heart of the European continent.
Nazi Germany's appetite for colonial expansion will not be sated until her bounds extend from
the Atlantic and the English Channel to the Black Sea, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean.

   "Then the plough will be the sword," runs a passage in "Mein Kampf," "and out of the tears
of  war will grow the harvest of future days." 

The Plan in Operation.

     Step by step the great dream, fantastic though it may appear, has been carried into realisation.
Austria has returned to the Reich as Hitler and Rosenberg declared it should and would; the Sude-
ten Germans have returned, too, and Czechslovakia was wiped out inthe  process; the Germans in 
Memel and Danzig and the Tyrol have all returned or returning by one way or another to their
 "Homeland."

   Then somewhere, somehow, the plan has gone wrong. Instead of executing the Drang nach 
Sued-Osten to the oilfields of Rumania and the rich corn lands of the Ukraine, Hitler has flung his
 legions against Poland, which up to now has played very little part in the dreams of Pan-Germanism; 
in the map illustrating Rosenberg's scheme of German expansion, for instance, practically the whole
of Poland -- including even the Corridor -- is left outside the imperial limits.

   Moreover, in one of his most cynical moments, Hitler has shaken hand with Moscow, with the 
Bolshevik monster whom he has so often and so violently denounced, and so closed the door, for
the time, at least, on his expansion towards the south-east.

   The Kaiser in his day made a similar move. Just as Hitler has attacked Poland, so the last of the 
Hohenzollerns in 1914 swept through Belguim. And Hitler should have remembered that then Britain
stood by Belguim.   ... He should have thought of that -- and thought again.

General Gamelin 23rd September 1939

23rd September 1939
Gamelin -- Man of the Moment
Just as the last war the French people loked up to "Papa" Joffre and
to Foch, the Supreme Generallissimo, so today they put their trust in General
Gamelin, who has control of all the armed forces -- on land and sea
in the air -- of the Republic.

General Marie Gustav Gamelin was born in Paris in 1872, shortly
after France of the second Empire had crashed in Bloody ruin at
Sedan.  It is said that as a child, he played with toy soldiers in his
nursery, and today, when he attends a meeting of the Supreme War
Council, he sometimes glances across the road at the house in
which he was born.

The blood of the soldiers flows in his veins, although in his early
days he wanted to be a painter, and still today he is something
more than a dabbler in water colours. From the Military academy 
at St. Cyr, the French Sandhurst, he went to the Chasseurs, and after 
a term of service in Africa became military secretary to Joffre.

At the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, he held a position
on the Operation Branch of Joffre's staff. What happened then may 
be told in the words of "Pertinax," the distinguished French journalist,
writing in the column of the "Daily Telegraph":

               On the evening of  25th August there was a
         discussion regarding the proper course to adopt
         in order to stop the movement of the German army,
         then pointing towards the valley of the Oise ad Paris
         and threatening to outflank the French line on the left..
             General Berthelot, Deputy Chief of the General  staff,
          declared himself in favour of a counter-attack directed
          towards the north-west and aimed at the inner (i.e. left) 
          front of the enemy right wing, which was opposite the
          British divisions. As against this Gamelin speaking for
          the Operation Branch, maintained that the invader taken 
          in the rear by an army gathered in the region of Paris and
          advancing north-eastwards.  Joffre decided in favour of
          Gamelin, who drew up Order NO. 2 -- the seed of the
          Victory of the Marne.
              The operation however, was not put into action before
           the French armies had retreated behind the Seine. On the
           morning of 04th September, when the Operation branch met,
           Gamelin, examining the map on which the positions of the
            various Corps were laid out, observed that they "Capped"
            the German effectives -- in other words, that a sort of circle
            seemed to be sketched automatically round them.
               The favorable opportunity offered itself: it was was seizing
            without delay. The attack must be made at once, and the 
            proposed recovery along the Seine put aside. Such is the    
            story of the Order No. 6 of 04th September, the order which   
            led to victory -- again the work of Gamelin's pen.

 

 In the spring of 1918, he decided to leave the French G.H.Q. for the field
and was given command of a Brigade of light Infantry (Chasseurs) in
Alsace, and later of the 9th Division. At the time of the great March 
offensive of 1918 Gamelin's single division held the front -- if it may be
called  -- which gradually spread over eleven miles. In those terrible days
 of defeat and retreat, he was one of the last to yeild ground.

 After the war he held a command in Syria, and there again he achieved 
victory for France at a most critical moment, when with 5,000 men he
annihilated a fanatical mob of 100,000 Druses.

 Small of stature, with pink cheeks, reddish hair, steel blue eyes and a crisp
moustache, he is a typical French soldier. He  is always meticulously 
turned out, with his many ribbons and medals in his buttonhole. His favorable
phrase to be, "I am a philosoopher."  As Joffre said after the battle of the Marne,
in which Gamelin had, as we have seen, played so valuble a part:: "If the be
philosophy, it is time that all generals were philosophers." 

photo Top
Meeting General Lord Gort at Victoria Station, London, in the summer of 1939
photo bottom
On several occasion general Gamelin, French Generlissimo, has paid official visits to
 (Aldershot) England, particularly since it became appartent that the Franco-British cooperation of
1914-1918 might have to be repeated in tg=he faceof the menace of Nazi aggression.