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.