THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 174 No. 5183

LONDON, SEPTEMBER 9th, 1939

SIXPENCE

IN THIS ISSUE

THE WAR AND NEUTRALITY

An Editorial on Europe’s Euture THE FIFTH PERIL

By Douglas Woodruff

SOME AMERICAN ATTITUDES TO THE WAR

A Survey by Robert Speaight

CARDINAL HINSLEY’S PASTORAL LETTER

Full List o f Contents on page 328.

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The War Party in Germany

The efforts continued up to last Saturday to achieve a basis for an equal and negotiated settlement between Germany and Poland, failed when the Germans invaded Poland on Friday and refused to suspend their military attack. Late on Thursday the German Government issued a document with sixteen points which they claimed that the Poles had rejected. This document was unknown alike to Poland and P o la nd’s allies. It was only published simultaneously with the announcement that the German Government considered it had been rejected, and the whole episode suggests very plainly that there has not been singleness of purpose or direction inside the Nazi movement. The party o f war have carried the day. Five years and more since the purge of June 30th, the revolutionary Nazis who have felt themselves for so long baulked o f their revolution, have crowned a series o f successes which began with the resignation o f Dr. Schacht and continued with the subordination o f the German Army to the Party machine.

Its problem is how to get more and more work and sacrifice out of the German people, who have already endured an immense strain to give the Government the armed strength with which it has gained, up to now, a succession o f bloodless triumphs.

Among the first of its acts are prohibitions o f foreign listening and confiscations o f sets strong enough to hear foreign stations. There is no enthusiasm for war in Germany, and in the light o f German history this is a very remarkable thing, for the Germans respond naturally and strongly to the military appeal. I f they do not do so today it is, in part, because their Government encouraged them up to a very few days ago, to think there would be no major war. The German Government has not declared war on Poland, it has accepted the British and French declarations, but regards them primarily as mistakes. I t plans to finish swift conquests in Poland and then turn to the west, without enthusiasm for a defensive war and probably with suggestions for settlement on the new basis furnished by the German arms.

The readers o f Karl Ludecke’s volume I Knew Hitler, will find in his pages how everything which has since happened in Germany, the centralized party despotism inside the country and the Moscow Pact, were the dreams o f the revolutionary wing, who bitterly resented the approach and the tactics of apparent legality with which Herr Hitler made his way to power within the framework of the Weimar Constitution. That, they said, was no revolution but a change of government, and only a war, in their view, could complete and crown revolution in Germany. Similar reasoning made the Jacobins in 1792 eager for the first of Europe’s revolutionary wars.

Power in Germany is now concentrated in a Council of Six under General Goring, who has been proclaimed as heir-apparent to the Führer. With the exception of Rudolph Hess, who now ranks next to Goring in the succession, the Council consists o f technical, military and economic chiefs, who will make the best use of their country’s great but far from inexhaustible strength.

There is one part o f Germany which cannot be sealed from contact with the outside world or placed wholly under Doctor Goebbels, and th a t is the front line. In the later stages o f the last War, the front line proved the chief channel through which a different view to th a t officially promulgated by the German High Command was spread among the population. The Germans o f 1917 and 1918 had been bom and had grown up under the dynastic system, and only came to doubt it under the intolerable strain to which it exposed them. The Nazi movement is the creation of yesterday, now in its seventh year o f harm, and like all revolutions, it began by unsettling existing convictions and is now exposed to the same th reat once more. The German Offensive

The German offensive against Poland has four chief objects. These are : the occupation o f the Corridor,