NAZISM

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 202, 27 July 1937, Page 4

NAZISM

ADDIIESS TO W-liJ.A. GERMANY UNDER HITLER. Addressing the Palmerston North branch of the Workers’ Educational Association on Saturday evening, Air S. J. Bennett, B.Se., gave an interesting outline of Nazism, describing the policy of the movement and the effect of it on the masses of the people. “Peace in Germany to-day is a despised condition,” he declared, “fit only for superior types of humans and for recovery and preparation for more war. The warrior is the highest type and women are looked upon as necessary in the sense that they bring children into the world to become soldiers.” After referring to the birth of the Nazi Party, which, lie said, did not seize power but was really “hauled into office,” the speaker referred to the various groups which went to makeup the Nazi movement. There were five main divisions of power, and there was not that unity which was found under Fascism. There was one group, for instance, he said, whose aim was to bring under trusts all Europe’s iron and Steel, and it stood, above all, for rearmament and for war. That group had an entente with the Blackshirts to keep down the workers, peasants, and middle-classes by means of terror and high prices. The industrialists had supported Hitler with funds at vital times to maintain iiis army and his propaganda machine in order to destroy organised labour. Hitler himself was an Austrian house-painter and later became a corporal in the German Army, said Mr Bennett. He had built up __ a mass party by attacking the Jews, the Marxists* the Church, and more especially the Versailles Treaty. He had himself said in his book that by sufficient propaganda anyone could be made to believe anything. “Hitler blames the Jews and the Communists for all the ills Germany •suffered during and since the war,” continued the speaker, “and lie curiously combines all his hates into one —the Russian-Jew-Communist financier.” In spite of the claims that unemployment had been nearly abolished in Germany there were officially 2$ millions out of work in 1936, and this number excluded many who should legitimately be listed. Low wages and rising prices were features of the regime which had to be acknowledged. There was general dissatisfaction, he said, among the masses of the people, not expressed openly but showing itself in many indirect ways. Among the peasants, workers and middle classes there was discontent, distrust,, and fear.