HITLER'S NEXT MOVE
HERR HITLER, having made a speech, has gone on holiday. General von Blomberg, Minister of Defence, and as such responble- for the Reichswehr, has done the same. Both of 'them no doubt are in need of relaxation. But their departure from Berlin serves designedly to emphasize the normalcy (as President Harding would have called it) of the general situation-. The purge is over and past. The mills of God grind Slowly, but the flail of the Fiihrer falls swiftly. The dead are dead, but life in Germany goes on and the Burgo- master of Berlin demonstrates to British tourists the unruffled placidity of the sun-baked capital. So the legend. And every German knows that whatever is true, that picture is not. Herr Hitler's progress through the streets to the Reichstag last Friday evening stirred only a fraction of the usual enthusiasm. The speech he delivered was unconvincing. The story lie told was uncorroborated, and could as well have been fabrication as fact. The promised list of victims of the terror has never been forth- coming. Apart from a few notorious cases mentioned by Herr Hitler himself no one knows who was killed or why, though facts that have leaked out about the murder of leading Roman Catholics like Dr. Klausener, head of the Catholic Action, and Herr Probst, leader of one of the principal Catholic youth organizations, will very sensibly increase the tension between the Vatican and the Wilhelm- strasse, and seriously imperil the ratification of the Concordat. Public opinion in Germany today has no means of making itself articulate, but the scepticism and disillusionment reported by British and other newspaper correspondents in Germany are in all the circumstances more likely to develop than diminish.
With all this Herr Hitler has to reckon. He may make a desolation and call it peace, but crying peace when there is no peace does not bring peace into being. And the fact has to be faced that two of the legends on which the Hitler regime is based, the legend of a united party extending till it becomes a united State, and the legend of an administration capable of making good its promises, have been finally and comprehensively shattered. Unity has not been restored to the Nazi Party because a hundred or two representatives of the immediately discordant elements are shot . in cold blood, shot while resisting or shot while trying to escape. Intimidation no doubt has its temporary effect, but Herr Hitler himself must be more intensely conscious than any man in Germany of the possibility of fresh challenges to his authority at any moment and in any ouarter. He cannot but be conscious equally of the strain next autumn and winter will lay on a population learning already what it is to go without potatoes and likely not many months hence to re-live the War-time experience of a shortage of bread. If the Hitler legend itself had lasted, Germans—a sufficient:number of them to serve the Government's purpose—might have been persuaded to suffer hardship for an ideal. But the personality of the Fiihrer no longer exercises its old domr Mating force. Increasing discontent, capable at any moment of taking menacing shape, is to all appearance the certain prospect.
If he is to keep his footing, Herr Hitler must turn either to Right or Left, which, so far as.his immediate colleagues are concerned, means towards General Goering or Dr. Goebbels. On the Right, moreover, are ,the great indusr trialists, the landowners of the eastern marches and, most important of all, the Reichswehr.. They are a formidable combination, and all of them, no doubt, .would accept Hitler so long as he was ready to dance to the tune they piped. But that would mean a clean break with the Socialist elements in the National Socialist movement, and they are far from negligible. No small proportion of the disilluSioned storm-troopers, tens of thousands of whom are threatened with expulsion from the force, is al- . ready beginning to drift towards Communism. Nazi dis- unity would be multiplied tenfold by any move to the Right on the Chancellor's part. Yet he may have to face that risk. He clearly intends to cut down the numbers of the S.A. The smaller but more highly trained force (said to number about 200,000, and playing the r4fr..of a swollen Praetorian Guard) is apparently to remain, and its future relations with the Reichswehr, which will soon be raised to a strength of 800,000, are problematic. If, which is doubtful, Herr Hitler can depend on both, he may still for some time retain his hold on the country. But the Reichswehr chiefs are keeping their own counsel, and the eulogies lavished by the Chancellor in his Reichstag speech on General von Blomberg seem to be dictated more by a hope of future support than by gratitude for present loyalty. In an increasingly unstable situation the Reichswehr stands out as the least unstable element, but even at its full strength of 300,000 its power to quell unrest in a population of 60,000,000 is necessarily limited.
All this, in one narrow sense, is Germany's own affair. Her own vicissitudes will not of necessity affect her neighbours much more than they have done already, though the fears expressed by Professor GuglielmO Ferrero in a penetrating article on a later page are not to be ignored. But Germany, whether under a Kaiser, a Bruning or a Hitler, is still a Great Power, and she must have external relations with the rest of the nations of Europe. At the present moment Herr Hitler's foreign policy is of greater consequence to the Continent than his domestic policy. For after protracted labour diplomatic conversations have resulted in a plan, clearly expounded by Sir John Simon in the House of Com- mons a week ago, for the full execution of which Germany's co-operation is indispensable. The difference between a Franco-Russian alliance and an agreement on the Locarno model is vital, and it is highly satisfactory that France should be proceeding definitely on the Locarno lines. A pact whereby France, Germany, Russia and Poland and one or two lesser States undertake to join in defending a signatory of the pact, Ger- many as much as anyone, if attacked by another signatory, has nothing invidious or discriminatory about it, and Germany will fail completely to persuade anyone outside her borders that it bears that aspect or can be interpreted as making for her encirclement. It makes powerfully for her security, just as the original Locarno Treaty does. The British Cabinet was right in giving the pact proposals its unhesitating blessing, and Italy's adoption of the same attitude of passive but benevolent approval is welcome.
If Herr Hitler is animated by the spirit that dictated his pact with Poland he will close with the French proposals with no more than a formal show of hesita- tion, for they would increase both the security of Germany and the general tranquillity of Europe. But the possi- bility has to be faced that he will not. What then be- comes of the British Government's very proper stipula- tion that the projected pact should be collective, not selective, in character—that it should include Germany and neither in spirit ,nor in form be directed against her ? The answer to that is clear. Germany cannot be brought into the agreement if she declines to come in. but France and Russia cannot be expected for that reason to drop their security arrangements, nor should we ask them to: Such a development would be a mis- fortune. Something like the .old pre-War encirclement of Germany would result, but if Germany's policy is the cause of that, the consequences of the policy must be accepted. A Germany in which revolutionary methods are once more manifest, and may be manifest again at any moment, is a dangerous neighbour. The best way for her to regain Europe's confidence would be to accept her place in the Eastern European plan. But if she deliberately chooses isolation, she may have to be systematically isolated for safety's sake.
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