Reactions to Hitler

Every time Fiihrer Adolf Hitler gets ready to make a speech the world gets scared. Every time he gets through making a speech the world is relieved that he has not immediately plunged it into war.

Much the same sense of relief was evident last week after the Dictator finished his annual Reichstag address (TIME, Feb. 6). Because he announced no troop movements, made no mention of forthcoming invasions and delivered his address in rather more subdued tones than usual, many correspondents, editorial writers, even statesmen called the speech "mild." Those who took the trouble to wade through the long, formless address, however, discovered that it was actually one of the most sensational and threatening talks ever made by the head of a State. Excerpts:

> "Surely no one can seriously assume that, as in the case of Germany, a mass of 80,000,000 intelligent persons, can be permanently condemned as pariahs or be forced to remain passive forever by having some ridiculous legal title [to colonies], based solely on former acts of force, held up before them."

> "In time of crisis one single energetic man outweighs ten feeble intellectuals."

> "Europe cannot settle down until the Jewish question is cleared up."

> "If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."

> "We shall protect the German clergy in their capacities as God's ministers, but we shall destroy clergy who are enemies of the German Reich."

> "Let us thank Almighty God that He has granted to our generation and to us the great blessing of experiencing this period of history and this hour."

Remarks like these gave Neville Chamberlain "the impression that it was not the speech of a man who was preparing to throw Europe into another crisis." Not a few other popular spokesmen on both sides of the Atlantic failed to share this view.

Said Commentator Dorothy Thompson of the New York Herald Tribune: "Hitler never delivered a more ominous speech or one more cunningly calculated to befuddle his opponents and create dissension in democracies. The speech boils down to a declaration of intention to reapportion the distribution of the world's wealth among nations." James G. McDonald, chairman of President Roosevelt's Committee for Refugees, thought the speech was a threat to peace, that it heralded the Nazis' use of the Jews for expansion purposes. Osservatore Romano, semi-official organ of the Roman Catholic Church, challenging the Fiihrer's statement that no religious persecution exists in Germany, declared that "liberty has lost all meaning in the ecclesiastical and religious fields in the Third Reich."

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