EASTERN EUROPE: Liberation

If I had the Ural Mountains, if we possessed Siberia, if we had the Ukraine, then Nazi Germany would be swimming in prosperity.

So said Adolf Hitler at Nürnberg in 1936. Last week Führer Hitler, after a year of magnificent triumphs, could still not see any likelihood of getting his hands on the faraway Urals. If there was any grabbing to be done in Siberia, Japan rather than Germany would do it. But the Ukraine was different. There the signs were getting plainer and plainer that Führer Hitler thought the time was approaching when the Ukraine—which includes parts of Poland and Rumania as well as of Soviet Russia—would be ripe for Nazi plucking.

With the reduction of Czecho-Slovakia last autumn to a German puppet state forced to do Nazi Germany's bidding, the real frontiers of Germany were moved 300 miles eastward. They now touch Rumania, front on Polish Ukrainian districts, reach within 90 miles of the Soviet Union.

After Munich, Ruthenia, easternmost district of Czecho-Slovakia, now called the Carpatho-Ukraine, became an "autonomous" region with only loose connections with Prague but with very definite though unofficial links with Berlin. Mountainous and largely barren, the Carpatho-Ukraine was obviously expected to produce for Germany political rather than economic results. The Nazis' Ukrainian blueprints nominated it as the generating centre for a movement to "liberate" all Ukrainians from their present Polish, Rumanian and Russian masters and bring them under the benevolent protection of Führer Hitler.

Well-heeled Nazi organizers began to appear in Chust, capital of the Carpatho-Ukraine. A military mission arrived to teach the hastily arming Ruthenians the art of warfare. A Ukrainian "Free Corps" was formed, while the Carpatho-Ukrainian militia named their organization after Colonel Eugene Konovaletz, former Ukrainian leader murdered in Amsterdam last year when an assassin, rumored to be of the Soviet secret police, placed a time bomb in his overcoat pocket.

Last week 4,000 Nazi soldiers were reported to have made their way across Czecho-Slovakia to Ruthenia, a plain warning by Führer Hitler that Nazi Germany will tolerate no impulses by neighboring Hungary and Poland to invade the Carpatho-Ukraine and establish a common frontier. Ukrainian broadcasts are sent daily from Germany. These broadcasts and the Nazi press in Germany incessantly campaign for "Freedom for the Ukraine."

White Help. Figuring also in Führer Hitler's plans are White Russians who fled from Russia when the Bolsheviks came to power. Herr Hitler would certainly prefer to see Russians fight Russians rather than spill good Nazi blood in his Ukrainian "liberation campaign." Estimated to be 400,000 strong, the White Russians, though scattered, are numerous enough and sufficiently experienced to be of military and propaganda value. Not a few are now in Berlin, where Unter den Linden cafés have buzzed with their plottings.