Foreign News: Peaceful Fuhrer

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Late one afternoon last week Adolf Hitler stepped up on a platform in City Hall Square at Wilhelmshaven. German naval base on the North Sea. A few inches in front of him was a bullet-proof glass shield†. Packed in the square beyond was an audience of 80,000 Heil-Hitlering Germans who had just attended the launching of the 35,000-ton battleship Von Tirpitz. Beyond them was a vast radio audience of millions in Germany, Britain, the U. S. waiting anxiously to hear a speech which had been widely heralded as the Führer's answer to the bold, diplomatic anti-German moves by Britain, France, Poland.

Trembling with emotion, a discernible note of disappointment and frustration in his voice, the Führer began: "German compatriots: He who wants to have the deepest impression of the decay and resurrection of Germany most vividly must go and see the development of a city like Wilhelmshaven, which today reverberates with life and activity and which till a short time ago was a dead spot nearly without means of existence and without prospects of a future. . . ."

At that point, the radio audience heard no more from Adolf Hitler. In Germany, where the people are always commanded to drop whatever they are doing and cluster around when the Führer makes an important speech, a German springtime song, All the Birds Are Here Again, suddenly came over the air. Many Germans thought that an April Fools' Day prank was being played. In the U. S. announcers quickly explained that the Führer's speech had been unavoidably cut off. A rumor that the Führer had been shot even circulated in Manhattan.

Ecstasy. Two-and-a-half hours later a censored recording of the speech was rebroadcast. A polished, edited official version of the text was released from Berlin, while the Führer left the mainland to spend the week-end at Helgoland, fortified German island in the North Sea. Nazi officials did not bother to clear up the mystery of the reason for the shutdown. Theory given in London's Sunday Express was: "Hitler had prepared no speech. He had spent Friday night in a state of high emotion and intense anger against Britain for her moves to curb his future planned aggressions. He was described as looking much tenser than usual. Suddenly his entourage realized when he began that, having prepared no speech, he might in a moment of oratorical ecstasy say something which it might not be wise to say."

Peace. Herr Hitler has rarely delivered a worse speech. It was weak, unconvincing, rambling, discursive, formless. Never had Hitler seemed less sure of himself. He worked up no climaxes. He asserted that in seizing Czecho-Slovakia he had performed a "service for peace" and announced that the next Nazi Congress at Nürnberg would be called the "Party Congress of Peace." His bitterest remarks were directed at Britain:

"When today a British statesman [Neville Chamberlain] demands that every problem which lies in the midst of Germany's life interest first should be discussed with England, then I, too, could demand just as well that every British problem first is to be discussed with us.