Mr. A. Hitler Says His Piece All Over Again

Adolf Hitler's speech at Danzig yesterday was merely another move in the war of nerves which he is still trying to wage--a war designed to confuse, to terrorize, and cajole his opponents into surrendering without a fight.

It was familiar stuff.

He said that all he wanted was "lasting peace." It is exactly what he said he wanted when he re-occupied the Rhineland, when he took over the Saar after the plebiscite: when he annexed Austria: at Nuremberg last August, at Godesburg, at the Sportspalast, and at Munich last September: when he annexed what remained of Czecho-Slovakia in March of this year: when he grabbed Memel.

And in that he intimated what he no longer quite had the face to say, that this was the last territorial demand he would make in Europe. He had said that at least three times already, notably in the case of Czechoslovakia.

He said he had no quarrel with France. He said that about Poland many times before Munich, at Munich itself, and repeated it at least twice this year. In Mein Kampf, (p. 902, Reynal & Hitchcock edition) he wrote: "... We must at last become entirely clear about this: the German people's irreconcilable mortal enemy is and remains (sic) France." And again (p. 978, ibid.): "As long as the internal conflict between Germany and France is carried on only in the form of the German defensive (sic) against French attack (sic), it will never be decided..."

He told us that Germans had been brutally persecuted in Poland, that the Poles had been cutting off hands and feet, gouging out eyes. He told us the same thing of Czechoslovakia last September. In neither case has the claim been borne out in any degree by disinterested observers, such as our American reporters and our American diplomats.

He told us that the Poles could no longer keep order and peace in their state, and that therefore he carried war to it, again the same thing he told us of Czechoslovakia. It is well established by reportorial and diplomatic testimony that such disorder as existed was deliberately planted by his own agents; it is clearly manifest that it is an invariable part of his technique to create disorders in the territory of his intended victims by way of setting up this excuse.

He said that the Poles had no "ethnic" right to exist as a state, because they were not "culturally determined." Polish culture is older than that which formerly existed in Germany and which has now succumbed to the new barbarism. And in scale, quite as distinguished. It is simply a way of saying that no state has a right to exist which cannot overmatch his military might. That is the principle on which Atilla, Genseric, Theodoric, Genghis, Tamerlane--all the great barbarian conquerors--have acted.

He portrayed himself as a chivalrous soul, grieving over the fate of the poor French poilus, determined to be generous to the Poles if they did not force him into atrocities to match their atrocities (the poor Poles seem to be in for atrocities, seeing what he is already claiming), and waging a humane warfare until the French and English should too much try his patience with their atrocities. In Warsaw women and babies were dying under his bombs as he spoke, in all the eastern villages of Poland. Over the whole land the corpses of innocents lay unburied; and it was too plain, from American diplomatic and reportorial testimony, that he had deliberately stretched the term "military objective" to the purpose of bombing open towns and terrorizing fleeing civilians. On the bottom of the Atlantic, the dead, including 28 Americans, from a westbound ship which did not carry contraband, grinned wryly. In the Chicago stockyards the hogs lifted up their heads and called themselves Galahad-not without reason.

All that by way of confusion and cajolery. Then he turned to threats.

He would, he said, drop 500 bombs on England and France for every one dropped on Germany.

He was resistless. Look how his "race of men" ran over Poland.

The British navy needn't be so persnickety and cocksure. He was going to have an irresistible sea force before long.

Besides, the British might be surprised to find themselves in front of a mysterious weapon with which they couldn't cope. (Hollywood should be able to do something with that.)

He laid the groundwork for justifying himself when he chooses to try to terrorize the British and French populace with civilian bombings by charging that the British blockade was an attack on German women and children.

He said that Germany can last seven years. And pointed to the face of Stalin, treacherously smiling in the shadows, for proof.

And at last, he turned God.

Or perhaps it was only Saint Peter, to whom it was given to bind and loose upon this earth. Germany would receive no more ultimatums, she would give them. And Poland was done for, forever. A very long, long word. The same one some of his predecessors used about Belgium and Northern France in 1914 and for some time thereafter.

Altogether, a wonderful speech. Essentially an attempt to substitute words for facts. And quite possibly also an attempt to hide terrible fear and the consciousness of ultimate weakness under bold phrases.