In His Steps

It is as well to recall some of the things that happened in Hitler's days:

"Today it is reported from Oldenburg that a Communist Deputy of the State Diet was taken from his home, hit over the head, and shot with five bullets"—Times. 4/3/33.

"At Schweinfurth a Nazi shot dead his brother, whose political sympathies were with the left."—Times, 14/3/33. And John Strachey lists many more such specimens in his book "The Menace of Fascism."

That's the way to treat them! I can see many New Zealanders taking it with great calm and even satisfaction when they see these reports appearing in our own papers, with Palmers ton North instead of Oldenburg, and Petone for Schweinfurth.

Already it has begun in other Western countries, in a small way. But it began in a small way in Germany. "Malayan Communist Party banned by British Government" read headlines in the "Dominion" of 24/7/48. "Communist Strike Leaders at Dunkirk Arrested" (23/11/48). "Communist Leaders on Trial in New York; Charged with Conspiracy" (18/1/49—shades of the Reichstag Fire?). "German Communist Gaoled" (2/2/49). Collectively, an alarming picture, because the history of Hitler's. Germany teaches us what comes next.

The persecution of the Jews is sufficiently well known. Professor Einstein and Thomas Mann bear witness to the expulsion of honest intellects from their homeland. Less well known are the arrest and torture of Dr. Felix Boenheim, of the scientist Hermann Duncker, the writers Egon Erwin Kisch, Karl Witterfogel and von Ossletzky; the dismissal of Nobel prizewinner James Franck and Professor Arthur Korn; the persecution and final flight of the world's greatest sexologist. Magnus Hirschfeld.

And who has read the list of banned authors, whose works were burned publicly in Berlin that May night in 1933?

Not only Marx and Lenin, out Mann, Freud, Zweig, Piivier and Jacob Wasserman; Wilde, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter; Andre Gide, Proust, Loti Zola, Henri Bar-busse; Ilya Ehrenburg and Arthur Schnitzler. . . . While the uniformed incendiaries stood to attention, their uniformed minds closed, their uniformed mouths opened, singin:

"Lift high the flag: and keep the ranks together!"—the song of the brownshirt brute-hero, Hoist Wessel.

Already in the United States, as Mr. Zilch has shown, the process has begun. And now the very Adenauers and Haiders who once commanded the vandal crusade on culture, are the allies of our crusade to the save the "culture of the west."