[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR]
SIR,—May I comment shortly on Mr. Meyrick Booth's plea for an understanding, based upon similarity of positions and interests, between this country and Greater Germany ? Few people in this country would object to such an understanding with the Germans in their normal frame of mind. The dangers implicit in German policy today are due to Nazism, and Nazism is due in part to the post-War policy of revanche pursued by the French and to Great Britain's lack of policy. I have seen Nazism in practice in Germany since 1934 and, though it has produced some excellent motor-roads and cheap holiday-trips for Nazi workers, it has meant also the extinction of individual freedom (Germans are " slaves in a Servile State "), the sterilisation of culture, the deliberate lowering of the standard of living in order to put the collectivised nation on a war-basis, the suppression of religious freedom, and the persecution of minorities, &c., &c.
Now all this has been transferred to Austria. I have only just returned from that country where I found that friends had been imprisoned on no pretext whatever, that hotel-keepers, &c., were losing heavily because of foreign cancellations, that Gleichschaltung frequently meant job-stealing, that Catholics were complaining bitterly and despairingly that Cardinal Innitzer's declaration was " forced," that young men in employ- ment were finding their careers about to be cut short by conscription and older men were preparing to cross the Swiss frontier in the event of war, that the Austrian officials, Nazi or non-Nazi, were practically powerless beside the importations from Germany, and that the German tourists exceeded even the exaggerations of war-time propagandists in the extent their almost barbaric arrogance and rudeness towards the inhabitants. Yet, despite all this, most of these unfortunate Austrians could do nothing else but vote for Hitler and Nazi domination in this ridiculous plebiscite.
Faced with the implications of Nazi despotism and also with the fact that its ecdftomic nationalism is incompatible with the fundamental economic remedies suggested by the van Zeeland report, liberal-minded Germanophiles hesitate before concluding an agreement with the present rulers of Greater Germany.—Yours &c., CHRISTOPHER CADOGAN.
Ouenington Old Rectory, Fairford, Gloucestershire.
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