CHANGING GERMANY [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Slit, —Herr
Heinrich Peters is so manifestly suffering froin chronic oppositionisrn to Hitlerism and everything associated with it that one feels assured that his absurdly naïve assertions of National Socialist disintegration will of themselves defeat his propagandist object.
The significance of the Church conflict with the German Government is consistently overrated, and the tedious squabble between Nazism and Roman Catholicism—the latter a waning force in Germany, as in the rest of Europe—has been magnified out of all proportion by those who spend their time casting around for a flail with which to hammer Germany. The Nazis seek solely to check the re-emergence of German Catholicism as a politico-ecclesiastical force ; a point of view that can be understood, even by English democrats like myself, when it is remembered that political Catholicism, in the form of the old Centre Party, shared in the humiliating failure of the Weimar Republican system even to administer a nation with efficiency. The tendency of the Roman Church in Germany to attempt to revive the old Centre grouping has, far from consolidating German Catholicism, alienated from the Roman Church many devout Catholics who now swell the Nazi ranks. If Herr Peters knows modern Germany, and I doubt it, he should be aware that Hitlerism finds its most powerful support in the Catholic Rhineland.
In Germany, as in Italy, political faith exercises a stronger pull than religious allegiance, however much publicised the pulpit thunderings may be.
It is true that freer speech may be heard in Germany today. I contend that it is a sign not of impending trouble but of a
relaxation of censorship over personal opinion, and that the regime is steadily achieving a greater elasticity as it gains in strength and in experience. No revolution can, in its early stages, afford to permit noisy criticism.
It is high time that those who have dedicated their lives
to petty campaigning against Hirlerism should find criticism other than the weary, discredited lie that Germany lives under jackboot terrorism. Hitler is making a nuisance of himself in foreign affairs, I agree. At home he has been on the whole an enormous success.—Yours, &c., Westminster Mansions, S.W. r.
RAYMOND BURNS.
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