Naval Victory

Fuehrer Hitler took Memel last week with enough flourish to make it seem valuable. It is not. The district is a homespun, colorless countryside 1,099 square miles in area bounded by East Prussia, the Baltic Sea and Lithuania. The population is a piddling 152,000, some 78% of them claimed by Germany. Memel has no industries important enough for the Nazis to boast of and Germany has many better ports. To Lithuania, however, it represents one-sixth of her industry, and it was the nation's only good outlet to the sea. With Memel gone, Lithuania now has only twelve miles of coastline. Furthermore, the Memel area controls the mouth of the Niemen River, on which traffic winds far into Poland.

In taking Memel, Fuehrer Hitler reaffirmed the old principle (temporarily forgotten in Czecho-Slovakia) of bringing back all the German "children" into the Reich's fold. Once decided on, the occupation of Memel was carried out with the Fuehrer's usual one-two-three precision.

Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop handed Lithuania's Foreign Minister Juozas Urbsys an ultimatum (in Berlin, as always), accompanied with the usual threats of invasion. Before long Foreign Minister Urbsys delivered Lithuania's acquiescence, agreed to sign a non-agression treaty which makes Lithuania a buffer State between the Reich and Poland and the Baltic nations.

What distinguished the actual occupation was that the Fuehrer personally "struck" from the sea. As if playing at naval conquest, he traveled to Memel on the pocket battleship Deutschland, followed by 60 other fighting vessels including two battleships, three cruisers, two destroyer flotillas, three torpedo-boat flotillas, numerous small craft. In the face of this attack the Lithuanian Navy, consisting of one 22-year-old, 500-ton patrol ship (a rebuilt German minesweeper), which mounts two three-inch guns and three machine guns, puffed out to sea for destination unknown, as homeless as the Flying Dutchman. Herr Hitler had won his first naval battle. The victory was consolidated when a naval corps--1,080 marines--landed and officially occupied the area.

Adolf Hitler spent scarcely three hours in his newest territory, but he had time to deliver a speech in which he said: "What we can expect from the other world we know. We do not have the intention to inflict suffering on this other world; however, the sufferings that it inflicted on us we had to make good again and I believe that in essentials we have already arrived at the conclusion of this unique restitution."

The "other world" knows by now not to take Herr Hitler's speeches of satiety seriously, but for those who believed that he would have to take a nap after swallowing both Czecho-Slovakia and Memel, there came a significant revision in the official text of the speech handed out to the press. In the revised version the above passage ended considerably more abruptly: "But the suffering that it inflicted on us must come to an end."

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