No Thank You, Herr Hitler

Since Adolf Hitler came to full power even the least bellicose nations of Europe have feared for their lives. Alarmed by Herr Hitler's warlike attitude, Switzerland last autumn mined her frontiers, nearly doubled her Army strength. The Netherlands has exiled almost all her gold to safer regions, has completed plans for opening her dikes to flood a large part of the country. In the north countries of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, not only have there been increased expenditures for arms, but the four small nations have long been banded together as the Oslo Powers to present a united front to the world in general and to aggressors in particular. The idea was that where the voice of one small nation might not carry far, the voice of four would.

Last week in Stockholm the Foreign Ministers of the Oslo Powers met in an extraordinary conference singularly unlike those usually held twice a year to discuss routine matters. Present were Juho Eljas Erkko of Finland; Richard Sandler of Sweden; Halvdan Koht of Norway and Peter Munch of Denmark. Their agenda: to decide what answer to make to Herr Hitler's offer of non-aggression pacts.

New pacts with Herr Hitler are not finding a very good market at the present moment. The Scandinavian public is dead set against them. Even when the British a few weeks ago suggested they might guarantee the Scandinavian countries' independence, they showed no enthusiasm. They want neutrality, not pacts. Obviously, all four would have liked to reply to Germany in unison: "Thank you, Herr Hitler, but we don't want any pacts."

But all four Oslo Powers do not have the same German problem. Norway, Sweden and Finland have some protection against Germany in the Baltic Sea. Denmark has a common 42-mile border with the Nazis. Furthermore, in the 1,500-square-mile province of North Schleswig, Denmark owns territory that, from 1864 to 1918, belonged to Germany. Several times during the last few years the German press has indicated that some day North Schleswig would be returned to the Reich. While Britain indicated last month that she would fight if Denmark were invaded, the Danes know that the German Army could probably be in Copenhagen before the British could leave Dover. The urgent necessity for Denmark is not to arouse the German Fuehrer.

So, when two days after the Stockholm meeting, the diplomatic representatives in Germany of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark went to the German Foreign Office to present their countries' replies to German State Secretary Baron Ernst von Weizsaecker, the united Oslo Powers front was broken. Sweden, Finland, Norway thanked Herr Hitler for his interest in their welfare, reaffirmed their neutrality, politely declined the Fuehrer's offer. Denmark replied that the Danish Government would be happy to discuss the terms of a non-aggression treaty with the German Government.

Aggression Pact. The Oslo Powers' replies made Herr Hitler's score of pact-seeking: four acceptances (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Denmark) and four rejections (The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Finland). None of these acceptances or rejections, however, held anything like the importance of a pact-signing that took place in Berlin early this week. There Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano and Herr von Ribbentrop put their names to a ten-year treaty which seemed to outsiders not so much a pact of non-aggression as one of aggression.

Made out in the name of the "German Reich's Chancellor and His Majesty the King of Italy and Albania and the Emperor of Ethiopia," this new military treaty affirmed the Italian-German determination to "stand side by side with their united strength for the preservation of peace and the securing of their living space." "On these lines forecast by history," the treaty's preamble reads, "Germany and Italy, in the midst of a world of unrest and dissolution, will serve to secure the bases for European culture."

The treaty, one of the most binding ever signed between two supposedly equal powers in Europe, provides that Germany and Italy will: 1) consult each other on all questions of "common interest or touching the general European situation"; 2) lend each other full "political and diplomatic support" to eliminate threats to either nation; 3) give each other military aid on "land, sea and air," in case either becomes involved in armed conflict; 4) set up permanent Axis commissions to deal with problems jointly.

Foreign correspondents predicted the formation of three Italo-German commissions, military, political and economic, and foresaw that they would be dominated by Germans. Moreover, the two nations promised each other aid in case one was endangered by "national events." That provision could be taken as insurance against civil revolt in either country, but since little Italy could obviously not intervene to "Keep order" in the big German Reich, this provision will, if ever implemented, give the Reich the right under some circumstances to intervene in Italy. To those who have seen German troops, generals, diplomats and agents pouring into Italy during the last six months the treaty seemed final confirmation of what has long been suspected: That long-independent Dictator Benito Mussolini had finally become the political, economic and military prisoner of the more powerful German Fuehrer.

Tours. Although there was hope that the "war of nerves" waged by Italy and Germany might drag on through the summer without a major crisis, Germans and Italians were busy power-politicking on a half-dozen other fronts. Starting at Aachen on the Belgian frontier, Fuehrer Hitler demonstratively inspected the reputedly impregnable 400-mile steel and concrete Limes Line (also called West Wall) on the French border, pronounced it good. II Duce wound up a tour of the Italian-French border with a more threatening speech against France than he had previously made on his tour.

Great Proletarians. Little Propaganda Minister Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels smeared the front page of Herr Hitler's Voelkischer Beobachter with some international rabble-rousing which he might well have cribbed from Joseph Stalin: Germany and Italy are the "great proletarian powers among European nations, robbed of their natural living rights by plutocratic States that have amassed vast riches by plundering and oppressing whole continents." For the Poles he chose these words: "Such silly childish political infants must be taught with a whip on the pants."

Shrewd. Germany has no colonies, but an enthusiastic Colonial League. Last week the League held its convention in Vienna. Attending were 25,000 delegates, who roared approval when Reich Colonial Leader General Count Franz von Epp promised that "by incomparably shrewd methods," Herr Hitler would regain the old Imperial colonial empire.

> At Geneva the League of Nations Council, holding its 105th meeting, was confronted with only minor or dead problems. Real doings took place in hushed hotel suites where British Foreign Seretary Lord Halifax and the Soviet delegate Ivan Maisky, also Ambassador at London haggled over the terms of the projected Anglo-French-Soviet mutual aid pact, with the prospect ever brighter that Britain would eventually accede to the Soviet demand for an out-&-out military alliance.

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