"Community of Fate"

Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, who began life as a drawing teacher and is now chief mystagogue of National Socialism, spends much of his time in private sanatoria. He dreams of a vast Germanic-pagan world in which Teutonic supermen live in ideological bliss. Rational Germans, few of whom possess the Nordic qualities he extols, call him "The mad prophet of Teutonic superiority." Sanatorium wardens tap their heads and whisper "Vogel im Kopf" (bats in the belfry). When Fellow Dreamer Adolf Hitler sees occasion, however, he often revives Comrade Rosenberg from his traumatic reveries and uses him for launching a trial balloon into the disturbed European ether or even for making a definite pronouncement on Hitlerian plans. Last week, which saw the Fuehrer acclaimed as the greatest warlord in history, was one of these occasions.

To the foreign press assembled in the gaudy scarlet-gilt-ivory conference room of the Propaganda Ministry and to the radio world at large, Rosenberg proclaimed a Nazi-dominated "Community of Fate" embracing Sweden, Norway and Denmark. "Fate," he declared, "so willed it that the German Reich has taken under its protection the entire territory from which once the German peoples migrated." Urging the Scandinavian countries, two of which are already Nazi-occupied, to appreciate the honor of German domination, he continued: "A small nation does not violate its honor when it places itself under the protection of a larger nation. . . . It may be understandable if a small nation will not let itself be ruled by another of the same size. Still, we are convinced that a small nation sacrifices none of its honor when it places itself under the protection of a really great people and a great Reich. . . . To recognize the greatness of a Reich like the German . . . is not in any way a sign of weakness, but recognition of the commandment shaping the fate of European existence."

Cold comfort to Scandinavians who last week saw their democratic ideals crumbling under Nazi pressure were Mystagogue Rosenberg's assurances that the Czechs and Slovaks, also German-dominated, "are living just as they had been living for centuries."

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