Nazi Policy Disturbs Minorities
Hitlerism In South Africa
From Our German Correspondent Millions of Germans are living as minorities in such countries as Czechoslovakia, Poland,Yugoslavia, Rumania, Latvia and Estonia. There are also millions of German-speaking people living overseas, particularly in the United States, the Argentine and Brazil. All these Auslandsdeutsche have been for many years the object of particular interest to Germans in the Reich. Considerable moral and financial help has been given them to maintain German schools, German churches and German newspapers in those countries.
German lecturers and theatre-groups tour those countries, anu well-organised associations have been defending the interests of German minorities and German immigrants.
But, at the same time, nazis have introduced everywhere their brutal and intolerant methods with the result that the unity of the German minorities has been destroyed and that everywhere two groups of Germans are fighting against each other.
That is the case in Poland as well as in Rumania, in the United States as well as in Argentina.
In Africa and Argentina In South-West Africa, formerly a German colony and now a mandate administered by the Union of South Africa, there are three groups of whites, almost equally strong in numbers: Englishmen, 13oers and Germans. They have equal rights, all three languages are considered as official, and the three groups are equally represented on the Legislative Council. The Germans have become British citizens, keeping at the same time their Ger man citizenship. Until the arrival of Hitlerism their situation and their relations with their English and South African neighbours were excellent.
But everything is changed now. The German farmers have become Hitler ite and have organised nazi organisations. Against the arrogance• of those organisations Englishmen and Boers have formed a united front. The Hitler Youth has been dissolved by the mandate government. Thanks. to Hitler, the situational Germans in South-West Africa has become difficult and precarious.
In Argentina, the struggle between German nazis and German anti-Hitlerites is extremely violent. There are separate German schools, separate organisations and separate newspapers for nazis and non-nazis.
Dr. Schiemann's Accusations Dr. Paul Schiemann, who has been for many years the leader of the German minority in Latvia, has just published in the Neues Wiener Taghlatt of Vienna a remarkable article on what he calls " the fatal evolution of the German minorities."
He shows that the idea that only members of the dominating nation and race must have full rights, and that the state must be run according to the interests of that one nation and one race is just the opposite of what those who fight fqr the rights of the minorities want.
"The fight of the minorities," says Dr.( Schiemann, " is the fight of the right of the..nationalities to live, against nationalism, -1 the ideology which wants to make of the state the object of the rule of one nation,"