Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

678 DER FUEHRERspirit shown within Germany to Germans is a menace to every nationbeyond her borders. . . .' But Sir John Simon, the Foreign Minister, hadnothing to offer Austria but 'the whole sympathy of this country'; andthe Four-Power Pact, just concluded between England, France, Italy,and Germany, 'which I hope will be used to assist that country. . . .'England did not promise embattled Austria her own aid, but only that ofall Europe — little more than an empty word.It was the English Left which in those weeks made a real attempt toinjure National Socialist Germany. On July 25, the Congress of BritishTrades Unions and the Labour Party issued a call to their members toboycott German goods. But on the conservative side, the mostinfluential makers of public opinion opposed the boycott. In the firstdays of July, Lord Rothermere published another of his enthusiasticarticles on the new Germany in the Daily Mail; in Germany, wrote thefounder of the 'Empire Party,' youth had seized the power of command,there had been a national awakening, an example to all the world. Withthe same methods Mussolini had made his country the best governed onearth, and he, Rothermere, confidently expected Hitler, who had cometo power at the age of forty-three, to achieve equal successes inGermany. The simple, unadorned patriotism of Hitler and his followerswas, according to Rothermere, a source of great agitation among Britishparlor Bolsheviks and 'culture Communists.' The most hateful detractorsof Nazis, he went on, were to be found in those very sections of theBritish public and press which were most enthusiastic about Soviet rulein Russia. These people had undertaken a loud campaign of slanderagainst what they called 'Nazi atrocities,' which, as everyone whovisited Germany quickly discovered, consisted only of a few isolatedacts, which propagandists had generalized, multiplied, and exaggeratedin order to give the impression that Nazi rule was a bloodthirstytyranny. Rothermere did not refrain from remarking that under theWeimar Republic there had been twenty times as many Jewish officialsas before the war; and, as though to prove that he really knew nothingabout conditions in Germany, he concluded with the remark thatHindenburg and the Crown Prince, along with Herr Hitler, constitutedthe center of the edifice. These three men