RAMPANT NATIONALISM

A hint of the course the Hitlerites may pursue if they come into power in Germany was given recently in a speech by a party member to a group of Nazi medical men. Suppression of the "inferior" races of the republic, banishment of the Jews, wholesale sterilization of the "unfit," and other measures to insure Teutonic supremacy are part of the program. The fact that the Germans, for all their race consciousness, are far from being a pure stock, evidently did not occur to the speaker.

The Nazi idea of race purity and of the emergence of a dominant national organism is a fantastic one. It is ridiculous to suppose that nations, purged of foreign elements or not, are subject to laws or natural evolution and the survival of the fittest. The absurdity is extreme in Germany where Teutonic, Alpine, Jewish, and Slavic stocks are thoroughly mingled.

Resentment against the French, to whom younger Germans simply feel that they are paying tribute, and indignation at the presence of thousands of Poles in the Ruhr mines while thousands of Germans in that district are unemployed account in part for the extreme nationalism of the Hitler party. The Jewish grip on the financial system and on the newspapers, its effect exaggerated by fabulous rumors concerning the malevolent use of that control, is responsible for anti-Semitic hatred.

But whatever its causes, the Nazis' chauvinism is clearly part of an emotional appeal to national pride. That aspect of the Hitler program no intelligent person could approve. If it represents the degree of a sanity in the program as a whole, then Germany is being made the victim of the rankest demagogism.