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Realities & Face. Adolf Hitler's small, neat architect's mind, abnormally isolated and emotional, likes simplicity, which it manufactures by excluding all contradictory facts. But he has a firm grasp of the realities on which European politics is based. These are simply that there are 65,000,000 white Britons, 66,000,000 Germans. 41,000,000 Frenchmen and 43,000,000 Italians and, on the other side of Europe, 162,000,000 Russians. Germany's pre-War diplomacy was so bankrupt that it went to War against all the other four. Its defeat was achieved not by its original enemies but by the economic might of the U. S. A basic principle of diplomacy is to preserve the fiction that all Great Powers are equally sovereign and therefore not to be coerced or humiliated in public. This maintenance of "face" is what imposes on Great Powers the reciprocal obligation to act with a sense of responsibility for world affairs. The post-War treaties violated this law. They did it safely in the case of Austria-Hungary by legalizing the com plete destruction of that Empire. They did it unsafely in the case of Germany by not destroying Germany. The Treaty of Versailles all but wrote into its text the eventual arrival of Adolf Hitler upon the world scene. The German people have an abnormal respect for Law and Authority, and their impulse is to adjust themselves to circumstances rather than to revolt against them. To an extraordinary degree Germans are in the hands of their leaders. Germany's responsible leaders were ruined by the Treaty of Versailles' post-War operations. Chancellor Brüning tried to show the Powers it could not be obeyed, by trying faith fully to obey it. Depression made Ger many's creditors call their loans, leading inevitably to foreign exchange control, standstill agreements, the Hoover Moratorium and the bankruptcy of Germany's international credit and internal politics. Had not resident von Hindenburg, the only German Germans could still respect fully look up to. been in an advanced state of mental senility, Adolf Hitler might have failed to call the cards. Franz von Papen, beloved of Hindenburg, spoke for Hitler to the aged President and, effective Parliamentary government having been scrapped three years before. Hitler was in as Chancellor. The rest was fairly easy. Nazis All. Hitler's attraction for Ger mans is that he, a little, high-strung Austrian, can break the Law for law-abiding Germans. Even to intelligent Germans it began to seem that the Hitler regime might be useful in getting Germany's necessary international dirty work done. By last week Realmleader Hitler had thrown three patriotic tantrums, had bluffed the Versailles Powers into letting him have an Army, a Navy and the Rhineland and had led Germany toward the same dead end as 1914. By last week Realmleader Hitler had also got all he could by patriotic tantrums. To get such real and expensive things as Austria, Memel, Danzig or lost German colonies he must from now on have Britain's friendship. To that end he has directed all his recent diplomacy to London, not to Paris.
