In one laconic sentence the German Ambassador to Japan, Major General Eugen Ott, last week set a temporary limit to German war aims and gave Japanese jingoes an encouraging pinch in the backside. The German Government, General Ott told Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita, "is not interested in the problem of The Netherlands Indies."
This was far more than Japan had hoped for when she asked other powers if they would respect the status quo of the East Indies (TIME, May 20). The Nationalist "Southward Ho" Party's newspaper Kokumin promptly hailed it as a "blank power of attorney" for Japan in the Pacific, muttered that the transfer of the Dutch Government to England had already altered the status quo. Even slightly cockeyed, definitely popeyed, bulky, bluff Yakichiro Suma, who speaks with authority for the Foreign Office, told the country in a radio speech that Japan's policy of non-involvement in the war might soon become one of involvement "in the sense of preventing the spread of the European war to Asia," i.e., in the sense that Japan would grab the Indies and possibly Singapore and French Indo-China if & when they became weak enough to need "protection."
Whatever dreams of world empire Adolf Hitler may have, his Ambassador's declaration to Japan seemed to mean that they can wait. Adolf Hitler is a man who does one thing at a time. Last week he was preoccupied with trying to knock out his archenemies, Britain and France, and in the flush of that triumph to build his new Europe which Germany would dominate for 1,000 years. Although France and Britain were still on their feet, they were so groggy that spectators were busy speculating on what sort of Europe Adolf Hitler's Europe would be.
To Münster. For three hundred years the history of our continent was substantially determined by England's effort, by roundabout means of balanced, mutually binding relations of power among the European States, to maintain and secure the necessary protection in the rear for big British aims in world politics. The traditional trend of British diplomacy . . . was deliberately aimed at preventing by all means the rise of any great European Power above the level of the general scale of magnitudes, and, if necessary, to crush it by military means.—Mein Kampf.
Last week Adolf Hitler's mind went back 300 years minus eight, to the Treaty of Westphalia signed in the old Hanseatic town of Münster. By that treaty the Holy Roman Empire, devastated by the Thirty Years War, was broken into tiny pieces and the authority of the Emperor ended forever. The history of Germany since then has been the repeated efforts, under Prussia, to pick up the pieces of that Empire. Last week Adolf Hitler let it be known that the peace treaty ending World War II would be signed in Münster.