Nazis, who form a dynamic sub-minority in the Sudeten German Minority in Czechoslovakia, last week redoubled the vigor of their efforts to create "impossible situations" for the Czechoslovak Government of President Eduard Benes, a Czech. In their villages Nazi orators raised the cry that offspring of Czech-German marriages are "half-breeds!" With planes from Nazi Germany incessantly swooping over the Czechoslovak frontier and droning above Sudeten Germans last week, plug-uglies of the Nazi minority indulged with impunity in terroristic acts against non-Nazi Sudeten Germans. In vain a representative of the Sudeten German Social Democratic loyalists, Deputy Wenzel Jaksch, rose in the Czechoslovak Parliament at Prague to cry, "I demand protection for our democratic Germans against the terrorism of the Nazis!"
A Nazi spokesman, Deputy Ernst Kundt, promptly bellowed: "We will keep calm as long as is humanly possible but when we lose our calm the world will know it is your fault!"
As. In the town of As (pronounced Ash) lives Sudeten German Nazi No. 1, sharp-nosed, hard-lipped Führer Konrad Henlein. He secretly left As by motorcar last week, sped over the Czechoslovak frontier into Germany, entered a waiting plane and presently alighted on the asphalt of London's great airport Croydon. Several times before Herr Henlein has visited England. Not long ago he pledged to British friends that he was "really democratic at heart," said he would never make his party openly Nazi. He did so a few weeks ago. Last fortnight Führer Henlein denounced his democratic Sudeten German foe, Wenzel Jaksch, for "the treacherous and un-German move of recently visiting London in a time of political crisis!"
The Czechoslovak Question boils down to how the aspirations of Adolf Hitler and his Sudeten stooge Henlein can be achieved without provoking a general European war. Such a war every leading Briton, whether Conservative, Liberal or Laborite wants to avoid at any cost, and thus in London last week Konrad Henlein was feted all but royally.
"Morally Bound." Orator Winston Churchill, an independent Conservative and extremely pro-French, had declared only a few days before that if the Henlein Nazis refuse to be satisfied with the highly conciliatory treatment Sudeten Germans are now being offered by the Czechoslovak Government, then "Britain will feel herself morally bound to stand by Czechoslovakia!"
Mr. Churchill, who thus might have been expected to snub Herr Henlein last week, actually invited this Hitler stooge to his London flat for a three-hour conference at which was present the Liberal Opposition Leader Sir Archibald Sinclair. This was in the early afternoon, and with much frantic telephoning a late tea party for Herr Henlein was arranged by Laborite Harold Nicolson, M. P. Leftist Nicolson persuaded to take tea with Stooge Henlein three middleweight British Parliamentary figures notable up to now for their last-ditch championship of Anthony Eden at the time he was ousted: Lieut. Commander Reginald Fletcher (Laborite), Brigadier General Edward Louis Spears (Conservative); and Mr. Mark Patrick, former Parliamentary Private Secretary to Foreign Secretary Eden's intensely loyal Under Secretary Viscount Cranborne.