World Press Digest

The entire metropolitan press greets editorially the failure of the Nazis in the Danzig elections.

The New York Times says:

In Germany and in the Saar the tactics of suppressing opposition and spreading terrorism in order to assure a popular mandate for Herr Hitler and the Nazis were completely successful. But the Reichsfuehrer has been stopped at the Baltic in his effort to spread the area of the National Socialist dictatorship among all peoples speaking the German tongue and responsive to German influence. The Free City of Danzig has taken its stand with Austria against Hitler’s Germany, and the result of its election yesterday may have a powerful stabilizing effect upon the peace of Europe.

The Herald Tribune writes:

Among the first constitutional changes would have been amendments disenfranchising Jews, dissolving the German opposition parties—if not those of the microscopic Polish minority—and possibly providing for the return of Danzig to the Reich through a plebiscite. They could only make such changes, however, in the full knowledge that they have no legal value until they were approved and ratified by the League Council, and they are certainly aware that the League Council would not consider their ratification for a split second.

The Sun comments:

Europe outside of Germany receives with undisguised satisfaction news of the failure of the Nazi drive to gain complete control over the legislature of Danzig. The voting demonstrated that Germans of Nazi inclinations number approximately three out of every five of the city’s population. But that ratio was not enough to give them the necessary majority in the Diet to pass constitutional amendments looking to the reunion of Danzig with Germany. What is most important, however, is the fact that the Nazi habit of victory seems to have been broken at a moment when breaking it was of psychological importance.

The New York Post states:

The Third Reich left nothing undone. Its most prominent speakers, Goering, Goebbels, Dr. Rust, Hess and others, played an active part in a high-pressure campaign. An army of paid propagandists was engaged for a weekly house-to-house canvass. Every public official—Danzig has a National Socialist government since May, 1933—was harnessed to the Nazi machine. The electorate was terrorized as it was terrorized in the Saar, and the High Commissioner of the League of Nations closed both eyes to Fascist outrages.

Nicolai Christian Levin Abrahams taught French at the University of Copenhagen in the first half of the nineteenth century.