An interview given by Professor Masaryk, the President of the Czecho-Slovakian Republic, to Dr. Ernst Benedikt, the publisher of the Vienna “Neue Freie Presse”, and reprinted from there in many other papers, in which he denounced Hitlerism, as a movement without any positive aim, and intent only on negative things, has led to a furious attack being made on the President in the Czecho-Slovakian Parliament by the Hitlerist Deputies.
Hitler and his movement have no programme except enmity and hatred against the Jews, the French, the Poles and the Czechs, President Masaryk said in the interview, and the German masses follow him only in the way they would follow a man walking about the streets naked. No one knows what Hitler does want, he went on. We only know what he does not want-no Jews, no French, no Poles.
Deputy Krebs, one of the Hitlerist Deputies, said that Hitlerist Germany surrounded Czecho-Slovakia on three sides, and in the Czecho-Slovakian Republic itself the Hitlerists were the strongest German Party. If President Masaryk wanted to know what the Hitlerists did not want he could tell him that it was Germanic race purity, and the destruction of the influence of foreign races on the German people and on German State life. Above all, they were out to destroy the Liberalist Jewish spirit. Only pure German blood would create a pure German State policy. The doctrine of race purity, he claimed, had been adopted also in America, where immigration was now regulated in such a way as to assure that the immigrants should be of Nordic stock.
The Government spokesmen did not reply to the attack, to defend the President, and no comment has been made on it by the President’s Chancellery. It is claimed in some quarters that the Government is silent because it is anxious to avoid any possibility of complications with Germany in case the Hitlerists should join the Government. It is suggested in the same quarters that President Masaryk’s Chancellery has made no comment in order to show that the interview was given by him as a great international figure, but not in his official capacity as President of the Republic.
In Democratic and Catholic circles in Czecho-Slovakia, however, President Masaryk’s denunciation of Hitlerism has given great satisfaction.
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