Hitler’s New Year’s Message to Nazis Bears Tone of Pessimism; Victory No Longer Predicted

A New Year’s message issued by Adolph Hitler, the National Socialist leader and his chief lieutenant Paul Joseph Goebbels, head of the Berlin Nazi Party, bears a tone of pessimism unlike previous messages.

No longer is there any prediction of victory. It enumerates several victories claimed for Hitlerism during 1932, among them the retirement of Dr. Bernhard Weiss, the Jewish Vice-President of the Berlin police department, who was forced out of office as a result of sustained Nazi agitation and a campaign of scurrilities hardly equalled even in the annals of Hitlerist propaganda.

The only specifically anti-Jewish passage in the Nazi New Year’s message is a call to Germans not to put their trust in the press controlled by the Jews.

A New Year’s message was also issued by the Liberal party leaders in Germany. This message expresses the

conviction that the year 1933 will see the ultimate collapse of Hitlerism because its power to attract the masses is already notably on the decline. The message also records undeniable sobering down of German public opinion with regard to the Nazis a result brought about by the disclosures concerning the death of Herbert Hentsch, a member of a Nazi Storm Troop in Dresden.

Hentsch, who disappeared on November 4th, was murdered by fellow Nazis, it is now learned. Until last Monday, efforts to locate him failed and his mother was informed by Nazi headquarters that they knew no one of his name.

Last Monday his body was fished out of the Matler Dam and an inquest established that he had been shot and his body mutilated before being tied up in a sack and dropped into the water.

Three members of Hentsch’s Storm Troop are suspected of the crime. The three suspects fled to Italy and their extradition is urged upon the Foreign Office by the government of Saxony.