Quick Peace?

Intuitive Adolf Hitler is feminine in never wanting a fight, but only victory. It would hardly have occurred to a masculine dictator, such as Mussolini, simply to ask the Czechoslovakian Government through intermediaries last week to tear up their military alliance with the Soviet Government, yet this was just what the Fuehrer did, according to officials at Prague.

The Czechoslovaks have an excellently equipped army of 173,000, have been proclaiming for weeks that they will fight if their border is crossed by the Germans. These brave words from brave men Der Fuehrer duly took into account, but not in the way expected. Since he had barred London and Paris from aiding Czechoslovakia by making the Rome-Berlin Axis stretch uninterruptedly from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, the problem last week was whether Moscow from the east will strike across Poland or Rumania to aid Prague. Orator Hitler has compared himself to a somnambulist and last week he advanced like a woman in her sleep unerringly to the wallet in which Czechoslovakia's President Eduard Benes may be said metaphorically to keep his treaty with Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin.

At Prague the utmost consternation reigned in Cabinet circles. Dr. Benes, "Europe's Smartest Little Statesman," was quite able to add up the Stalin blood purge, the Chamberlain tribulations, the Blum uncertainties and the collapse of Austria. Smart, quick, the President rushed into effect measures he hoped would insure peace between Czechoslovakia and Germany. The 3,200,000 Czechoslovaks who are radically German and whose principal leader is blatant Nazi Konrad Henlein--involved only a few months ago in a homosexual scandal --are to be given by a bill announced by the Cabinet last week the right to fill, in each part of Czechoslovakia, proportionately as many Government civil service jobs as there are Germans in the district concerned. This will make the Czechoslovak civil service about 99% German in the part of the country now bordered by Germany and German-Austria, about 33% German in the capital, Prague.

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