When criticized, the Pan-Germanist is ready with his answer. "Put yourself in our position," he says; and the challenge is one to be met. Viewing the question from the German standpoint it is not difficult to discover facts and tendencies in national and international politics that explain, and within limits may be said to have condoned, the anxiety and spirit of unrest which settled upon Germans when, in 1885 or thereabouts, they began to f eel the pressure of the population question, the growing need for new markets and the stirring of ambitions which pointed out wards. It is significant that the movement made its greatest advance when J. Chamberlain, colonial secretary from 1895-1902, was uttering his clear and resounding call to the commonwealths of the British empire to coalesce and to raise their frontier barriers, commercially, to the outer world. In the past the British empire had opened its door freely to Germans as immi grants and traders, but it was suspected that they were no longer as welcome as heretofore. Even had it been otherwise, the Ger mans chafed against the inequality in the partition of the un developed territories of the earth which compelled their emigrants to seek homes under alien flags and thus to be eventually lost to the fatherland. Further, while many German politicians feared a future agglomeration of the Anglo-Saxon races, the whole nation was haunted by the twofold menace of a restless Russia in the East and of a France in the West unreconciled to the loss of terri tory in 1871.
These and other facts, weighing on an emotional and politi cally immature people, probably gained for Pan-Germanist ideas a hearing and a sympathy which in different circumstances might have been refused to them. When all due allowances have been made, however, it is but the more justifiable to say that the Pan Germanism of the past was condemned by its excesses. The great mistake of the Pan-Germans of pre-war days was that they allowed a justifiable national pride and an eager and natural hankering for more elbow-room to degenerate into hostile designs against other nations which, owing to historical reasons, had preceded Germany in the colonization of the empty spaces of the earth, and that they often avowed these designs with so brutal a candour. After the war the Pan-German league, refraining from aggressive agitation, concentrated its attention upon the task of strengthening the national sentiment and spirit, hardly tried by ad versity. From the beginning the movement had had a definite anti Semitic bias, Jews being considered ineligible for membership of the Pan-German league. Under the Nazi regime, pan-Germanism has been welded into a challenging policy. It is racial resulting in
anti-Semitism ; narrowly cultural, developing a "Pagan" or tribal conception of religion as against the Roman Catholic and Lutheran faiths. It is political, challenging Communism. It is geographic, de manding German control over German populations in Europe wherever they may be. It is imperial, asking for colonies ; it is militarist and dependent on might as right. Pan-Germanism is thus a challenge to the internationalism of which the League of Nations is an expression. (W. H. DA.) The Developments of 1938.—Hitler, in his Mein Kampf , had catalogued in 1925-26 the territorial ambitions of Germany in Eu rope, Africa, and Oceania. Much of the "irredeemed" European ter ritory passed under German sovereignty in 1938, with the Austrian union in March and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia by the Pact of Munich in September. Hitler had declared prior to the Munich agreement that the Sudeten areas in Czechoslovakia consti tuted his final territorial demand in Europe, and the emphasis of the Pan-Germanic program thereafter was shifted to agitation for return of the colonies lost in the World War and to economic dom ination over South-eastern Europe, mainly by means of credit extensions. The Nazi Party had organized a "colonial policy office" which became increasingly insistent in its colonial demands and intimated that Germany might resort to force if France and Great Britain declined to negotiate the question. Meanwhile, the pre dominance of Germany in the political destinies of Central and Eastern Europe became an accomplished fact.
The Pan-German movement is carried abroad by local groups or "Bunds" which exist in countries where Germans are numer ous, particularly in America. (X.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The German literature of the Pan-German move ment is very large and inevitably of very unequal value. Better known writers include, besides those already named, Alexander von Peez, Albert Ritter, Gen. Friedrich von Bernhardi, the Anglo-German Houston S. Chamberlain, Baron L. von Vietinghoff, Count von Reventlow, Albrecht Wirth, H. Frobenius and Friedrich Lange. Noteworthy German works on the league itself are an official survey of Pan-Germanic endeavours entitled Zwanzig Jahre alldeutscher Arbeit and Kiimpfe (Iwo) ; Martin Wenck's Alldeutsche Taktik (Pan-German Tactics) (1917) ; and Otto Burchard's Geschichte des alldeutschen Verbandes (192c)) . Of a number of works in English there may be named Rowland G. Usher's Pan-Germanism (1913), and a translation of Charles Audler's Pan-Germanism, published in