Hitler branded us as apes

Adolf Hitler believed New Zealanders were a lower form of human being, living in trees and clambering around on all fours.

The Nazi leader aired his views about New Zealanders in a speech on July 15, 1925, according to a paper delivered to the NZ Historical Society by historian Gerhard Weinberg and reported in RSA Review.

Lieutenant-Colonel Glyn Harper, director of the Army's Institute of Military Studies, writes in the Review that by 1925 Hitler had come to believe New Zealanders were a lower form of human being. As such he considered they deserved a similar fate as Jews, Gypsies, the handicapped and Slavs in Nazi programmes to eradicate people deemed undesirable or inferior.

In his 1925 speech, reprinted in a Nazi pamphlet for wider distribution, Hitler said there was a "certain differentiation" between humans.

"For example: many New Zealanders live in trees and many still climb around on all fours, very different from a European, who walks on two legs and does not live in trees, but wanders the streets.

"Now you might say: 'That is the effect of climate.' My friend, if all Europeans left the continent and the New Zealanders slipped in here, you will surely not believe that the climate will make a European out of a New Zealander."

Lieutenant-Colonel Harper said the implications for a people perceived as ape-like and non-European were all too obvious.

So the 105,000 New Zealanders who served overseas in the war were "fighting for New Zealand as surely as if they had been fighting on the beaches of Nelson or Christchurch ..." - NZPA