Germany's Embarrassed Generation:

...author, "What About Germany...

...For, whenever their activities prove subversive, Emmet and Muhlen point out, the German Supreme Court outlaws them...

...Here is an objective, fact-packed work of only 66 pages which crowds more information, supported with trustworthy figures, about Nazism in West Germany today that anything made available to the general reader since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1948...

...Reviewed by Louis P. Lochner Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent...

...Among these the teachers are a special breed, particularly the older teachers who held their jobs during Hitler's rule...

...The Vanishing Swastika gives an honest account of what has become of those who were part of the Nazi regime...

...The parents of the children thus deprived of knowledge of an important and disgraceful period of German history hesitate to protest, for many of them had themselves bowed to the Nazi tyranny and find it equally embarrassing to have their offspring ask why they did not revolt...

...This becomes particularly evident when one reads the chapter entitled, "The Young Generation.' The deep impression which The Diary of Anne Frank has made upon German youth, the pilgrimages of youngsters to the Belsen concentration camp where Anne Frank died, the manifesto of six million German youngsters protesting against the swastika daubings in early 1960, the votes by student councils of various universities to expel all who· held Nazi ideas—these are some of the hopeful indications that a recrudescence of Nazism as a potent factor in German life need no longer be feared...

...Therefore, although the curriculum calls for methodical teaching of the iniquities of Nazism, these teachers until very recently managed to drag their feet and conveniently reached the end of the school year just as they finished teaching the essential facts about the Weimar Republic (191.8-1933...

...In my opinion, any comeback of Nazism as a dominant political force in the Federal Republic of Germany is wishful thinking, either by that group of self-appointed prophets of German doom who would like to see their thesis of an "incorrigible" Germany proven, or by a die-hard minority of Teutons who still hanker after the "fleshpots of Egypt" they once enjoyed, without any real expectation of ever being able to return to them...

...They state in their introduction: "What matters is not so much whether individual Nazis and anti-Semites still exist—unhappily, yet naturally, many of them do survive...

...Christopher Emmet and Norbert Muhlen, expert observers of the German scene, have approached their task of evaluating West German attitudes with open minds and without axes to grind...

...They seem today to find it embarrassing to admit that they once taught history as Hitler wanted them to teach it...

...The crucial question is whether their number has been increasing or decreasing over the past fifteen years...

...This reviewer has visited Germany five times since Nazi Germany's surrender...

...The very fact, however, that both these groups—'teachers and parents of the generation that was enmeshed in the Nazi web—were so hesitant about discussing the Third Reich would seem to indicate that Nazism, as the Emmet-Muhlen booklet shows, is truly on the downgrade in West Germany...