THE EDITOR RESERVES THE LAST COLUMN
The Editor Reserves The Last Column SOME of our rocking-chair planners, especially those who write pieces for the papers, are having themselves quite a tizzy these days over the prospect of a...
...We have done just the opposite...
...Goebbels' hands, prolongs the war, and endangers the peace...
...The agency asked this question: "If you had your say, how would we treat the people who live in Germany after this war...
...The Editor Reserves The Last Column SOME of our rocking-chair planners, especially those who write pieces for the papers, are having themselves quite a tizzy these days over the prospect of a "soft peace...
...The object of political and psychological warfare is to divide the enemy and weaken their will to resist...
...The more cautiously conservative London Economist, certainly one of the most respected of British journals, emphasizes a point we have long made in these columns —that our failure to speak out clearly and cleanly with a democratic program for postwar Germany plays squarely into Dr...
...British writers who have seen the war at close range and lived through five years of air raids show a far more liberal attitude toward the non-Nazi groups within Germany than do the bloodthirsty intellectuals in America who have watched the war from their seats at the newsreel theaters...
...In our anxiety not to have any bargaining with the Germans we are making it incredibly difficult for anyone in Germany to think of surrender...
...The results showed that 65 per cent "advocate lenient treatment—a liberal attitude toward the German people (but not toward their Nazi masters), active assistance, or a re-education program...
...Only eight per cent favor "definite punitive action...
...The foolishness of the present situation is that most of these horrors are not even contemplated...
...Germany will be divided between the powers, German men castrated, German women sold into slavery or worse, the economic life of the Reich destroyed-—this has been a constant refrain for the last two years...
...While many intellectuals in the United States are clamoring for harsh treatment of conquered Germany, the leaders of the underground movements in occupied countries like Norway, Belgium, and Holland—the men and women who risk their lives to harass the Nazi terror—continue to stress the importance of seeking out and building up the democratic-minded elements within Germany...
...Our political conduct of the war has been a mess from the start...
...Reports from Allied intelligence officers who have questioned hundreds of German prisoners indicate that it is still not too late, that the declaration of sane objectives for Germany, even at this late hour, would help enormously to smash the Nazi hold over Germany and thus shorten the war appreciably...
...In its latest issue the Economist speaks of the "policy vacuum which Goebbels in Germany and unofficial Allied propagandists have eagerly filled in...
...and that, in due course—we cannot say when—a revolutionized Germany will have a chance again to take its place in the comity of nations...
...M.H.R...
...They^re brooding out loud over the fear that the German people may not be punished enough, that the Reich may not be carved up into a number of tiny, uneconomic units, and that Unconditional Surrender might be replaced at long last by a more sane and meaningful war aim...
...Thei'e's another angle to this problem which continues to intrigue me...
...If all these things were in fact going to be done, there would be a cynical reason for disguising the fact...
...that the victorious Allies do not propose to put Germany to fire and sword...
...A wholesome contrast to the new demand for a harsh peace of vengeance in certain intellectual circles is the cool common sense of the plain people of America...
...Even today we might succeed in doing this if we assured them that by surrendering theycould save their cities from further destruction...
...The enemy is being stiffened in his resistance by a picture of policy which the Allies have no intention of carrying out...
...Liberal British Opinion This realistic appreciation of the problems involved turns up in British intellectual circles as well...
...Still Not Too Late Goebbels, the Economist points out, "has not chastened his imagination for the task...
...A poll by the National Opinion Research Center disclosed a fortnight ago that a substantial majority of the nation opposed a peace based on revenge...
...These men and women will have to go on living in Europe when the shooting is over, and they want a strong democracy in the mid-continent, not a nest of brooding, scheming Germanic states embittered by a harsh settlement and biding their time for a new war of revanche...
...Against it the Allies set official silence and unofficial confirmation...
...I have quoted often from the liberal Neiv Statesman and Nation of London, which is the British equivalent of many a so-called liberal publication in the United States, but which thinks, however, that Unconditional Surrender must not be our only stated attitude toward Germany...
...Last week that London journal renewed its plea for a restatement of Allied aims in these words: "One way or another, we must convince the German people, as we have not yet convinced them, that there is , a thinkable alternative to going on fighting...
...for example, Lord Vansittart's recent article in which he proposed, among other things, that German workers should spend a period of celibacy in foreign labor camps...
Vol. 8 • August 1944 • No. 33
