ARE GERMANS HUMAN?
Mayer, Milton
Are Germans Human? By MILTON MAYER S/SGT. Nathan Cohen is not in Quebec, or Washington, or the State Department, or the OWI. S/Sgt. Nathan Cohen is in Germany. Nor is S/Sgt. Cohen a writer of...
...These dangerous Germans and Americans are a menace to the war effort—even to war itself...
...What is to be done with people like that...
...Sgts...
...If Sgts...
...Cohen and Friedlander are allowed to go on talking to each other, they will wind up agreeing that a "soft" peace may be more sensible than a "hard'' peace...
...Before we came here," S/Sgt...
...I have always suspected that Jews, myself included, were human...
...The idea of mass punishment seems so ridiculous now," says S/Sgt...
...I found them out on the street and the woman was crying, and when I asked her why, she told me she thought I was going to punish her...
...Is it possible that Germans are human, too...
...Cohen is a fighting man...
...Sidney Friedlander, also a Jew, have talked and talked about this thing and it doesn't seem so simple and easy...
...It's Like This I should like to meet Sgts...
...Instead, I find them the most timid people I have ever seen...
...Cohen continued, "I thought that every German would be stiff-necked and arrogant, and I was ready to sock the first one who spit on me...
...Menace To War S/Sgt...
...the making against the Germans...
...Cohen aNaziphile, a German by birth or descent, or even an Aryan...
...Doesn't Sgt...
...Cohen and Friedlander may decide that a "hard" peace is simply too hard for them to enforce...
...the Berlin radio says'that any German who accepts food from enemy soldiers or fraternizes with them is a. dangerous German...
...Cohen says he and his pal from the Bronx, Sgt...
...But look around you here on the streets...
...It was a simple thing to sit back home and say that all Germans were Nazis and that was that," says S/Sgt...
...I might find myself, before I know it, across the border, kissing Cohens and Schmidts and Antonescus and O'Briens all over Europe...
...Morgenthau, Churchill, et al., are you going to do with people like S/Sgt...
...There are between 13,000 and 15,000 people in this town and 90 per cent speak German and are, for all practical purposes, Germans...
...What would become of the white American Century if people got going down the road that Sgts...
...Cohen and Friedlander are traversing ? What would become of the Jews, and the Germans, and the Train Secretary on the Twentieth Century Limited...
...Doesn't he know what the Germans have done to the Jews ? Doesn't he know, that the Germans attacked the world ? Doesn't he know that the Germans are psychotics who can find no expression except in militarism and aggression ? Doesn't he know that the Germans are racially committed to barbarism...
...I think I might be impelled to throw my arms around them, as the French do, and kiss them on both cheeks...
...What, Messrs...
...Doesn't he know that the Germans have got to be punished...
...Cohen in the interview, which occurred in an occupied border town in Germany...
...Cohen from a hotbed of isolationism...
...Cohen is a dangerous American...
...Cohen and Friedlander confirm my suspicion, and, in the face of their behavior, I do not know how Hitler can demonstrate otherwise...
...What would become of American Womanhood ? What, in a word or two, would become ? Well, it's like this...
...Look at the women and kids and old men, and you tell me what we should do about mass punishment of these people...
...I took her into a room and asked her to wait a minute while I went out to find a couple more chairs...
...They may wind up more dangerous than that;' they may wind up so "soft" themselves that, like the British soldiers at Archangel in 1919, who refused to shoot at the Bolsheviks, they will refuse to enforce the "hard" peace that is in...
...When I came back, the woman and the kids were gone...
...What are you going to do with people like that...
...Cohen's from the Bronx...
...There was a woman, for instance, who came in with three children to see if the Americans could obtain the release of her husband, who had been arrested by the Belgians...
...Cohen is a Jew...
...There seem to be dangerous Germans, too...
...Cohen and Friedlander, and a lot of other Jewish and Gentile sergeants, corporals, and privates...
...Cohen, in an interview published in the Milwaukee Journal, a paper which has itself subscribed more or less to the theory that Germans are born with horns...
...Cohen a writer of mystery stories, a radio master of ceremonies, an expatriate psychologist, or a popular lecturer...
...Cohen Know...
...I think I might even feel impelled to address them all as "brother," and once this "brother" stuff gets started there is no telling where it will end...
...Glory be to God, the Father of us all, I might find myself kissing Chinamen in China and Negroes in Mississippi...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 42
