THE EDITOR RESERVES THE LAST COLUMN
The Editor Reserves . . . The Last Column DISPATCHES from London and Washington indicate that Winston Churchill's urgent call for an early meeting of the Big Three—Stalin, Roosevelt, and...
...In more recent months, however, Soviet writers and intellectuals have been permitted to scoff at "Western notions" of a "different Germany...
...Said the New Statesman in a challenging conclusion: "The majority will be almost embarrassingly docile and willing to be instructed and ruled after the war...
...This is a real danger unless the Allies can together present Europe, including Germany, with a constructive idea for the integration of the Continent...
...Obviously there has been no clsar-cut agreement on how to handle Germany when she capitulates, except for a rough and tentative division of the Reich into zones of occupation...
...The Editor Reserves . . . The Last Column DISPATCHES from London and Washington indicate that Winston Churchill's urgent call for an early meeting of the Big Three—Stalin, Roosevelt, and himself—is based in large measure on his fear that the collapse of Germany may catch the victorious powers with their plans down...
...They accept Allied occupation of Germany as a matter of course...
...M.H.R...
...Four years ago Foreign Commissar Molotov said that "we have always held that a -strong Germany is an indispensable condition for a durable peace in Europe...
...Their numbers, we are told, "are small...
...We are not given the "why" of the various changes of heart...
...Now, apparently, the circuit has been completed...
...Beyond that, as far as they are concerned, the government of Germany can be had for the asking...
...But we may suspect what they have been finding by turning to a recent number of the London New Statesman and Nation, one of the outstanding liberal weeklies of Great Britain...
...They see him not so much as the war leader . . . but rather as the father of the whole nation and of all Germans...
...The sooner the whole outfit disappears, the better, "because then, and only then, peace will come...
...In the absence of more direct testimony, one may legitimately suspect that the present Soviet policy is based in part on what skilled Red commissars have extracted in the way of information, attitudes, philosophy, and future hopes from the captured Germans...
...When asked what kind of government they visualize, their reply is that the Allies will provide the government, and it is up to them to tell them what to do and how to do it...
...The Allies will have to make the plans and issue the orders...
...They have no love for National Socialism or Hitler...
...Three years ago, when the Soviet Union was locked in mortal combat with the Nazis, Stalin issued a May Day order clearly distinguishing between the mass of German people and the Nazi gangsters...
...Conflicting views have been presented in the United States and Britain, and oddly enough in Russia as well...
...This Soviet publication quotes Stalin as differentiating in marked degree between the Nazis and the rest of the German people...
...Their one desire is for order...
...2. "Much larger," this group is composed of Germans who have apparently made up their minds that the Nazi Party and the Nazi State are finished and will not survive defeat, and they are not prepared to weep many tears over them...
...This lack of thought or initiative or responsibility or constructive planning is food for gloomy thought, but it constitutes, too, a staggering reply to those who have felt that the vast majority of the Germans have been so indoctrinated with Nazism that it would take years to re-educate them away from their hateful dogmas...
...3. The third group, we are told, "constitutes the majority...
...But peace, in their minds, does not seem to mean anything more tangible than return to their families, home-life, the end of the fighting ordeal...
...The Nazis are betting on the Allies making mistakes which will gradually force the disillusioned and apathetic mass once again to trust a Fuehrer or a dynamic party...
...An absorbing article, entitled "The Mind Of The German Army," fills in some of the greatest gaps in our knowledge of what the present-day Germans are really like...
...Last week, for instance, the Soviet Embassy in Washington made available to American newspaper men the current issue of Russian Affairs...
...But they make a definite mental reservation with regard to-Hitler...
...The Red Army has bagged countless thousands of German prisoners...
...Just as obviously a sound and workable plan for dealing with what is clearly the heart of the European problem must be ready for adoption and action when Hitlerism is at last beaten to its knees...
...The article, based on observation of 300,000 prisoners of war whom the New Statesman describes as "a fair-cross section of the German people," reports that the German prisoners fall into three categories: 1. A group whose complete faith in the Nazi doctrine is unshaken...
...Hitler's New Order was terrible, but seen in retrospect any order seems better than anarchy...
...None of the three ruling powers has come forward with even a definitive plan...
...One can only guess that the Soviets, being intensely practical politicians, have been alert to adjust their theories to the hard facts as they appear on the battlefront or in the secret pow-wows of the Big Three...
...In the reconstruction of Europe as a going concern, young Germans, after accepting their defeat, may find a new and useful outlet for their infinite capacity for work and obedience...
...THE Soviet Government has not formally disclosed the results of its vast inquiries...
Vol. 8 • November 1944 • No. 46
