THE EDITOR RESERVES THE LAST COLUMN
The Editor Reserves . . . The Last Column APERCEPTIBLE shift in the official Soviet position on the baffling question, "What Shall We Do With Germany?", seems to be causing great confusion and...
...On the same day that the War Department released this information, a United Press dispatch from Kas-sel, Germany, cleared by American censors but suppressed or buried here at home, reported the existence of an underground youth movement in Germany whose members flirted with death by sabotaging the Nazi war effort...
...Hardly a day went by that we did not get 3 or 4 sulphurous letters calling us a bunch of "Fascist appeasers" or "Hitler-lovers...
...They have been infected with the virus of fascism and I attribute their fascistic policies to oppression as well as to propagandization of the people...
...There are no simple formulas or easy solutions...
...THE problem of what to do with Germany is extraordinarily complex, of course...
...When fascism is removed, there is no reason why the Germans cannot become a normal, decent nation.'" This does not mean, the dispatch hastens to add, that the Russians "are mollycoddling German civilians, who live in mortal fear of their conquerors...
...Composed of teen-age German boys, many of them the sons of working class parents, the organization was known as the "Edelweiss Pirates...
...Robert Reuben, assigned to the Russian Army in Germany, cabled this significant report with Soviet approval: "The Soviet military government in occupied cities of Germany is following a liberal policy toward civilians, and many Russian officers today told a group of newspaper men that they were opposed to mass permanent punishment of the German people...
...But now the Soviet position is changing rapidly...
...One of the biggest problems we face is that of undoing the damage done to German youth by 12 years of Hitlerism...
...The German people basically are not bad,' one Russian colonel said with surprising moderation...
...Two developments illustrate my point...
...Less than 24 hours afterward the ever-vigilant Soviet censors cleared a Reuter's dispatch to the New York Times which amplified the new attitude...
...The only reason we ever could figure out," a War Department spokesman said, "was this: The German for so long was not permitted to speak freely on any subject in his homeland that when he was captured, he spoke out...
...Instead of being the sullen, stubborn, incorrigible, Hitler-loving type we had been led to expect, many of the German boys were anxious to talk and cooperate...
...In his victory speech to the Russian people, Stalin said: "The Soviet Union is victorious, although it does not intend either to dismember or to annihilate Germany...
...threw the whole smear vocabulary at The Progressive...
...Almost every day now there are isolated developments which throw out a ray of hope as we prepare to buckle down to the job, but all too tragically the news of these developments is withheld from the public by the very editors and radio commentators who are always bleating about Government censorship, which is bad enough without the unofficial censorship being practiced so widely today...
...seems to be causing great confusion and consternation in the American ranks of those who take their cue from the Kremlin...
...Up until a fortnight or ago the official Communist line was simply that there was no difference between the Nazis and the rest of the Germans, that only a harsh peace of revenge, dismemberment, and destruction could solve the German problem...
...This does mean, I hope, that the Soviets, faced with the realities of reconstruction, recognize that a harsh and vengeance-minded settlement would not last and would only destroy the hope of peace...
...THE fact that there were captured German soldiers who were eager to cooperate with their American captors and German youngsters at home who risked their necks to sabotage the Nazi war effort and beat up Nazi gangsters, doesn't solve our problem for us, of course, but it does provide a working faith, however modest, in the assertion of the Russian colonel that "when fascism is removed, there is no reason why the Germans cannot become a normal, decent nation...
...And yet there are hopeful signs that the problem is far from being insoluble...
...Its purpose, the United Press revealed, was to "sabotage the Nazis in every way possible—destroying material and beating up Nazi Party members...
...Marshal Stalin himself struck the keynote of the new line...
...M.H.K...
...Echoing the Moscow line, militant U. S. supporters of the U.S.S.R...
...The dual assignment we face—that of dealing out stern justice to the Nazi criminals and at the same time giving aid and encouragement to democratic forces capable of building a democratic society—calls for cool heads and steady hands, and not for repeated bursts of hysteria in the press and on the radio...
...The War Department last week released an announcement—almost totally ignored on the radio and in the press—that one of the most powerful weapons we had in Europe was the willingness of captured German soldiers to reveal vital information to American agents...
Vol. 9 • May 1945 • No. 21
