I. A PEACE BASED ON HATE CANNOT LAST
Hankins, Dr. Frank. H.
I. A Peace Based On Hate Cannot Last By DR. FRANK H. HANKINS WAR brutalizes man; war emotions distort human values and warp human judgments. Cries for revenge against Nazi excesses and summary...
...It represented a seizure of power by strong-arm methods in the midst of world depression without and vast internal stress within the country...
...she will promote her own interests...
...This in spite of political techniques—from bludgeon to idealistic appeals—that make Huey Long and Boss Hague look like pikers...
...A Calmer Frame Of Mind It is absolutely essential, therefore, that we liquidate as rapidly as possible the war-fomented sentiments and replace them by a calm analysis of where our future, long-view interests lie...
...Lincoln had sought a magnanimous peace...
...The British had full knowledge of the prewar atrocities in Germany...
...But the trial of thousands of super-patriots for sporadic killings due to the excesses of wartime emotions will merely prolong such hates, divert attention from the staggering problems of European salvage, and very probably create a new galaxy of German heroes...
...It is said that 300,000 civilians perished in a few hours in the Dresden holocaust...
...Cries for revenge against Nazi excesses and summary justice for their perpetrators are nearly universal...
...The atrocities were, for the most part, committed against German and Polish citizens, Jews, Communists, Social Democrats, liberals and pacifists...
...We note secondly, that wholesale liquidation is a device of totalitarianism...
...We cannot adopt her summary methods, but we can ask ourselves some realistic questions...
...One may, therefore, raise a query as to whether the criminal trials now being prepared seem likely to aid in the reconstruction of a shattered world...
...Behind closed doors, however, one learned of the fear that gripped the hearts of sober-minded people as to what the Nazi policies portended...
...In modern criminology punishment is not considered an effective deterrent for crime...
...Here is, indeed, a sovereign recipe for reaching the coming Utopia...
...To establish an objective frame of mind toward Germany while atrocity evidences are so fresh and while we are still fighting the Japanese will be difficult...
...And how could those who did know and objected, organize an effective protest...
...The speedy restoration of Germany to industrial prosperity is one of the surest safeguards against the bolshevization of all central Europe...
...and peace was repeatedly promised by the Nazi leaders...
...The political alignments of Russia are not governed by past fears and hates, but by present and future advantages...
...Obviously we cannot turn the leading Nazis loose...
...On balance, we have doubtless slaughtered our full share of innocents...
...In the first place, we must reject the view that the atrocities were due to some special inherent evil in the German people...
...One can scarcely imagine the tens of thousands of innocent and helpless—many of them hating the Nazis —who have, suffered the tortures of the damned in these repeated holocausts on a scale never previously approached in human history...
...Totalitarianism is like war...
...Nor will any of the psychological or psychiatric theories apply to the whole nation, however aptly they may fit Hitler and some of his henchmen...
...Even the defeat of an entire nation, with the slaughter of millions of her people does not prevent her going to war again...
...Even in 1936 when I spent 4 months in Berlin, the atmosphere was ominous with dread and apprehension...
...While we are setting up policies of repression and non-fraternization in Germany, the Russians, though doubtless liquidating all potential resisters of Soviet domination, are cultivating German good will by organized cooperation and systematic propaganda...
...that would have seemed impossible in days of peace...
...That generation remained unreconstructed...
...Totalitarianism, whether religious or political, or both, requisitions the total man...
...It is for this reason that all parties in this war, including ourselves, have been guilty of excesses of inhumanity...
...We often hear the query, "Why did the good Germans, if there were any, not protest against the atrocities of the camps...
...Will the trials establish new and recognized principles of international law...
...Its effects in such complicated matters as national leadership and war must be negligible...
...The combination of totalitarian government and modern propaganda methods renders entire nations helpless in the hands of their rulers...
...Or does anyone not feel that the lynching of Mussolini has left a dark blot on Italian culture...
...However, if the Pope and a British Archbishop repeatedly protest the wholesale slaughter of city-wide bombing, one can readily imagine that to the Germans and Japanese it appears as the apex of man's inhumanity to man...
...War requires totalitarian psychology and methods and both war and totalitarianism destroy those virtues which we commonly associate with civilized life...
...A harsh peace of vengeance for Germany in the midst of a Europe reduced to an indescribable shambles will force the entire continent into the Russian orbit...
...if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it...
...Even a prominent New York minister has recently demanded a harsh treatment of Germany...
...One need not conclude from all this, however, that Christian ethics consists fundamentally in advocating whatever happens to accord with the popular emotions of the moment...
...We tried a number of leaders...
...To this end it is necessary to exercise more objectivity toward war atrocities than has recently been done by our official and unofficial propaganda agencies...
...To listen to some loud-mouthed virtuosos in human hate one might suppose that it is treason to our heroic dead and to all humanity to take time to think...
...Our Own Experience The answers to these and all similar queries is an unqualified "No...
...If making war, as says George Bernard Shaw, is no crime in our world, then it is questionable whether there is any law which makes it a crime to get rid of one's enemies by the quickest and most efficient methods...
...Nazism, as has often been noted, elevated to power many of the least cultured elements...
...We shall probably never know what percent of the population supported Hitler after he seized power, but Rudolph Heberle, formerly professor at Kiel and now at Louisiana State University finds (Journal of Politics, Feb...
...It is thus all too clear that chivalry is dead, while all history makes it abundantly clear that in times of deep crisis the Commissar triumphs over the Yogi...
...Did the South repent or remain "unreconstructed...
...Our own postwar prosperity and that of Britain likewise depend in some measure on the same policy, because Germany was for decades our second greatest market and Britain's third, while German industry was basic to the prosperity of Europe...
...One doesn't openly criticize a government when there is a spy or informer in every apartment house and when one's outspoken friends mysteriously disappear without due process of law...
...To be sure, they asked for it...
...Will they make future wars less probable ? Will they promote better relations between Germany and ourselves ? Prof...
...THEN it is as certain as anything can be that only a fraction of the population knew anything definite about the inner affairs of the camps or the human ab-batoirs...
...Some ministers, notably in England, spoke out loudly and firmly against the indiscriminate bombing that kills and maims women and children by the thousands, and many now advocate a peace of reconciliation...
...Reports indicate that, again for the most part, American and British prisoners of war fared moderately well...
...war-bred emotions insisted on a "victor's" peace...
...The experts are not agreed as to whether any legal basis exists for such trials—or whether they will be real trials or kangaroo court proceedings...
...Germany can easily go communist...
...Under these circumstances it is senseless to blame all Germans for the sadistic excesses...
...Will they teach nations never again to tolerate domination by political gangsters...
...Moreover, the situation is confused by the unilateral action of Russia...
...She seems certain to do so unless reconstruction is speedy and effective...
...At its height the Nazi secret police numbered 900,000...
...An alignment of Germany with Russia will effectively and irreparably upset the balance of the world and shake the influence of the Western nations...
...We must rid ourselves of war-bred stereotypes...
...German rehabilitation is necessary for the rehabilitation of Europe, and the latter for world reorganization...
...The following considerations are advanced solely to promote a calm frame of mind toward the almost overwhelming problems that now confront us in the European scene...
...To win it in our atomized world will require both sober thought and humanist sentiment...
...This is the same proud minister of the lowly Jesus who whooped it up for war in 1916, repented thereafter during our period of disillusionment, swore never to support another war, and now favors continuation of the war after it is ended...
...The latter will not proceed on the basis of some rationalization of "justice" or "the requirements of civilization...
...The Immediate Need What the time demands is a peace made for the long view, not one based on wartime hates and the spirit of revenge...
...MANY theories have been advanced to account for the systematic and excessive brutalities of the concentration camps and for the failure of the saner elements of the population to protest them...
...but we can easily segregate them...
...It is necessary, however, to do so because the adoption of policies toward Germany cannot wait until the Pacific war is ended and our initial policies set the stage for subsequent developments...
...Along with them might well go the professional butchers who cannot be dealt with by the laws of the countries where they operated...
...through Sir Neville Henderson's Papers Concerning Treatment of German Nationals in Germany, but this information was kept secret in order to facilitate the appeasement policy...
...The individual commits his conscience to an idealistically conceived church, state, or party and can thus torture and kill in good conscience for the greater glory of God, country, or heroic leader...
...If attention is called to the inhumanities committed by us we find that they were "necessities of war...
...most of the victims of Nazi atrocities, hundreds of thousands of them, were Germans...
...DOES anyone today feel that our failure to hang- the Kaiser in 1919 was a miscarriage of justice or a political error...
...The same kind of data recently, have been widely publicized to facilitate the war loan, a hard peace, and the trial of Nazi criminals...
...The voluminous and labored efforts to explain the brutalities as due to elements of German tradition— Lutheranism, the idealistic theory of the state, romanticism, Nietzcheanism—lose most of their force in consequence of similar activities all over eastern Europe...
...For our own welfare and that of Western Europe we should take immediate steps to integrate her solidly with the West...
...However, explanation does not wipe the slate clean...
...But, now that the war in Europe is over, one must strive for understanding as the only justifiable basis for intelligent action...
...Did they hang their heads in pretended shame or make heroes of their martyrs...
...Sheldon Glueck notes that the list of war crimes is the same now as after World War I. Did failure to prosecute then have any effect in encouraging similar outrages in this war, either by Germans or others...
...it is, in fact, war by a political party against the rest of the nation's population...
...we simply showed them how to do it on a truly magnificent scale with technical efficiency...
...We do not blame all Southerners for Negro lynchings...
...nor all Westerners for the shooting-up of returned Japanese households...
...In the present situation we might well recall our own tragic handling of the South and her leaders after the Civil War...
...The new phosphorous bomb leaks down into cellars, caves, and dugouts and burns 'em alive—truly a marvelous achievement of "civilization...
...Before Hitler, the Russians had set up the models and, especially in the elimination of 3 to 7 million Kulaks, had just previously established the grand scale of operations...
...we punished others...
...1943) that in the July elections of 1932 Hitler gained an absolute majority (51 per cent) of the total vote in only one election district in the entire Reich...
...Will they promote the conversion of Germany, her moral regeneration...
...Even the saintly Shaw, in the preface of his new work, On the Rocks, advocates "killing as a political function...
...One need not doubt the validity of what the pictures show,—as fiendish, premeditated and systematic cruelty as was ever perpetrated in modern times on so vast a scale...
...we executed some...
...Checked neither by law nor by consideration of human rights, it is political power driving toward its own extension by destruction and intimidation using mass methods in a technological age...
...Pastor Niemoeller, himself long in one of the camps, was horrified when shown pictures of the butcheries, of which he had known nothing...
...There was almost universal popular yearning for peace...
...It was a revolution of the Untermenschen...
...But the peace is far from won...
...The answer seems clear: they had been taught by the Nazi regime of terror that protest was both useless and fatal...
...How could they...
...Otherwise, how do we justify our own slaughter of women and children by the hundred thousands...
Vol. 9 • June 1945 • No. 26
