GERMANS ARE HUMAN TO
Brandt, Karl
Germans Are Human Too By KARL BRANDT EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second 6f two articles by Dr. Brandt. The first appeared last week. AT present, the most common line of emotional reasoning...
...The answer to that is they did...
...All Germans are con-genitally and racially vicious...
...Here in our midst we have people who are potentially excellent candidates for an SS or a Gestapo...
...Through no fault of their own they have lost their beloved ones, their possessions, their honor, and their country...
...Hitler...
...In San Francisco we accepted a convicted murderer, Baron von Killinger, as consul- general of the Nazi rearime, over the protest of German refugees...
...In 12 happy years of my second life in America, I have grown very fond of the many excellent qualities of our people, but I have not been able to convince myself that American men and women are made of essentially different timber than the good Germans I have known...
...Next Winter, and in Spring 1946, without relief from the outside, five or six million German men, women, and children will die of starvation...
...It was sadly similar to that which happened in Germany...
...Adam von Trott zu Solz, a Rhodes scholar, who was my guest here in 1940, organized the last and greatest plot in July 1944, with associates in all spheres of life and in the highest ranks of the Army...
...YOU will perhaps ask why the Germans didn't do something to rid themselves of Hitler and his henchmen...
...Therefore all Germans are to blame for Hitler, the SS, the Gestapo, and all that they have committed...
...Many nations who are united with us mostly in form and much less in spirit will put the blame for such catastrophe under United States and British military government squarely upon us...
...We are duty-bound to accomplish this task for our own future...
...I saw very clearly that I would land and end very quickly in a camp...
...He does not know that he quoted verbatim what Hitler said about the Poles...
...Ever since March, 1933, our Government in Washington has been entirely aware of the wholesale torture of the peaceful Germans...
...What about those honorable fellow citizens who throw dynamite and shoot in the dark at the three-star mothers of Nisei soldiers, or*those delightful compatriots who, on my last trip on the Super-Chief, spouted their anti-Semitic venom in a loud voice through the whole dining car...
...If we fail, our Allies closer to the scene will not, because they know too well the disastrous consequences involved in leaving 70 million people to starve in the midst of ruin and desperation...
...Eventually these emotions lure us onto the slippery pavement of self-righteousness and the cheap illusion that fortunately we are free from all such faults...
...All Germans knew about it...
...Why did Hitler have such an easy game in cowing and terrorizing all the conquered countries almost overnight...
...I had voted against Hitler, and I was well known to be an anti-Nazi...
...Our people were outraged by the oppressions, the crudest forms of torture, the large-scale murder, and the wholesale confiscation of property which initiated the Nazi regime in Germany...
...Not only do I read this story day in and day out, but throughout the country I am asked why it is that all the Germans are obviously degenerates...
...Why did I not do anything about it...
...During a year in Louisiana I made a post-mortem study on Huey Long's regime...
...ANY society, or any nation, has that potentially vicious element...
...In fact, I know that they have been, where sectional reigns of terror have allowed gang warfare to take away civil rights, and men to be tortured and murdered who dared to speak out, regardless of the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech...
...I accept the facts about the sickening atrocities, but I refuse to jump so quickly to such plausible, and yet such painfully false conclusions...
...My fullest sympathy and my deep respect is with them...
...If this guilt lies in the blood, what about the many millions of good Americans of German descent, including our leading generals and admirals, former Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, and leaders of industry...
...The death of millions of Germans under our occupation would cause the greatest embarrassment to our nation—abroad, and here at home...
...I did, a few days after it began...
...There are no good Germans...
...They came to view the Nazis as a band of brigands, set on subverting within Germany every vestige of a rule of land which would entitle an aggregation of people to be looked upon collectively as a member of the family of nations...
...Long before D-Day this group had solid contact with the Allies and wanted desperately to end the war after killing...
...If you want proof, read the history of the French Revolution, the Chinese Boxer Rebellion, or the several Russian revolutions and counter-measures...
...They witnessed persecution of the greatest enormity on religious, political, and racial grounds, the breakdown of trade unions, and the liquidation of all religious and moral influences...
...No, by far not all Germans are guilty for the depravity of the Nazis...
...So is a scholar who recently said that all the 70 million Germans are not worth the life of even one American boy...
...Because he found in all of them large numbers of nationals to do the dirty job of coercing, torturing, and killing their fellow citizens for him...
...They were always that way, and even in defeat and misery they are arrogant, and therefore incorrigible...
...Naturally, the negative emotions of hatred, revenge, and bitterness affect nothing so much as our judgment about the German people...
...These sectional reigns of terror were brought to a halt only because the brigands did not capture the whole government, as they did in Germany...
...Up to this day I have not found in the United States a single person who could tell me specifically what I or any other German should have done to stop the Gestapo, SA, or SS, from torturing people to death...
...Or, if in the face of the evidence they should be declared guilty, then I, and the 100,000 Germans who came to this country as refugees, are guilty too—along with Thomas Mann," Chancellor Bruning, Albert Einstein, and many another citizen of the world...
...However, being a coward and no hero, and clinging to this little bit of life for myself and my wife, I chose to leave everything behind, and came to these shores where I had many good friends...
...He says: "Early in the Nazi regime, people of this country came to look upon the Nazi Government as not constituting a legitimate state pursuing the legitimate objectives of a member of the international community...
...Once it gets in the saddle, the terror, the torture, and the atrocities naturally follow...
...Justice Jackson's recent report to the President about the prosecution of war criminals...
...Let us not lose our compass in a heavy sea...
...Unfortunately, His Majesty's Government published these documents only after Hitler invaded Roland, because during the years of appeasement it did not want to aggravate relations with the gangster government...
...These are members of our society who are dyed-in-the-wool Hitlerites without knowing it...
...AT present, the most common line of emotional reasoning regarding the peace settlement for Germany runs as follows: The Nazis have organized the beastliest atrocities with scientific scrutiny and industrial efficiency...
...Many thousands of men have been slaughtered in revenge for these attempts...
...Two of my own farm laborers were among the first mmates of the camp at Oranienbufg, just a few miles from my farm...
...The Norwegian, Dutch, Belgian, French, Czech, and Polish Quislings were Hitler's and Himmler's pals—¦ the good Germans, Dutch, Belgians, Czechs, and Poles were their sworn enemies...
...Morally, politically, and socially, America cannot afford to take that risk...
...Several thousand other anti-Nazi Germans of all political shades and religious denominations were simultaneously slaughtered in reprisal...
...This is no fanciful exaggeration...
...YOU notice that Justice Jackson states vividly how brigands and gangsters enslaved first the German people by terror for seven long years before the eyes and ears of the world...
...I am convinced, that under the same system of terror by a well organized, omnipresent, and brutal secret police, they would be just as hopelessly trapped as the good Germans were...
...To begin with, I find myself in wholehearted agreement with the authoritative statement about the background of those crimes in Mr...
...The German people knew about them and did not do anything about it...
...If individual German civilians who were in the trap are guilty for not having stopped Hitler, why are not the statesmen of the Great Powers, who fed whole nations—such as Austria and Czechoslovakia —to the beast in order to appease it, guilty as well...
...If we do nothing to prevent this impending food catastrophe, and let the innocent perish with the guilty, we will smother in bitterness the beginning of rehabilitation, and we will frustrate forever the desire of all the good Germans to cooperate with us in the denazification and pacification of their people...
...A day after Hitler came to power, terror was in effect...
...I am confident that the American public will, in the near future, endorse a hard but a just peace for the German people that will open the way to political and economic rehabilitation...
...You had a choice then, between being quiet or be-ing silenced in torture camps...
...The British Government, in 1939, issued the Second White Book on Nazi Germany entitled Papers Concerning the Treatment of German Nationals, with a full account of the torture and killing of German nationals in the concentration camp of Buchenwald...
...Let us be eternally on guard that these men of ill will never get in the saddle...
...From 1939 through the Spring of 1945, the torture and liquidation of Germans in camps was only increased in scope, and the system perfected in the years' bafore 1939 was merely applied as well to other peoples...
...For the simple reason that soon I was completely paralyzed by fright and terror, as I am sure every one of you would have been...
...Sadly enough, neither the free people of Great Brit-a;n nor the free people of the United States did anything about these outrages against civilization, except that they accepted large numbers of refugees...
...They failed, as you know, and died on the gallows...
...It was well known in all other countries that the first victims of Nazi atrocities and acts of sadism and brutality were Germans...
...Half a dozen attempts to assassinate him were made—by rifle, dynamite, and bomb...
...I plotted with good and solid friends, many of whom paid with their lives, kicked and beaten to bloody pulp by the same type of criminal we execute here for murder, but who, there, went into uniform...
...But millions of the best Germans neither had the opportunity to emigrate, nor did they want to give up what they loved...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 42
