LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
THE GERMAN PROBLEM
Snt,—In your issue of July 28th, Miss Eleanor Rathbone returns to the defence of the Germans with an old and unworthy device. She says, in effect: "Don't expect the Germans to revolt against their Fuehrer. They might get hurt. Would you get hurt in their place?" Miss Rathbone ignores the point that Germany's victims have died in tortures by scores of thousands, for they were not afraid of being hurt in the cause of liberty. If they had argued as Miss Rathbone argues on behalf of the Germans, there would, of course, have been no underground movement anywhere. Miss Rathbone, in fact, shows unwittingly why there has never been an effective underground movement in Germany. Her free German friends are driven to all sorts of other devices to mask the same inconvenient fact.
Here typically is one of them explaining in Socialist Commentary that help to the German revolution "should not consist in appealing to the German workers to revolt at once—now ; on the contrary, such appeals discourage the German opposition." Let the Poles, French, Dutch, Norwegians, Yugoslays, Greeks do it—anyone but the Germans. How brazen! Here is an attempt to prevent the British public from realising that, at the end of five years of war, there is still no one in Germany willing to rise, and that, when rising does come, it will come of defeat, not courage. conviction, remorse, not love of liberty equal to that of the peoples eagerly oppressed by the united effort of the German people. "No one who witnessed the triumphant joy of the vast majority of Germans in their conquests and in the loot of their soldiers and their business men can ever consider them free of guilt," writes Sigrid Schultz, for twenty-one years in the Berlin office of the Chicago Tribune. What comparable credentials has Miss Rathbone?—Yours truly, VANSITTART.
Denham Place, Denham, Bucks.
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