Sia,—The remark in your editorial note " Broadcast to Germany
" (September 19th) that the German author of an article on a later page of the same issue " adduces depressing evidence of the complete- ness to which all classes of the population have from varying motives accepted the Hitler regime," made me feel very uncomfortable. The statements of your " German correspondent " are not only in contra- diction to certain facts, but to the judgement of almost all reliable people, writers, politicians, diplomats, who were in close contact with the development of events in Germany during the period from 1932 until 1939.
How could you take seriously a writer who states that before the seizure of power the " preliminary Nazi bait, appealing to the basest instincts, &c., &c., was generally accepted "? The last free poll for the Reichstag, still under the terror of the gangsters, showed that Hitler had not more than 44 per cent. of the voters behind him ; and of those who voted for him a large percentage were adverse to his antisemitism based on race-theory, and excessive intolerance. "Hitler," writes your German correspondent, " was greeted by the masses with obvious enthusiasm as a new MesSiah." That is no less a distortion of the truth than his first statement. The voters who had sent to the Reichstag a majority of deputies fiercely opposed to the Nazi creed could not greet Hitler as a new Messiah ; in fact, there was a deep depression over a large majority of the German people when the old Field-Marshal von Hindenburg handed over the executive power to Hitler and to the Reichswehr. After Goebbels had referred in a speech at Hanover, on February 22nd, 1933, to the first President of the Weimar Republic, Ebert, as the former brothel-keeper, the Vorwarts, at that time the chief organ of organised labour in Germany, headed its accounts of this Goebbels speech : "A Toad crawled over a Grave." Such was the enthusiastic welcome of Hitler's right-hand- man !
The feeble resistance offered from the beginning is for your correspondent another unmistakable symptdrn that the German people " was indeed ripe for Nazism." The other day you could read in the German London daily Die Zeitung, in a commentary on a Nazi outcry that the movement of the Volga-Germans to Siberia would mean the death of half a million of them, that at least the same number of persons were murdered in Germany by the Nazi regime.
I cannot vouch for the statistics of this organ, which has some
ministerial approval behind it, but I can testify to the horrors and intimidation which the Nazis let loose on the German people to crush any resistance. It seems to me that your " German correspondent " has overlooked Hitler's concentration-camps, where hundreds of thousands—in their vast majority so-called Aryans—are suffering most horrible tortures. " I feel it the more necessary in enumerate some of these cases of persecution known to me," writes a British author, " as so many people in England seem to imagine that only Jews are interfered with by the Nazis. Such ignorance is to me amazing."
There is almost no point at which your correspondent does not manifest his ignorance or his resentment and hate, not against the Nazis, but against the German people. It is, e.g., pure nonsense to assume a German educational system centuries old ; there was in fact a variety of systems by reason of the structure of the German Reich as a federation of States ; there were wide differences in the system of education even in Prussia itself. A German (sic) system of education begins with the Third Reich of Hitler.
There is just /one fact which is put rightly and honestly by the author of " Hitler and his Subjects." When your pseudo-historian turns into a psycho-analyst a la Jung, I found some truth in his writing, particularly when he states—in contradiction to all he said before— that the rapid extension of this pathological (Nazi) culture may prove that Nazism is no deeply rooted conviction, and a sudden collapse may follow the disappointment of delusive expectations. " When the German masses have once understood that they cannot win the war, they will no longer endure bombardment and starvation."
Yes, as long as Hitler could spare the German people the horrors of the modern war, and could present them with easy prey, there was no great chance left for anti-Nazi propaganda. Now, these circuit). stances, lightning victories with negligible losses, have ceased to prevail with the German people, the mass of which was so far away from Nazi-ideology that it was—if you will trust the witness of HAI Ambassador at Berlin—" horror-struck at the whole idea of the war which was being thus thrust upon them." The Russian adventure of Hitler has turned the table ; there are still victories, but heavy losses too, and no prospect for the German people to come to a victorious end of this war within sight—and the U.S.A. becoming a factor more and more potent. It is just the moment which demands a full spate of anti-Nazi propaganda.—I am, Sir, yours, &c.,
AN ANTI-NAZI REFUGEE.
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