Letters
Judgment at Klagenfurt
Sir: Count Tolstoy rightly points out (19 September) that if German officials were the ones who had been involved in sending off millions to Stalin's death-camps, not British officials, reactions would have been very different. I would go further: after the war, Germany rightly prosecuted or dismissed many bureaucrats and politicians who had been involved, even remotely, in crimes such as this, and to this day we never cease to read British and American comments about the amazingly unprincipled German officials of Hitler's day who were 'only obeying orders'. Yet the death-train bureaucrats and politicians of our Foreign Office, who used British troops to bludgeon women and children into cattle trucks taking them to the death-camps were not prosecuted, nor dismissed, nor criticised: on the contrary, they rose to the highest positions and honours, and their co-workers are sitting in the Foreign Office to this day, negotiating on Britain's behalf with Brezhnev.
Do we need, and does the world need, the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service, at all? Even where not KGB-penetrated it acts as though it were, and it seems pointless to pay out at least £100,000 per diplomat per year for his giant salary, allowances, free supplies, free school fees and flights home, when we could achieve the same end by, as a Danish politician wittily said, just having a telephone answering machine saying 'We surrender' in Russian.
George Stern 6 Eton Court, Shepherds Hill, London N6
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