Beastly Germans
From Professor J.R.Vincent Sir: Taki seeks to disconnect the Germans from Nazi anti-Semitism (High life, 24 July). Well, maybe. But the idea that the Germans have a natural tendency to atrocity rests on older foundations and is quite independent of the Holocaust. Consider the Wilhelmine period alone, which Taki sees as the high point of German civilisation. At that time the Germans massacred Africans on a huge scale which no other power remotely approached. Again, in its atrocities against Belgian non-combatants in 1914, Germany behaved in war in a way that no other great power would have done. Amiable and quite admirable though the West Germans of our day are, the peculiar horror of the German past cannot be restricted to the Nazi episode and the issue of anti-Semitism.
John Vincent
Faculty of Arts Graduate Centre, University of Bristol, Bristol
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