Sta,—When the Nazi dictatorship forced all liberal writers into exile,
under penalty of the concentration camp, these exiles were received in this country as the representatives of the true German culture. Many of them have been here since 1933. The work of such writers as Rudolf Olden and Robert Neumann since they came here has been that of active opponents of the Nazi regime. Now that we ourselves are at war with this regime these representatives of the true German culture are discovered by the authorities to be a danger to the country, and their intelligence and experience are hurriedly interned.
It would surely have been possible to intern them pending a rigorous examination into 1. their records. - No writer with a list of% anti-Nazi books to his- name is a Quisling-in disgaise. No writer is capable of so fantastic -and. exhausting a. disguise: It should lie possible, even now, to retrieve from, the camps -those Germantand- Austrian- writers who are known by their works as bitter opponents of Nazi Germany. It is not only that they can be useful, and want to be useful. We need for our own sake to make it dear that the principles those writers hcped to assert in exile are as actively to be defended as our homes.— it Gower Street, London, W.C. i.
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