" HITLER'S FIRST YEAR "
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—In his interesting review of my booklet on Nazi Ger- many, Mr. Wheeler-Bennett accuses me of having committed
myself to the statement that historical teaching in Nazi schools, except for an absolutely one-sided view of War Guilt and the Treaty of Versailles, was no more biased than at Dartmouth. In fact, I made it clear that this was the opin:on of an English master at one of the new " Schools of Leader- ship " about his own school. Both he and I chanced to have
been educated at Dartmouth, and we had vivid recollections of a certain book entitled Sea-kings of Britain, which hailed as great heroes men whom Spaniards, for example, with some justification regard as pirates. But on the other hand, I expressly mentioned the case of a Munich secondary school where the history-master's teaching can only be described as aPPallinfl- It is not easy to say where the real truth lies. As Professor Ernest Barker puts it in his foreword to A Nazi School History Textbook, issued by the " Friends of Europe," Germany is now making the legend of the Third Reich, with saints and heroes and martyrs. In this she is doing what every great nation has done in the past. Professor Barker points out that Rome, England, the United States—all have their legends. He hails it rightly as a triumph of good sense that just recently, some 150 years after the events, American scholars set to work to revise their histories of the War of Independence in the light of objective truth. In that analogy it would be a fair assumption that somewhere about the year 2100 A.D. German scholars will perform the same service to their legends of War Guilt, Versailles, and the birth of National Socialism.—I am,
Previous page
