GERMAN PROPAGANDA
Snt,—I cannot claim to be fully conversant with the whole range of German propaganda, but about one branch of it, at least, I feel that many will agree with your corre- spondent Mr. H. G. Lyall. It is scarcely possible that the German "News Bulletin " in English from Cologne and Hamburg can have any more useful effect upon those outsidp Germany than would nothing at all. The RA.F.'e leaflets have been criticised as failing to grasp Teutonic Mrntality. These would surely appeal to no other.
To take a typical bulletin. There were only two items
(a) the claim that it had now been proved beyond doubt that Britain was fighting to dominate Europe—the to quoque argument by now so familiar, and (b) some disparaging remarks, presumably made in the heat of an election, about Mr. Neville Chamberlain at the beginning of his political career. It was not news: nor was it persuasive in proving a case for Germany. Perhaps, however, it had some entertain- ment value.
The résumé of some of Mr. Bernard Shaw's remarks on another occasion possibly carried more weight. One wonders whether it gives him satisfaction to be supplying the renegades Messrs. Baillie Stewart and William Joyce with just the material they like for anti-British propaganda. His clever remarks display a deplorably limited, and even flippant, con- ception of the circumstances of the war.
Somewhat unaccountably, both Mr. Harold Nicolson and Mr. Peter Fleming (though " Pax Bloomsburiana " includes the G. B. S. view) omit his name from " the thin yellow line of pacifism." He infers that we could have kept out of this war, while Russia and U.S.A. would have seen to it that Hitler didn't overreach himself. What a peace with honour! What
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