A DUTCH WOMAN ON FRATERNISING
Stit,—It always comes as a shock to me to read in English and American newspapers or magazines that the order not to fraternise with the Germans is not popular in your armies. You would not think of fraternising with the Japs, would you, when you occupy their country in the near future? hear you already replying: " That is different—they are coloured." if that mattered! It is not the outside that counts but the inside, nd their insides are about alike, Germans and Japs. We know some- ing about both these nations. Holland, my country, has not been upied for nothing during five whole years. A countrywoman of yours id to me when I told her about those " nice, good-natured Germans ": .We can only sympathise with you, but we can never fully understand II that you have gone through." And that is the whole truth.
We have learned now why we could never understand the German ind: it is always worse than you expect: it is a mind absolutely apart corn all others in the world, except the Japanese. It is that mind which akes the Germans stick together wherever they are, in Asia or in rica, in Europe or in America—everywhere. You can always recognise rmans because they instantly form their communities and keep to hemselves, and after a little while they start planning and plotting, cheining and spying, and marching! They are worse than mere cattle, hey are robots, killing and destroying where ordered to. It is their mind that killed, murdered, tortured to death the best, the flower of our young d older men in Holland. And the men who arc coming back from he German hell will be for ever maimed in body and soul. The German ws to one who is superior to him in rank, but he kicks and tortures ne who stands below him. "Befehl ist Befehl !" (Order is order!) And o the dear Fritz who plays with little children and sobs about his dear Id mother will torture you to death if the order comes to do so. I could show you whole lists of people I knew who have been murdered y the Germans. " Oh, but THEY are the Nazis," I hear you say. Yes, but it is the German mind. NOW you will meet in Germany thousands ind thousands who are anti-Nazi: they never cared for Nazism! Oh no! But, as WE know them, they would have gloried all the more in Hitler and his gang had they succeeded, and in Great Germany and the winning the war, IF they had won. Their great writer Goethe said of them: " Als Einzelner achtungswert, im Ganzen miserabel! " (As a single respectable, as a whole miserable). And that sums up about the whole truth. It is failure to understand the German mind that has brought about this horrible war. Has this last lesson meant so little? It is not I alone who am shocked about this weak and incomprehensible desire for fraternisation with the Germans, but our whole nation.—Yours sincerely,
Previous page
