TOWARDS A NEW SS?
SIR,—Your cold war correspondent is right to attack the formation of sinister extra-military forces such as Combat Groups, the Swiss Army. the TA, and so on, and his comment that tyrants never rely upon a single coercive force is most original; most tyrants, he shrewdly states, have at least an army and a police force. This is very true; in fact, we in England go even further: as well us the army (and its shad-ow, the TA), we have an air force and a navy—and the police force is divided into both uniformed and plain clothes forces!
And we must admire Mr. FitzGibhon's courage in mentioning concentration camps at a time when it is almost treason to pretend that any Germans have ever heard of such things and when many think that the only decent thing to do, as yet another ex-Nazi falls from office at the end of his own rope, is to look the other way in silence.
But this 'wicked and mad ideology,' with which Nazism is so subtly equated by Mr. FitzGibbon, is, of course, Communism, in subservience to which mil- lions of Red Army men were prepared to fight to the death against, among others, the Waffen SS, the sub- ject of his question mark. Secondly, if the answer to this question sadly turns out to be yes, the blame can- not all be Ulbricht's—or Adenauer's, or Stalin's or Foster Dulles's; some of it belongs to those scriveners of both West and East who strive to bog the cold war down in stalemate, and whose every appearance in print is to sing a song of hate against the deliber- ately hated adversary.
Cold soldiers, it seems, neither die nor fade away; from their big trench mouths they shoot off eternally. A. EDKINS 8 Cheslerford Gardens, Hampstead, NW3
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