Again and again, whenever the problem of re-educating Germany or
de-Nazifying the young Nazis, is being seriously approached, some encounter or incident turns up to make the apparent hopeles ness of the situation inescapable. Take a message in Tuesday' Times from one of that paper's special correspondents in Normandy He was enabled to question, or was present at the questioning of, group of German prisoners. They were asked what they thought the anti-Hitler plot. " What do you mean, think? " answered first. " One doesn't think." The next one simply said that his superiors knew better than he did ; it was not for him t judge. The third simply refused to believe there had been an attack on Hitler. And so on. The writer's general comment i " To see and listen to these German youths, who since the age six have been filled with Nazi doctrine and the Nazi view everything, have been denied access to contrary opinion and foreign newspaper and radio, is a depressing experience. It is this that Nazism brings men, unthinking, inhuman automata, wh minds have atrophied through not being used. According to interrogation officers, 90 per cent. of the prisoners have no opinions they are not allowed to have opinions and have stopped trying• If so much as so per cent. of that is true we are up against a c pletely intractable situation. For to whom will this mindless gene tion listen? Certainly not to its foreign victors. Still more certa not to German einigres, mostly non-Aryan. A good many of th will, no doubt, be sent to forced labour on reconstruction in Russia that may enlarge their horizons a little. But what impression Russian Weltanschauung may make on a mindless German is not question to answer with complete confidence. '
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