2 OCTOBER 1942, Page 22

You Can't Do Business with Hitler. By Douglas Miller. (Skeffing-

ton. 5s.) WHEN Mr. Miller wrote this able tract, over a year ago, the United States was still nominally at peace, and there were many Americans who thought that they could do business with Hitler. They not merely hankered after peace at almost any price ; they nursed the illusion that once comforted so many of our notables, that Hitler

was a conservative barrier against Communism. Mr. Miller knew Germany and the Nazis too well from the inside to be taken in by them, and he performed a public service in exposing what business is under Hitler, the competitive methods of Hitlerism and the im- possibility of his calling a halt. One would like to think that a book of this kind is totally superfluous in both America and Britain today. But it is not. We have been conditioned to be hostile to " propaganda " ; we are hardened to atrocity stories ; we find it very difficult to believe that men and systems can be totally unlike us and ours. And British and American complacency is so great that men seriously think that no doubt Hitler does this or that to Poles or Czechs, but " not to us." But the utility of this tract would have been even greater if it had been brought up to date. As it is, many of its pages have a curious dated air. Its very timeli- ness in 1941 makes it a little archaic in parts today. But, on the whole, its argument is almost as relevant now as it was then.