CONCENTRATION CAMPS
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Sin,—The recent revelations do not perhaps add much to what was akeady known of the horrors of the Nazi concentragon camps. The British White paper, published before the war, and arTicles such as that in the Catholic Medical Journal for October, 1939, contained the essential facts ; and those of us who have known personally refugees released from the camps have drawn deductions from their almost universal silence about outrages and humiliations which they would have liked to banish from memory. But the facts are now widely before the world, and lead, I think, to some important conclusions.
First, the numbers of Germans who defied Hitler were much larger than we thought. No doubt the majority of the victims had no choice ; they were seized because of their Jewish birth or their political past ; but some hundreds of thousands at least must have deliberately or impul- sively defied the tyrant and his torture-chambers. That needed courage. Secondly, even if the German camps, in the words of the Parliamentary Commission, " mark the lowest depth to which humanity has yet descended," the treatment of political prisoners has been little short of appalling in many other parts of the world. The Howard League made a valiant effort to get some sort of "Prisoner's Charter" accepted by the League of Nations before Hitler's time, and civil wars, open or dis- guised, have increased the evil since then. What is quite certainly needed is (1) a general Prisoner's Charter, on a scale not too exacting, and (2) not merely a right, but a regular practice, of inspection by an international body. If any such proposal is seriously considered by the United Nations' Organisation, I trust there will be no attempt to make the inspection apply only to the ex-enemies and to exempt all the " peace- loving nations."
There is a third thought raised in my mind by these revelations, not a conclusion but a great doubt. How complete is the power of terrorism over mankind? If I had been a German in Germany, hating Hitler and loathing the Nazi cruelties, but knowing perfectly well what would happen to me if I spoke a word against them, what should I have done? Should I have tried to be silent and not think about dangerous subject's? Should I, as the years went on, have become as callous to the torture of prisoners as most people are to the bombing of cities? Should I at last have broken down in some unguarded moment and found myself in a camp after all? Who can say?—Yours obediently, GILBERT MURRAY.
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