THE GERMAN PEOPLE
SIR,—Opening The Spectator, and turning as usual first to " Marginal Comments " I find myself for once exclaiming • to Harold Nicolson: " That's not fair." He believes that " the majority of Germans are decent, orderly and humane." How then does he know that " the German people as a whole " share in the hysterical glee evoked by Goeb- bels' fairy stories about our sufferings under flying bombs? Suppose as many as 75 per cent. of them felt about it like the British citizens who wrote to the B.B.C. to protest against imaginary gloating in announcers' voices? Would they dare to show it? Would they not rather murmur to themselves as Germans are said to do when indignant about worst things:
" Dear God, make me dumb Lest I to Dachau come."
Those who accuse anti-Nazi Germans of moral cowardice because they don't protest against or resist Nazi atrocities never, it seems to me, allow sufficiently for their difficulties. Of course they ought to have resisted at the beginning, before Hitler became too strong. But they did not then recognise him for the monster he is. Many British people, not only Tories but Mr. Lloyd George himself, were misled into expressing warm admiration for him. Later and now, consider the difference between Germans and would-be resisters in France, Norway, etc. These are surrounded by fellow citizens of whom they know that the vast majority agree with them, including many officials whom the Nazis have been obliged to trust. Representatives of Nazidom are relatively a handful. In Germany the balance is the other way. The whole machinery of authority and all its weapons are against resistance. It must be extraordinarily difficult for anti-Nazis to know how many are on their side, to plan concerted action, and to judge whether any particular scheme has a chance of success or would be sheer suicide. Yet German refugees here of the Free German Movement have accumulated evidence to show that underground concerted action does take place in some volume. When condemning Germans because there is not more of it and in bolder forms, everyone should, I think, ask himself how, much resistance he would dare if he balanced its small chance of success against the certainty of torture for oneself and ruin for one's family if it failed.
A further difficulty is the conflict which must be going on in many German minds between hatred of Hitlerism and fear that an Allied victory may mean the kind of future which Lord Vansittart plans for Germany. That is why his. proposals have. been indeed a " gift for Goebbels."—Yours faithfully,
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