10 AUGUST 1945, Page 10

These prophetic and illuminating comments were written as long ago

as 1912. Throughout his life Albrecht Bernstorff strove to convince his countrymen that the British theory of the relation of the individual to the community was a saner conception than the German conception. The precepts which he had learnt at Oxford, and which he subsequently expanded and idealised, brought him into inevitable conflict with the Hitlerian system. With fine courage he defended those principles even in disaster: they cost him his Life.