Surely the harrying of Dr. Schacht has been carried far
enough— if not too far. When once a man has undergone the protracted and searching ordeal of the Nuremberg trial and achieved complete acquittal he might well be thought entitled to end his days in peace. But no such fortune befell the former Director of the Reichsbank. Released from the Nuremberg prison, he was forthwith arraigned before a German denazification court and condemned to eight years in a concentration camp. That sentence was quashed on appeal, but now on some plea or other Schacht is apparently to be put on trial a fourth time. I should certainly not be prepared to represent Dr. Schacht as a blameless character. That he is capable of speaking with two voices he proved in private long before the war. But I doubt if he was more a Nazi than any man who held any public position in Germany after 1933 was bound to be. He was essentially a financier, not a politician, and he was compelled to put his financial talents at Hitler's service. Even so he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and spent the rest of the war in a Nazi concentration camp. To attempt to drag him now, at 71, out of obscurity into the dock once more is to manifest a vindictiveness to which the British authorities in Germany will, I hope, lend no countenance. * * * *
Previous page
