GERMANY: NORMAL OR ABNORMAL?
pERHAPS the expulsion of that questionable character Dr. Cort indicates that McCarthyism has penetrated to high places in the Home Office. Perhaps the conviction of Captain Griffiths for brutality to Kikuyu prisoners proves that the British army is officered by thugs. Perhaps, after all, Maclean and Burgess went to Russia because they knew that some vindictive elements in the British Foreign Office were planning to remove them from their posts.' Any one of these hypotheses is tenable, and tenable with- out the use of any outright lies. For if you put your mind to it (and especially if you happen to possess the rare facilities of a British daily with an enormous circulation), you can argue almost anything from a given set of facts: that the Nazis are gaining control of ' key positions' in the administration of Western Germany, for instance; that they drove Dr. John to his spiritual suicide by planning to replace him as head of the Security Services; that they .are planning an ' aggres-, aive ' German army of thirty-six divisions. For you have a finger on the British pulse; you know what the public want to hear, and for good measure you can stick up a few clear, tasteful posters telling somebody (Sir Winston Churchill, Perhaps'?) not to rearm the Germans. And still you need not necessarily tell any lies.
For there are ex-Nazis in the West German administration, some of them in fairly high Places. There are plans to build a German army outside the European Defence Community, in case the EDC should not be ratified. There are Germans With impeccable pasts who are upset by these developments. There is a tendency towards the Right on the part of some of the smaller parties in the Federal Government coalition; they have to assert themselves, and Dr. Adenauer's own party Persists in occupying the Centre. But precisely what does any of this prove ?
It proves, in the first place, that nearly ten years after Hitler shot himself Germany is beginning to recover a degree of normality in its civic life and the greater part of the governing classes are no longer excluded from governing. None of the ex-Nazis in question has a vicious record; all of them have come through the process of de-Nazification ' with less than category I or category II degree of Naziness attached to them. They may not be particularly sympathetic characters, but there is no reason to suppose that they are psychopaths or that they remember the days of Hitler with nostalgia. This is point one. Point two: there is even less reason to suppose that Dr. Adenauer likes them or the parties that support them. He happens to be obliged to include them in his coalition because he happens to believe in democratic government. Point three: they do not influ- ence policy in any fundamental way—at this moment; for German policy at this moment is the policy of Dr. Adenauer and of practically nobody else. Point four: Dr. Adenauer has a reputation for distrusting Nazis as effectively as any British journalist. This being so, the shortest way of enabling the ex-Nazis to influence policy is to ensure that the policy of Dr. Adenauer fails, the policy, that is, of giving West Germany back her sovereignty and her right to rearm within an intimate association of European Powers.
If, in other words, it is true that the ex-Nazis are plotting to control the affairs of Western Germany, then the involve- ment of Western Germany within the Western alliance in such a way that it has neither the incentive nor the means to commit independent aggression becomes a matter of even more urgency than is currently believed in Whitehall. If there is no Nazi plot, then it is interesting to speculate on the reasons for making one up.
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