a,—The trouble with Mr. David Thomson is not that he
cannot think traight on this matter (though no doubt a brilliant logician on every they): the trouble is that quite literally he cannot, for more than a few Mutes at a stretch, think at all. For instance, in his second paragraph e uses his brain like a civilised man, and writes: "Mr. Gollancz does well to remind us that German concentration camps have existed since 1933 ; that until the invasion of Austria they included only ' Aryan ' and ' non-Aryan ' Germans ; and that therefore it is ludicrous to regard the whole German people as responsible for the brutalities committed in these camps."
But the effort is too much ; by paragraph six he has relapsed into primitive animism, and asks: " Why have German citizens never been ready to make any similar sacrifice—or even any similar effort—to assert the cause of personal justice and civil liberty against the cause of nationalism and authority? "
Suddenly, you see, " German citizens," sans phrase, have never been ready, etc.: whereas a few paragraphs earlier some Germans had paid for their readiness with their freedom and their lives. This was exactly what my pamphlet was about, feebly though I seem to have conveyed my meaning to Mr. Thomson. Some experts have estimated that there were as many as two million of these German political victims (plus husbands or .wives and children, so to say): but the number is, of course, quite irrelevant for the present argument. " Thinking " such as this is not only " confused and sentimental ": Mr. Thomson must forgive me for saying that it is essentially Nazi. Even so did Hitler, poor perverted half-wit, talk about " the Jews ": he personalised an abstraction, and forgot that the reality was, not " the Jews," but, for instance, Mr. Abraham Cohen, Mr. Solomon Levi, and—Yours, etc.,
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