SAN FRANCISCO AND SITTLICHKEIT
T is a fitting turn of fortune that the opening of the San Francisco Conference, at which a new League of Nations is be built, should have synchronised so closely with the two vents which go far towards signalising the "end of organised sistance in Germany," the immediately imminent junction of the lied armies in east and west and the immediately impending all of Germany's capital. Berlin is of obvious strategic impor- ance, but it is more important still as a symbol. An official pokesman was proclaiming from the capital as recently as Monday at once Berlin and Prague were lost all was lost. All in fact was good as lost for Germany before a single Russian was within irty miles of the Brandenburger Tor, but Germany in her last roes is the victim—unwilling probably so far as the mass of her pulation is concerned—of a fanatical Nazi insistence on self- nunolation which will make existence for millions of Germans 11 but insupportable. Berlin resists, and what was left of it is lown to pieces. Bremen resists, and what was left of it (much ore than of Berlin) is blown to pieces. Numbers of lesser towns nd cities have already undergone that fate. The civil population as anxious to surrender ; the Wehrmacht or the party leaders or he Gestapo insisted on resistance; and where there was once a rosperous township there is now a desolation. The destruction f transport—both the actual rolling-stock and the bridges that arried it across rivers—was an inevitable incident of war ; so as the destruction of extensive and well-equipped factories con- erted from the needs of peace to the needs of war. That in self would have inflicted immeasurable loss and privation on post- ar Germany. The destruction of houses by the hundred thousand these last days of utterly fruitless resistance will inflict irn- easurably more. There is left to the German people, in blind- ess or in bitterness, the parrot-cry, "We thank our Fiihrer." But something more has coincided with the opening of the San Francisco Conference, where an attempt will be made to mbody in the coming Charter a definition and assertion of lemental human rights,—the revelation of the unspeakable stialities of the concentration camps. There is no need to dwell ere on the hideous and incredible details ; they have been given he necessary publicity in the daily Press, and the Parliamentary delegation that went to one camp is about to publish its testimony. There are certain names which this war has stamped indelibly on history. One is Quisling ; another is Buchenwald—unless indeed horrors eclipsing even those of Buchenwald yet - come to light elsewhere. Enough is known already to make it clear that Buchenwald was no blacker hell than Belsen or Nordhausen or other camps whose character is known as yet only from the reports of prisoners who have had ex- perience of them. They preserft the Allies with a totally new problem, one which concerns not concentration camps but the whole of Germany. What is to be said of a people in whose midst such things can happen? What is being said by the people themselves, even people in the immediate vicinity of the camps, all correspondents have reported in similar language. They never knew what was happening, and if they did know what could they do about it? The question may be worth considering; the statement defies credence utterly. Such sustained and con- tinuing outrage could not conceivably have been concealed for twelve years. Hitler knew about it, of course, from the first. So did British Consuls, who reported on it before the war. The plea of ignorance cannot be countenanced for a moment. The plea of impotence is another matter. A people that has once let Hitkrism take root in its midst may well have been powerless to cope with the foul growth when its baleful branches had grown to over- shadow the whole country. And a people that has done that once may, if left to itself, do the same thing at any moment again.
That is the insoluble problem which underlies the whole ques- tion of the treatment of Germany. To indict every individual German for the atrocities of Buchenwald and Belsen and the rest would be to transgress the bounds of reason and justice, but every German is likely to suffer indirectly for the crimes of the camps, for the heart of every Allied statesman and Allied citizen has been hardened inevitably by what has been revealed. It has long been manifest that the only possible attitude of the victors towards a defeated Germany was one of stern justice—a justice which is in fact sheer mercy compared with what requital in kind would have been—and today there must be an added emphasis on sternness. Let it be conceded that there exist what may be termed good Germans as well as bad. Many of those who have died in the concentration camps or miraculously survive are no doubt among the former, and there are others like them who somehow escaped that awful fate. There may still be many in the Churches who secretly, even if they have not dared to avow it openly, put loyalty to God before loyalty to Hitler. But all of them are part and parcel of a criminal nation, and they stand branded with its criminality. Fascism in Italy was vile, but only Germans could perpetuate such barbarity as stands revealed today. In dealing with such a people the Allies can take no risks. If it is agreed, as it must be, that there are both guiltless and guilty Germans, it is essential, in face of the foul and flagrant guilt of the nation as a whole, to hold each individual German guilty till he has proved his innocence. There will be oppor- tunities of discrimination ; confidence will be reposed in those Germans who can prove themselves worthy of it ; but the time for discrimination is not yet. Defeat may bring a conviction of error ; but- it may only bring a conviction of the error of being defeated. One characteristic of Germany in defeat, as has been stated often enough, is to organise sympathy and impose on the soft-hearted among Germany's enemies. Such an attempt, after Buchenwald and Belsen, will impose only on the soft-headed.
What conclusion then can be reached that is not a mere counsel of despair? That the outlook is almost desperate is not to be denied, for the measures indispensable for the restraint of Ger- many are calculated in themselves to evoke the very emotions that made Hitlerism possible. All the Allies can do is to build up slowly inch by inch, restoring liberty to Germany locally and gradually only as there is reasonable ground to believe she will not abuse it. How that will work out, and whither the process may eventually lead, is at present beyond prediction. For long the occupation of Germany must rest on force ; any sign of weak- ness would be an encouragement disastrous in the end to Germany herself. But the work of San Francisco will be lamentably in- complete unless a framework is created there in which a place can be found ultimately for Germany. What is being attempted is the formulation of a code of interdational conduct to which nations will agree to conform, and to which if need be they will be held. The hope is that they will never have to be held to it. So far as they have, the ideals behind San Francisco will have broken down, even though the failure be localised and retrieved. It will manifestly be to Germany's interest to enter the Inter- national Organisation when she can gain admission, and it would be foolish at present to suppose that she would be animated therein by any motive but self-interest. But before that time comes the San Francisco agreements, if they fulfil their highest purpose, will have produced not merely a set of political agreements but a code of honourable conduct between States. It may be idealistic, but it is not idealistic to the point of folly, to believe that if that hope is ever realised even Germany may be constrained to conform to the universal standard. In an address he gave in 1913 Lord Haldane expressed the hope that an entente between certain of the Great Powers of that day might so extend that, in the spirit of the larger understanding, "we might hope for and find the best in other nations, and so develop a Sittlichkeit, or sense of good form, as distinguished from mere law or pure ethics, which should provide a firmer basis for International Law and reverence for International Obligations and establish respect for the rights and duties Of foreign nations." There have been two cynical an sinister comments on that aspiration. The first was dated ,191 the second 1939. Humanity has still one chance, but it may we be the last. Science in the service of slaughter will know no lint.' of 'range, and no distinction of, age or sex.' A resolve to organise to escape that fate is not the highest of moral motives, but it cal at least be invoked to reinforce others that are higher. It is an irony to choose a German term—Sittlichkeit for the sake of Sittlichkeit—to define the aim. But the irony may serve to the aim in memory.
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