StR,—It is surely a pity that Mr. Peter F. Wiener
should think he furthers the effort to bring in a better world by discrediting the attempt to secure co-operation with whatever decent elements there may be in Germany. The attitude he assumes of moral superiority to the group of Germans in this country represented by mat excellent paper, Die Zeitung, s not seem to me to have any justification. Mr. Wiener talks as if there were a set of people who wanted our war effort to be relaxed in the belief that anti-Nazi elements in Germany could be trusted to overthrow Hitler and his gang of then. selves. I have never come across such people or heard of them. It seems to be aniversally recognised that no effective opposition in Germany to the present regime is to be expected till the German armies have suffered a decisive defeat Mr. Wiener's fierce- ness is beating the air. On the other hand, It may well be that, when that defeat has occurred, it will make all the difference if contact from this side can be made with decent elements in Germany, and we can have their co-operation in dealing with me bloody chaos which will probably follow defeat. Today they can be only our potential, nor our actual allies.
Mr. Wiener speaks of " the shametal militarist and aggressive policy which the German Social Democrats pursued from 1914-1933." This is misrepresentation. The story from 1914 to May, 1918, can be found in detail in the book I wrote at that time, German Social Democracy During the War, now long out of print, but accessible, I suppose, in the British Museum and some other libraries. The Social-Democrats of the Minority, who protested against the war and refused to vote war-credits In the Reichstag, who eventually broke away to form a sepmate party, the " Independents," went on rill the end of 1917, growing in numbers. The Majority Social-Democrats did, it is true, vote war credits and help the Government to carry on the war, but, with the exception of some individuals on the extreme Right of the party, they continued to protest against the Pan-German war aims and tried to limit the Government's War aims to a compromfse peace—" no annexations and no indemnities." They may be charged with weakness and connivance; they did not try
to arrest the war chariot, but only to :apply a kind of brake, and that feebly and ineffectually ; they cannot fairly be charged with urging on the chariot.
There is one fallacy which keeps on cropping up in arguments bearing on this topic. It is assumed that the support given by a people to a Government in carrying on a war, after the war has started, proves that the people, as a whole, approves of the war, and would like more wars after this one is over. When two nations are locked in a life-and- death struggle it requires heroic virtue in any one not to wish to stave off from his own country the consequences of defeat, even though he holds his country to have been in the wrong in the originating quarrel. True, at the time of the Boer War a number of Englishmen who thought that right was on the side of the Boers, .,nu that the methods used by the British in the war were reprehensible, publicly denounced their own Government, but that was a minor war, al which a withdrawal of the British from the Transvaal would not have meant the rubjection of England to a foreign conqueror. The case is very different when defeat or surrender would have for a belligerent nation such consequences as the Germans, and the British, believe that defeat or surrender would have for them. It is probably true that the g‘eat majority of people in Germany are now doing all they can to stave oft defeat, and are solid behind Hitler. Yes, but this is compatible with Herr Schmidt's having regarded war, before it came, with consternation and hor-or (he did so, I have reason to believe, at the time of the Munich crisis in 1938) and with his preferring peace and a quiet lite, when he has got it, so long as he is not ordered by aggressively minded rulers to take up arms and is not worked up by a lying propaganda. And if he fails to react with healthy detestation to the crimes committed by agents of his Government, when these are represented to him as committed for the greater glory of Germany, that may rather be a part of nis dreadful docility than a pro- pensity to evil which would drive him into atrocious activities from a delight in them, even should a new world eituation bring better influences to bear.—Yours, &c., EDWYN BEVAN. Yatscombe Cottage, Boar's Hill, Oxford.
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