A Mannerless General
The Allied High Commission in Germany is wise in decid- ing, as it appears to have done, to take no official notice of the ill-conditioned and provocative speech delivered by a 'former General of parachute troops named Ramcke at a Waffen S.S: reunion at Werden, in Lower Saxony, on Sunday. The reunion itself was not very different from such gatherings -organised from time to time by the -British Legion in this country. General Ramcke is not a member of the organisation, but an invited speaker (very inadvisedly invited, as it turned out) and the organisers of the meeting immediately dissoci. ated themselves from his outrageous attacks on the Western Allies. The Federal Government at Bonn has since condemned his utterance. There this particular matter, it would seem, can well be left. Ramcke has not hitherto been a person of any consequence in Germany, and to invest him with a mere- tricious importance by initiatiig proceedings against him would be altogether unwise. As it is, most of public opinion and of the, responsible Press in Germany has condemned his out- burst emphatically. Paradoxically, his performance may in the end do good by sounding an alert against any recrudescence of Nazism. There has been little sign of it so far. The one thing that might stimulate it would be gratuitous intervention by the Allied Powers. The German Federal Government appears to have both-the power and the intention to deal with any trouble that may arise.
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