A REVERSION TO BARBARISM
THE first instinct of the average civilised human being on reading the records of barbaric cruelty practised in German concentration camps is to dismiss them as incredible. But the Foreign Office White Paper leaves no room for doubt. Stories such as many of us had already heard from German eye-witnesses are here confirmed in detail by conclusive evidence from many sources and from the testimony of British Consuls in Germany. Confronted with the alternatives of publish- ing these records of revolting savagery or of letting them rest quietly among the archives for the enlightenment of historians, the Government has rightly decided that the facts, however unsavoury, however weakening to the self-esteem of the twentieth century, ought to be made known. Few of us today have any desire to emulate the spirit all too evident in the last war which encouraged the publication of atrocity stories damaging to the enemy. Even the fact that the German propaganda department has issued a flood of fabricated tales about British misdeeds in the past would afford no justifica- tion for replying in kind. But this matter is different. This is not a case of ransacking the history of the Nazi Party for examples of outrages committed by its members in the past. Nor is it a case of recording brutalities committed by irresponsible individuals in the last two years—the period covered by the White Paper. The persistent methods of torture applied with sadistic zeal by the S.S. guards in the camps are revealed as part of a system deliberately adopted by the camp superintendents, and ordered by the authorities " higher up." They offer a terrifying exemplification of Goering's words, " I will use the police, and ruthlessly," and of an authority still " higher up," Hitler himself, who announced at the beginning of his regime that sedition would be " burnt out with barbaric ruthlessness."
The civilised mind, confronted with the details of a bestial cruelty not exceeded in the tortures of the Middle Ages, is loath to dwell on the picture, yet cannot dismiss it. It is important that we should know what sort of an enemy we have to deal with. To what extent is this depravity, which is general both amongst the rank and file and the leaders connected with the con- centration camps, representative only of extreme Nazism, or of Germany as a whole? Mr. J. E. Bell, the Consul-General in Cologne, speaks of the disapproval among middle-class Germans of the extremities of Jewish persecution, yet none the less thinks that among the masses of Germans there is observable a certain Schadenfreude, or joy in mischief. It is well to emphasize the evidence of the Jew who, released from the horrors of the camp at Buchenwald, was questioned by officials of the regular police and records that they were shocked at such revolting and scandalous con- ditions and attributed responsibility to Frick and Hinunler. Certainly we should not be justified in ascribing to the whole or to a majority of the German nation the perversity of mind and character which takes so sinister a form in the S.S.
It may be said that every nation has its criminal class, and that the tortures inflicted in the camps are the work of men of exceptional criminality. That is probably true, though it would be disconcerting to know that there were enough depraved criminals in the country to fill the ranks of this immense force which Hitler has created. But the most disquieting aspect of the situation is that men of this type are the men chosen to be the instruments of the regime ; indeed, more than that, it is men of this kind that the Nazi regime creates. The most merciless of the prison guards who gloated over the tortures of their victims were youths between 17 and 20 years of age, young men brought up to this frame of mind through Nazi education, acting under the instigation of commanders who themselves were applying a system deliberately imposed on them. These are the men from whose ranks the Fiihrer's personal bodyguard is drawn—these are the products and the instruments of the Nazi mind which is imposing its will upon the people of Germany and is attempting through every agency that the State can command to reproduce its like in the national mind. The spirit manifested in the concentration camps is, in fact, merely the crudest expression of Nazism itself, which controls the body of Germany and aims at possessing its soul.
That, indeed, is what we are fighting against. The sordid horrors and indecencies of the concentration camps are merely Hitlerism writ small. We have seen the same horrors and indecencies writ large in Hitler's passion for brute power, in his utter disregard for treaties and promises when they stand in the way of his ambition, and in his cruel indifference to the lives of foreigners or Germans when he thinks that war will serve his purpose. Considering the larger crimes of policy in the light of the individual crimes committed in the prison camps, we cannot accuse the Archbishop of Canterbury of exaggeration when he describes " this spirit armed with ruthless force as in truth satanic," and tells us that " the world is now confronted by the menace of a force which is really and truly evil." As long as the German rulers, with the apparent consent of a majority of the German people, were satisfied with re- versing the processes of civilisation in their own country, we could do nothing and attempted nothing, grave as was the menace of so contagious a reversion to barbarism in the heart of Europe. But when the mania took another form, and was let loose against the freedom of other countries, the resistance to it was inevitable not merely a.; against military aggression, but aggression dictated by a spirit inimical to all that western civilisation has been attempting to create in the centuries of its history.
The publication of this report is justified, not because these outrages display the handiwork of the German people, but because it shows clearly that perversion of the German spirit which Nazism tends to effect, that deterioration of the human character which the triumph of Nazism would make more general. If Nazism had not thrust itself beyond its German boundaries it is difficult to believe that the German people themselves would have failed in the course of time to exorcize it. As it is, action outside was precipitated by aggression. Knowing what Nazism is, the whole world can judge that the democracies are fighting not merely to keep their lands and their independence, but something yet more vital, which a real enemy, who has entered into possession of the body of Germany, threatens to stamp out with modern guns and savage ideas.
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