TERROR IN GERMANY
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—As a student of history I must protest against the letters you have been publishing on this subject. The very phrase strikes anyone living in this peaceful, orderly, kindly country as utterly ludicrous.. All those tales about the ill-treatment of prisoners and pogroms against Jews and even Catholics :would make one laugh if they were not so painfully reminiscent of the campaign of defamation which is one of the_ cost inglorious pages of the Great War. The Entente. may have been of immense- benefit to the world, though -the general feeling of insecurity since its triumph and the armies of unemployed dragging themselves about listlessly between closed factories and, derelict farms hardly bear this out, but it emphatically never was an alliance of the romanized, i.e., civilized countries against the non- romanized ones, i.e., barbarian countries like Germany and Russia. Was Scotland against which Hadrian built his famous wall excluded from the Entente ? And were not great things expected from the Russian steam roller ? As a matter of fact it did flatten some happy Prussian home- steads out of existence. Your correspondent does not seem to know that a large part of what is now Germany was held by Rome, that several German towns were originally Roman settlements, that the heir of the Imperium, the Roman Catholic Church, spread what was left of its civiliza- tion very evenly throughout mediaeval Europe, that for centuries „owing . to, geographical, political and economic reasons -Germany - had closer and more numerous contacts with the old cradle of Roman civilization, --Italy, than either England or-France. Printing was first developed in Germany,; Protestantism was born there. So were Copernicus, Bach, Kant, Beethoven, Goethe, only to mention the very greatest. Could, a nation -of savages produce minds of that quality ?
To come down to modern Germany, . her standards of education, cleanliness, security, humaneness compare ex- tremely favourably with those of the best run countries in Europe and that is as true of pre-War as of post-War Germany. Though considerably smaller and poorer than London, Berlin fills' two opera houses for nine• Months in the year, while London has difficulty in keeping Covent Garden going for two ! Further, it shows a most imperfect knowledge of history to identify' democracy ivith parliamentarianism. Parliamentarianism is only that form of democracy which being native to the soil suits England, but almost always fails where it has been tried under different cenditioni. It suited Germany so badly 'that it ended with no fevier than thirty-tUro parties, six million unemployed and 'a. mass of extravagance and corruption in an administration which under the so-called autocracy had been singularly economical and honest. The movement which' swept Hitler into power
was a much needed reaction against a system foisted upon a starved " and beivildered people by a gang of ambitious men disguised as the apostles of liberty, but 'chiefly concerned with filling their own pockets at the expense of the public.
That the profiteers and embezzlers of the diScarded system and their "litermy scientific hangers-on should scurry post haste' across the nearest" border and set up dismal howl over their lost fleshpots is, natural enough. Hut that the Press 'of a country which has a reputairon foi veracity and justice should mistake these howls for the expression of genuine. fear of gruesome- atrocities can- only- mean one of two things.: either -extreme gullibility- has become the fashion—and crazy fashions do occur--or the same sinister conspirators are at work who broke the century-old under- standing between what are after all two branches of the same racial stock, England and- Germany. Only those powers stand to gain by this artificial enmity, the powers
which behind the most formidable wall of tirmathents Europe has ever seen pretend to tremble at the sight 'of an imper- fectly trained, frequently under-nourished and -generally pathetically young Nazi policeman.—I am, Sir, tte:,
8 Hohen St., Potsdam, Germany. A. MUNTHE.
[No facts in recent history are established more incon- testably—to a large extent on the evidence of witnesses essentially friendly to Germany—than the numerous cases of murder, assault, and various forms of intimidation for which the National Socialist Party in Germany has been reSponSible in the last two months. Out of the mouths of its spokesmen, Captain Goring and Dr. Goebbels, the party stands convicted. The organized economic boycott of the Jews is -the climax. The Spectator has consistently shown itself a friend of Germany, but it is a friend of freedom first. Resort to violence is not condoned by styling it revolution.—En., The Spectator.]
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