THE HIGH COST
OF
VENGEANCE

by

Freda Utley

HENRY REGNERY COMPANY
CHICAGO
1949

This book was made possible
by a research grant from the
FOUNDATION OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Copyright 1949
HENRY REGNERY COMPANY
Chicago, Illinois

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Reproduced from:
http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/thcov/index.html#Contents

To My Dear Friends
John and Joan Crane
Whose Help and Encouragement
Have Been Invaluable
In the Writing of This Book

Table of Contents

CHAPTER


1.
Road to War

2.
The Spirit of Berlin

3.
The Material Cost of Vengeance

4.
Tragedy in Siegerland

5.
German Democracy between Scylla and Charybdis

6.
Nuremberg Judgments

7.
Our Crimes against Humanity

8.
Our Un-American Activities in Germany

9.
How Not to Teach Democracy

10.
The French Ride High

11.
Conclusion
 

Added by Gnostic Liberation Front:

FREDA UTLEY, CRUSADER FOR TRUTH AND FREEDOM
 

Chapter 1

Road to War

Following World War I France and Britain refused to listen to the statesmen who said that you can have peace or vengeance, not both. They broke their armistice pledge to Germany that peace would be made on the basis of President Wilson's Fourteen Points and "the principles of settlement enunciated" by the American President.* They continued the starvation blockade of Germany for six months after the Armistice, in order to force the German democrats who had taken over the government to sign a dictated peace. Having promised a peace without annexations or indemnities, they deprived Germany of territory and imposed a crushing reparations burden on the newly established Weimar Republic.

Having promised general disarmament they disarmed Germany without disarming themselves. The victors refused even to discuss the terms of peace with the vanquished who had surrendered on stated conditions which were not fulfilled, and in general discredited democracy in German eyes by associating it with broken pledges, national humiliation, and economic distress.

The Nazi movement, born from the dragon seeds planted at Versailles, and brought to monstrous growth by the world depression which raised the total number of unemployed in Germany to six million, took power at the moment of Europe's and America's greatest economic crisis. Inevitably, the second World War followed the first after an interval of only twenty years.

1

Instead of learning that you cannot build confidence and security, democracy and prosperity, on a foundation of hatred and vengeance, the victorious allies this time have torn Germany apart, deprived her of all possibility of existence without exterior aid, and while unable to agree among themselves on a peace treaty, have jointly reduced the defeated enemy country to the status of an African colony.

History is repeating itself with results likely to be even more tragic for Europe than the events which led up to World War II. Once again the victorious allies are making it impossible for the Germans to place their faith in democracy and justice, since they find justice denied and democracy mocked by the occupying powers. Once again the German democrats are in danger of yielding right of way to the totalitarians because legal methods and appeals to justice are again failing to obtain a fair deal for the German people. Last time we produced Hitler; this time we may succeed in giving Stalin hegemony over all Europe.

If France, following World War I, had been prepared to treat Germany as generously and intelligently as England had treated France after Napoleon's defeat, Europe might have known another century of peace. The long conflict between Germany and France could have ended on terms as advantageous to both, and as conducive to European peace, as the Anglo-French collaboration which succeeded centuries of rivalry and war between England and France. Instead, France sought a fictitious security by disarming the Teutonic giant while giving him every reason to plot for revenge. The crushing burden of reparations the Germans were required to pay, and the denial to Germany of a secure and honorable status among the nations of Europe, so enfeebled German democracy that the Nazis won power and France was overwhelmed by the forces she herself had created.

It may be true that the lesson to be learned from history is that mankind learns nothing from it. But the explanation for the failure of the Western democracies to read the lesson of the immediate past seems mainly due to the effect of war propaganda and the ignorance or lack of integrity of the molders of public opinion.

The pen is still mightier than the sword and responsible for more human misery when unscrupulously employed in "psychological warfare." As Samuel Johnson wrote in the eighteenth century : "I know not whether more is to be feared from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie."

War propaganda, and the falsification of history indulged in by a multitude of journalists, authors, professors, and politicians has convinced the American public that the Germans have a peculiar aversion to democracy and are an innately aggressive people who will always attempt to rule the world unless kept down and taught to love democracy by a long period of instruction in a reformatory.

Only those who have studied the history of Europe know that Germany did not become a militarist nation until centuries of French aggression, from the days of Richelieu to Napoleon's conquests had caused a reaction which enabled Prussia to forge the modern German state out of the disunited and powerless congeries of kingdoms, principalities, and free cities, which constituted "the Germanies" before the French Revolution.

Americans who have had it dinned into their ears for years that Germany has attacked France three times within living memory will be astonished at reading what was said at the time in Britain and the United States about the Franco-Prussian War.

The London Times on July 16, 1870, wrote as follows :

The greatest national crime that we have had the pain of recording in these columns since the days of the First French Empire has been consummated. War is declared—an unjust but premeditated war. The dire calamity, which overwhelms Europe with dismay, is, it is now too clear, the act of France, of one man in France. It is the ultimate result of personal rule.

There can be no doubt as to the side on which the world's sympathies will be enlisted, and, whatever may on former occasions have been the offenses of Prussia, she will in this instance have on her side all that moral support which is seldom denied to those who take up arms in self-defense.*

George Bancroft, the U. S. Minister in Berlin, reported as follows :

The leading statesmen as well as public opinion America regard the present war essentially as an act of self-defense on Germany's part, and the outstanding task is to insure Germany permanently, by a better system of frontiers, against new wars of aggression on the part of her western neighbors, of which the past three centuries have brought so large a number.

3

The tragedy of modern history is that the Germans have always been kicked around when they were pacifically minded, with the natural result that the apostles of violence have again and again won the leadership of the nation, following the failure of the democrats and antimilitarists to win a fair deal for the German people, or protect them from attack.

Having finally girded their loins to resist French aggression and forced France to abandon her centuries-old ambition to establish her hegemony over the Continent, the Germans proceeded, once Bismarck's influence was withdrawn, to follow in France's footsteps. Nevertheless the popular conception of the Germans as the cause of all recent wars is erroneous. In the half century which elapsed between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, Germany was at peace, whereas Britain and France conquered most of Africa and extended their Asiatic colonial empires; Russia fought Turkey and Japan; and the United States acquired new territory by wars with Spain and Mexico.

Having both studied and taught history at London university in the twenties, when war passions had cooled, and having had the privilege of knowing the eminent British historian, Dr. G. P. Gooch, who with other scholars was establishing the facts concerning the causes of World War I, I am also aware that Germany cannot be regarded as solely responsible for the first act in the Tragedy of Western Civilization. Diplomatic documents made public by the Bolsheviks, together with those from the Vienna archives, proved that Tsarist Russia and the Hapsburgs were more responsible for the outbreak of the war than Germany.

As Gustav Stolper has written :

Not one historian of international repute of any nationality during the twenties and early thirties maintained that Germany alone was responsible, while several outstanding historians, particularly British and American, went far in establishing Germany's comparative innocence.*

The facts of history were overlaid by propaganda during World War II and are today forgotten. But no one can deny that after their defeat in World War I, the Germans for a time swung back and embraced pacifism and democracy with the same fervor as they had formerly followed their militarists. The Constitution of the Weimar Republic guaranteed so many freedoms that it allowed license to both Communists and Nazis, first to undermine and finally to destroy the German Republic.

4

The Weimar Republic might have survived its own inner weaknesses if France had been willing to bury the hatchet and pursue as enlightened a policy toward Germany as the British, who soon after the war's end realized the stupidity of stifling the democratic forces in Germany by the full implementation of the Versailles Treaty.

In 1923 the French, against British advice, occupied the Ruhr in their efforts to squeeze blood out of a stone and obtain the huge reparations the German Republic could not possibly pay. The Germans countered this high-handed action by a general strike in the Ruhr which, although it eventually forced the French to retreat, toppled Germany over into bankruptcy. The runaway inflation which resulted ruined the middle classes and laid the basis for the Nazi movement. At the same time the misery of the working classes drove many to abandon Social-Democratic leadership and follow the Communists.

The intervention of America postponed the crisis for a decade. American loans and credits rescued the Weimar Republic and enabled Germany to pay a scaled-down annual indemnity, while also presenting an appearance of prosperity. There remained a hard core of unemployment amounting to about two million, but German industry was re-equipped and rationalized with the help of American loans.

Germany's hope of meeting her obligations depended on expanding world trade and continuing American credits. The world economic crisis drastically reduced German exports, brought an end to American credits, and destroyed any possibility of Germany's being able to pay either reparations or interest on her loans.

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in the United States and the 1931 Ottawa Conference which raised a tariff wall around the British Empire, completed the ruin of German democracy. Germany's export trade was reduced by half, and unemployment, bank failures, and bankruptcies produced such desperation on all sides that the extremists on the right and the left were able to destroy the democratic parties which had strained so hard, and under such tremendous handicaps, to make the German people reject militarism and place their trust in a rational and peaceful world order.

President Hoover endeavored to prevent the crisis in Germany and all Europe by his moratorium on international debts. President Roosevelt, by torpedoing the London Economic Conference and devaluating the dollar, gave a further mighty impetus to the economic warfare which was the curtain-raiser to the tragedy of World War II.

In desperate economic distress, disarmed and denied equal rights with other nations, with half its industrial population unemployed, and possessing no such imperial revenues as Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium to support its workless millions, Germany succumbed to Hitler. The false Messiah who promised "work and bread," and a free strong Germany in place of the impotent Weimar Republic, extinguished German democracy.

The Nazis not only took advantage of economic distress. They played upon national resentments and fears. As H. A. L. Fisher, the eminent British historian, wrote in his History of Europe :

The disarmament imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles had never willingly been accepted by a nation of soldiers; and the Germans were entitled to claim, either that they should be allowed to rearm, or that a reduction of armaments should be seriously undertaken by their neighbours. With a rare unanimity of passionate emotion, the youth of Germany claimed equality of treatment, and protested against the continuance of a system which left them helpless before the airplanes, the tanks and the heavy artillery of Poles, Czechs, and Frenchmen. . . . The long delays of the League militated against the authority of the Social democrats who stood for fulfillment of the treaties, and had been prepared to make sacrifices for European peace. For seven years Germany had wooed Geneva, and wooed in vain.

To the Germans, for a few years, it seemed that Hitler was eminently right and the German democrats profoundly wrong. For everything that had been denied to the latter was given to Hitler without a struggle. From 1933 to 1939 the truth of the maxim that "might makes right" and that justice is always denied to the weak, was proved over and over again. The union with Austria, denied to the German democrats when it could have alleviated the economic crisis which was rendering their positions untenable, was permitted to Hitler. The right to self-defense, denied to the Weimar Republic, was not questioned till long after the Nazis had extended it to mean the right to attack others. After Hitler came to power the Germans found themselves able to win every right denied to them when they were democratic.

The German "common man" who had stood idle at street corners or looked vainly for work, and felt himself an outcast in a society which had no use for his labor, now had permanent employment, and a sense of security so long as he obeyed orders.

Whereas the world's markets had been shut to German exports under the Weimar Republic, Dr. Schacht opened the gates to German trade by his barter treaties concluded outside the international monetary system controlled by London and New York. The Germans, who had suffered great privations when they followed the lead of the Social Democrats, had good jobs and comfortable homes under the Nazis. The price was the loss of freedom but a starving man will always sell his birthright for a mess of pottage.

Hitler is dead and the Nazi bid for world empire has ended in overwhelming defeat and universal hatred of the German people who followed after their false star, and are still held responsible for their crimes. Equally disillusioned by the Nazis and by democracy, the German people today are adrift and hopeless. If democracy could inspire them with hope as strong as that once inspired by the false Nazi prophets, all Europe might be saved. But we, the victors, treat them as a pariah people, and by giving little or no support to the German democrats, demonstrate that the latter are as incapable today as two decades ago, of winning for the Germans the right to work for their own support and be accorded an equal status with other European nations.

Only a little knowledge of history is required to refute the popular belief that the Germans are naturally more aggressive than the French or the English or any other people. Each of these peoples has, in turn, been the aggressor, according to its power, its opportunities, and the ambitions of its rulers.

It serves no purpose to apportion blame, since almost all nations at one time or another, have been aggressors in Europe, Africa, or Asia, and even Americans have waged wars of conquest on their continent. The survival of Western civilization now depends on our ability to forget old injuries, rise above national prejudices, and heal the scars of war. Unless the internecine feuds of Europe are ended and we start acting according to the principles we profess to believe in, the Communists will conquer. The first bad peace produced Hitler; the second is giving us Stalin.

Only a revived faith in the principles we profess to believe in and our determination to put them into practice can preserve Western civilization.

The insidious influence of totalitarian doctrine, and the decay of democratic principles is reflected in the changing attitude of the United States between the two world wars.

During World War I, President Wilson endeavored to make America's allies listen to the voice of reason and humanity, and appealed for a peace without "annexations and indemnities" to "make the world safe for democracy." But during and after World War II, the President of the United States became the foremost exponent of the policy of "all spoils to the victors," and took no account of the Atlantic Charter he had himself drawn up. It was President Roosevelt who sold out Poland and China at Yalta and delivered Eastern Europe to the Communist terror. It was President Roosevelt who agreed with Stalin that "reparations in kind" should be exacted by the use of Germans as slave laborers.

It was also the Democratic President of the United States who sponsored the Morgenthau Plan for the death by starvation of millions of Germans, and agreed to the expropriation and expulsion of millions of Germans from Silesia, East Prussia, the Sudetenland, and the Balkans for the sole crime of belonging to the German "race."

It was Churchill, the Tory imperialist, not Roosevelt, the American democrat, who stood up to Stalin at Yalta when the dictator of all the Russias proposed the massacre of thousands of German officers after victory.* It was Churchill, not Roosevelt or his "liberal" aides, who tried to save Europe from Communist domination and terror by advocating a strategy which would have kept the Russians out of Eastern Europe, and could have prevented the sacrifices of the war from resulting in nothing but the substitution of one totalitarian tyranny for another.†

President Wilson was broken, and died, after his failure either to persuade America's allies to agree to a just peace, or to get the support of Congress for The League of Nations, which he thought would compensate for the concessions he had been forced to make at Versailles to the greed, fears, and ambitions of the victors.

8

President Roosevelt died before the consequences of his repudiation of moral values in the treatment of the defeated enemy peoples and his readiness to sacrifice principles and interests in furtherance of his "Great Design" had become fully apparent. But before his death he must have known that Stalin would not honor the commitments won from him at the cost of betraying Poland and China, delivering Eastern Europe to Communist rule, and putting the Soviet dictator in a position to menace all Europe while taking over China.

Both Democratic Presidents failed; but Wilson had fought for justice, whereas Roosevelt had sacrificed it to expediency and staked the future of the world on what he himself admitted was a "gamble" and on his faith in his ability to charm the Soviet dictator.

The consequences of Roosevelt's "successes" were more disastrous than Wilson's failures. The United Nations proved from its inception to be a greater failure than Wilson's League of Nations and has already in effect been discarded in favor of the Atlantic Pact with the enemies of Soviet Russia.

The contrast between the attitude and aims of Wilson and Roosevelt was a reflection of the changed philosophy of the liberals. During and after World War I the liberals had pleaded for a just peace, eschewed national and racial prejudices, and endeavored to combat the influence of nationalism and war-fostered hatred among peoples. But during and after World War II, so-called liberals and progressives took the lead in demanding the crucifixion of the whole German people.

If the forces of Western democracy have been weakened by the influence of totalitarians masquerading as liberals, or corrupted by Communist influence, the Communists have lost part of their strength by having divested communism of its original humanitarian content and international appeal.

None but the ignorant, the blind, and a few self-seeking men of large ambition and little talent now believe, that communism offers mankind a more just social order or greater equality between men, nations and races.

The difference in the attitude and policies of the Communists today and twenty years ago is best illustrated by their behavior toward Germany. Here the contrast between past and present attitudes, and professed ideals and present practices, is most clearly displayed.

In 1917 Lenin proclaimed the unity of the "workers of the world," denounced the war as an imperialist struggle, and offered the hand of friendship to the German people while repudiating the nationalist war aims of both the Tsarist and Kerensky governments. Under his leadership the Communists were internationalists in both theory and practice. They had no more enmity toward the German people than toward any other because they regarded "the masses" in every country as the victims of "capitalist tyranny" and "imperialist ambition."

A quarter of a century later, Stalin, having built on the foundations laid by Lenin, but with a totally different conception of the structure which was to be erected, had transformed Russia into a national-socialist state, and was wreaking a terrible vengeance on the whole German people for having followed its own National Socialist leaders instead of Russia's. And whereas Lenin had renounced all the territorial ambitions of the Tsars, Stalin was demanding all and more than they had ever dreamed of acquiring in Europe and Asia.

The degeneration of Communism and of democracy having proceeded on parallel lines, it was natural that the Western Powers and Soviet Russia could agree only upon one thing : vengeance upon their defeated enemies. Communism having become a synonym for the interests of the rulers of Russia and democracy having succumbed to the insidious poison of national hatred, the victors of World War II combined to despoil and enslave the Germans.

Whereas hatred is a powerful weapon in the hands of the Communists, it debilitates the enemies of tyranny. Our hands have been tied by our intimate association with the tyrants whose only quarrel with Hitler was his refusal to make common cause with Russia's national socialists.

Communism has lost the liberal savor which once gave it moral force. But its appeal has not yet been nullified by its inhuman acts and its prostitution in the interests of Stalin's dictatorship. Stalin was wiser than Hitler, who ignored Machiavelli's precept that to succeed a tyrant must either kill off all opposition or conciliate his enemies. Whereas the number of victims consigned to Soviet concentration camps who have escaped is infinitesimal, many Jews and democrats who had either suffered in Hitler's prisons or had friends or relatives in them, were allowed to go abroad and tell the world about Nazi atrocities. Hence the widespread knowledge of Nazi crimes and the little information in democratic countries concerning the torture and death of the millions of victims of Communist tyranny.

Because Hitler was a little less ruthless, or efficient, than Stalin in exterminating his enemies, the atrocities committed by the Soviet Government are far less widely known than the record of Nazi crime. This is the one reason why the echo of communism's original humanitarian and international appeal still evokes a response among idealists who know nothing, and refuse to learn anything, about Stalin's Russia. But the main appeal of communism today is to the most irrational and destructive impulses to which human nature is heir. By playing upon our hatreds and passions the Communists foster and inflame class, racial and national antagonisms, and cause us to act against our own interests and the cause of freedom. Since the war's end they have been successful in propagating the idea that mercy, justice, charity, and goodwill are signs of "fascist" sympathies.

Years ago, when I went to live in the Soviet Union, the Communist attitude toward Menschlichkeit (humane behavior) was first revealed to me by the notice I read in Sevastopol under the portrait of a certain Russian general who commanded the Tsar's troops in the Crimean War : "General X was a most dangerous enemy of the working class; by treating his soldiers kindly he sought to dull their class consciousness."

Since the Communist aim is to perpetuate or create the conditions of chaos and misery which alone can give them the opportunity to seize power, it is natural that they should not only oppose the Marshall Plan but also exert their influence to exacerbate the old hatreds and resentments which keep their enemies divided.

The best and wisest of the Jewish people cannot be seduced by the Communist appeal to the natural but irrational desire to exact retribution from all Germans for the murder and torture of their race by the Nazis. Intelligent and liberal Jews have been among the leading opponents of the Communists and have rejected the Communist conception of collective guilt and punishment of innocent and guilty alike. But, being human, many Jews are as putty in the hands of the Communists, who appeal to their desire for revenge in order to soften up Europe for Soviet conquestThe Communists have likewise successfully appealed to the hatred of the Poles, the Czechs, and others who suffered at German hands, using this passion as a means to deliver the "liberated" peoples into Stalin's hands. Thus the Czechs, who expropriated and expelled the three million people of the Sudetenland, are today themselves being converted into Stalin's serfs in their own country.

If the influence of the Communists today were confined to those who still believe that the Soviet Union is a "peace loving democracy," it would be negligible. It is the cleverness of the Communists and their sympathizers and dupes in appealing to our irrational and destructive impulses which is weakening the democratic world.

Stalin is in the enviable position of having two hands to use for the destruction of the free world. As head of the Russian State he is offering the German people the opportunity to revenge themselves on the West by allying themselves with Soviet Russia. Hoping to harness German nationalism to his chariot, he gives former Nazis honorable and well-paid positions in the German Communist "police" forces which are in fact an army, and in the Communist universities and administrative offices of the Soviet zone. Soviet Russia's appeal today in Germany is mainly addressed to former Nazis who are welcomed into the ranks of their ideological brothers in the Communist party.

At the same time, as "pope" of the Communist "church," which is supposed to transcend national barriers, Stalin instructs the faithful in other lands to demand the implementation of policies calculated to drive the Germans to side with Soviet Russia because they despair of ever being allowed to earn a living under Western military occupation.

This double game would be too obvious to be successful, were it not for the influential writers, radio commentators, professors, and other molders of public opinion who have allowed themselves to be influenced by the Communists, either because they are ignorant, or because they are ambitious, or because of the skill of the Communists in playing upon national and racial hatreds and keeping alive the passions engendered by the recent war. The American people would by now have learned the self-defeating nature of United States policy toward Germany, were it not for the influence of Communist sympathizers, spread in manifold and subtle ways in newspapers, periodicals, and books; by popular lectures and the teachings of university professors; among Senators, Congressmen, and businessmen fearful of the stigma of red-baiting attached to those who question the Communist definition of "liberalism" and "progress."

The Communists and their hangers-on have succeeded in convincing a large number of Americans that justice and mercy are "reactionary," and sympathy for the underdog a sign of "fascist sympathies." They almost succeeded in convincing a majority of Americans that vengeance on the defeated, even at the cost of imposing a crushing burden on the American taxpayer, is the way to secure peace.

Communist influence, so strong in the Roosevelt era, has been largely responsible for our treatment of Germany, and our repetition in exaggerated form of the mistakes made by France and England after World War I. Nor is this influence now dead, in spite of the growing awareness of the American people of the danger it constitutes.

French influence has reinforced that of the Communists to convince the American people that Germany should be kept disarmed and deprived of liberty and sufficient industrial capacity to exist without American subsidies—a policy which must eventually succeed in forcing the Germans to side with Soviet Russia.

We have not only, once again, imposed a crushing reparations burden on the German people. This time we have also deprived an already overpopulated Germany of the territory without which her people cannot be fed, and of the industries which could produce the exports with which to buy the food otherwise unobtainable. Not satisfied with having put Russia in direct control of Eastern Germany which formerly supplied Western Germany with food, we agreed to the expulsion of more than twelve million Germans from Silesia, which we gave to Poland; from the Sudetenland inhabited by Germans for centuries past; and from Yugoslavia and other East European countries with minorities of German "racial" origin.

If ever the history of our times comes to be written by scholars free of national prejudices, the "crimes against humanity" committed by the victors of the second World War of the twentieth century A.D., will appear as equal to those committed by the Nazis. For an objective observer of the "crimes, follies, and cruelties of mankind" cannot deny that the expropriations and expulsion from their homes of millions of people for the sole crime of belonging to the German "race" was an atrocity comparable with the extermination of the Jews and the massacres of the Poles and Russians by the Nazis. The women and children who died of hunger and cold on the long trek from Silesia and the Sudetenland to what remained of the German Reich, may have thought that a quick death in a gas chamber would have been comparatively merciful.

Nor will that mythical person, the historian of the future, when he comes to draw up the balance sheet between Nazi crimes and those of their conquerors, fail to register against the democracies our decision to halt our armies on the Elbe in order to allow the Red Army to sack and ravish Berlin.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery no one ever paid a higher compliment to the Nazis than their conquerors.

Instead of acting according to the democratic principles we had gone to war to preserve, we tore up the Atlantic Charter and copied the Nazis in our repudiation of international law.

Instead of demonstrating our belief in the Christian and liberal principles which had made America the strongest power in the world, we reaffirmed the Nazi doctrine that "might makes right." Instead of showing the Germans that Hitler's racial theories were both wrong and ridiculous, we ourselves assumed the role of a master race. Instead of establishing a rule of law according to which individuals are punished only for the crimes they themselves have committed, and only after proof of their guilt has been established, we have indicted the whole German nation for Hitler's crimes.

We told the cold and hungry Germans in the cities shattered by our "obliteration" bombing that they could expect neither justice nor mercy, but that although we had disenfranchised them as punishment for Nazi crimes, we would teach them to love democracy.

Instead of recognizing that their "unconditional surrender" put us under a moral and legal obligation to ensure a fair deal for the German people, we did exactly the opposite. We proclaimed at Nuremberg that we no longer considered ourselves bound by the Hague or Geneva conventions because Germany had surrendered unconditionally, but that we would punish all Germans for having similarly disregarded international law when they were the victors.

The original directives, given to the United States occupation forces ordered them to do nothing to revive the German economy, and disclaimed all responsibility for the feeding of the conquered, although we had ourselves insisted during the war that Germany must provide enough food for the people of the countries she had occupied, however impossible this was, owing to our blockade. And it was agreed at Potsdam that the victors were entitled to exact reparations in kind in the form of forced labor—a provision taken full advantage of by the Russians who have held millions of prisoners of war as slave laborers and conscripted men and women in their zone to work in chain gangs or concentration camps.

The soldiers of the United States were told that they were entering Germany not as liberators but as conquerors. The task of the occupation forces was conceived of as entirely negative. It was to demilitarize, denazify, decentralize, and deindustrialize the defeated enemy country. Nothing was to be done to make the Germans believe that the victory of the democracies offered freedom, hope, or justice. Instead, we proceeded to teach the Germans that their dead Führer had been right in saying that if Germany failed to conquer she would be destroyed. "Woe to the vanquished" was our motto as it had been Hitler's.

For three years after their unconditional surrender we kept the Germans on rations little or no larger than those in Nazi concentration camps. All Germans, even those who emerged from Hitler's prisons, were starved and humiliated.

Germans were forbidden on pain of imprisonment to criticize the Soviet Union or complain of its inhuman treatment of those we had delivered over to the Communist terror. American and German Communists and fellow travelers were installed in influential positions in the Military Government, in the German state and town administrations, on denazification boards, and as newspaper editors and managers of radio stations. We did our best to convince the Germans that we had no objection to totalitarian doctrines and practices so long as they served the interests of Soviet Russia instead of those of German nationalism.

We not only made a mockery of our democratic professions by the power and influence we accorded to both American and German Communists, we also taught American youth to abjure the principles the American people had been told they were fighting to preserve.

American soldiers on entering Germany were given indoctrination courses in hatred, and taught to have no mercy or pity in dealing with the wicked German "race," just as young Nazis had been taught to hate and abhor the Jews. "The Morgenthau Plan," approved of by President Roosevelt at Quebec, was the basis of the Army's notorious order JCS 1067 which laid down the pattern of our original occupation policy. The Morgenthau Plan for the pastoralization of Germany, had it been carried out, would have constituted the greatest act of genocide perpetrated in modern times. The Germans would have been deprived of almost all their industries, and, since their soil is incapable of supporting more than the present agricultural population, at least thirty million people would have died of starvation.

The humanitarian scruples of the American people prevented the execution of this infamous plan. Unfortunately, however, JSC 1067 remained as the textbook of our occupation forces until 1947. According to this Army order issued to General Eisenhower in April 1945, "no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany or designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy" were to be taken. Military Government was explicitly instructed to "prohibit and prevent" production in a long and comprehensive list of industries.

The food consumption of the German people was to be held down to a minimum, with "surpluses" made available to the occupying forces and displaced persons. With a total disregard of the fact that a Germany deprived of her eastern bread basket by the Russian occupation and by the Polish seizure of Silesia had no possibility of feeding herself even at a near-starvation level, it was decreed that ration scales should be set low enough to permit the use of "net surpluses" for the sustenance of the occupation forces and displaced persons and for export.

Army order JCS 1067 explicitly states that "Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation, but as a defeated enemy nation." It went on to say that reparations and restitutions were to be exacted, and no political activity permitted. "Fraternization" with the enemy was strictly forbidden. We were determined to out-Nazi the Nazis in our own treatment of the conquered.

American soldiers were threatened with punishment should they behave like Americans and aid the destitute and helpless. Kindness, even to German children, was held to be a misdemeanor. GI's were forbidden to take a morsel of food off their plates to give to the starving, and mess sergeants were instructed to throw away food left over, not to let any Germans have it. Even the gift of coffee grounds to the Germans was forbidden.

Not only was charity forbidden and pity regarded as un-American, GI's and officers, if not positively encouraged to loot, were in no way discouraged from committing the same excesses as the Russians and French. Today the verb "liberate" has become an army colloquialism for stealing.

Since every army contains a percentage of gangsters and criminal elements, there is always some looting in an occupied enemy country and a certain amount of brutal mishandling of the civilian population. The instructions given by Washington to the United States Army positively encouraged the licentious and brutal minority and penalized the decent, law abiding, and humane majority.

It is to the credit of the American people that in spite of the Roosevelt-Morgenthau directives, put into operation by General Eisenhower without protest, large numbers of American soldiers insisted on behaving like Christian gentlemen. Many succored the hungry and defenseless Germans in spite of the regulations against it. Others were impelled by the impulse which in all ages has broken the barriers between conquerors and conquered.

Americans in the occupation forces might enjoy the status of "sons of heaven," but like the angels they looked upon the daughters of earth and saw that they were fair. It was impossible to prevent GI's who were far from home and sick of war to carry the demands of vengeance to the extent of rejecting association with ill-fed but neat German women or refusing candy to starving German children. Neither army regulations nor the propaganda of hatred in the American press could prevent American soldiers from liking and associating with German women, who although they were driven by hunger to become prostitutes, preserved a certain innate decency, and by responding to kindness with affection and loyalty, often won the love of American boys who had started out only to enjoy the pleasures which war affords to the victors.

Because of the natural kindness of the Americans, the call of human nature, and the qualities of German women, the inhuman and unrealistic directives given by Washington to the United States occupation forces were from the beginning more honored in the breach than in observance.

The futility of telling Americans to act like Nazis, Communists, or robots led at an early stage to the cancellation of the nonfraternization decrees.

Meanwhile, the utter absurdity of the Morgenthau Plan and the high cost of vengeance was becoming obvious in America. Far from realizing "surpluses," Western Germany had to be supplied with American food to prevent "disease and unrest" dangerous to the occupation forces.

Americans had not been sufficiently indoctrinated with totalitarian concepts of collective punishment to be inflicted on innocent and guilty alike to enable them to condemn millions of people to death by starvation, even if this policy had not involved risks to the occupation forces. Humanitarian sentiment was reinforced by the dangers to which American soldiers were exposed. Germs disregard racial barriers or those dividing "good" and "bad" nations, and it was also realized that starving people might prefer a quick death by attacking their conquerors to a slow lingering one. So the American taxpayer was called upon to provide just enough food to keep the Germans alive and submissive and to prevent epidemics. Gradually also, the influence of so-called liberals and "New Deal" advocates of the theory that we should love Communists and hate all Germans, declined.

The original pattern of the United States occupation had been set at a time when propaganda had convinced a large number of Americans that Soviet Russia is a "peace-loving" power and an example of a "new and better" democratic way of life, and had induced the majority of Americans to believe that Stalin could be trusted to honor his commitments.

After the Soviet Government made it increasingly obvious that it was irrevocably hostile to the Western democracies and had no more intention of observing its treaties with us than those it had formerly signed with its European neighbors, the most loving "friends of the Soviet Union" were compelled to think again. Those who were not Communists were forced to admit that the assumptions on which United States policy had been based since 1941 might conceivably be false. As the menace of Soviet aggression grew, the assumption that the Germans were the root of all evil crumbled. As it became more and more apparent that the Soviet Union menaced the whole world, it became clear that what was left of Europe must be defended against Russia even at the cost of forgiving the German people for their error in following Nazi leadership, and admitting them into the community of free Western nations.

Understanding of the terrible present danger which Communism constitutes to freedom everywhere in the world, combined with the American taxpayers' realization of the cost of vengeance, combined to modify our German policy. The Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe, which included Germany as the recipient of American ECA assistance, took the place of the Morgenthau Plan for "keeping Germany in chains and Europe in rags."

The need for a complete repudiation of the totalitarian concepts which originally inspired our occupation policy is not, however, recognized even today.

As soon as I arrived in Germany in August 1948 I realized that the assumption at home that the Marshall Plan has completely superseded the Morgenthau Plan is a delusion. United States policy had changed, and compared to the first years of the occupation it had become humane and intelligent. But the basic pattern remained the same.

The adherents of the Morgenthau Plan, although they no longer directed United States occupation policies, still influenced it and could be found occupying important positions in Military Government. The Communists and their sympathizers were no longer permitted to hold leading positions in Germany; but they were still able to work through so-called liberals who have been persuaded that advocacy of a humane and constructive policy in Germany is a sign of reactionary sympathies.

Waning Communist influence has been reinforced by French intransigeance and the British desire to eliminate German competition in the markets of the world. Thus dismantlement and other measures which debilitate Germany, weaken Europe, place ever increasing burdens on America, and pave the way for a Communist conquest of the world, are still being implemented.

This book does not attempt to deal with all aspects of the German problem. It aims only to show the American people the cost of vengeance, now and in the future. That cost cannot be appraised only in economic terms. The moral, political, and military consequences of denying to the Germans, not only liberty, but also the right to earn a living and the right of self-defense, may lead to the destruction of Western civilization, unless America is made aware in time of the need to implement in Europe the principles which have made her great.

19

Chapter 2

The Spirit of Berlin

Berlin in the summer and fall of 1948 reminded me of Shanghai ten years ago. In China then, as in Germany now, the Americans, British, and French were living safely and comfortably while "the natives" risked their lives against the enemy who was preparing to attack us in the fullness of time. A decade ago the United States and Britain had endeavored to maintain "good relations" with the Japanese aggressors in spite of their Nanking Massacre and other "crimes against humanity"; and in spite of Japan's disregard of Western interests in China, her insults, and such hostile acts as the blockade of the British concession at Tientsin, and the bombing of the United States gunboat Panay. In Germany we were trying to reach an understanding with the Soviet Government in spite of the blockade of Berlin and Moscow's open proclamation of bitter enmity toward the Western "capitalist-imperialist" Powers.

In the first years of the Sino-Japanese War, when I was a correspondent in China, America and England, while seeking to preserve their own interests by appeasing Japan and sacrificing China, treated the Japanese with far greater respect than the Chinese who were fighting our battles as well as their own. In the Cold War in Europe, we were trying not to "provoke" the Russians, and were begging Stalin in Moscow to meet our envoys to discuss the Berlin Crisis with the same disregard of the interests of the German people as we had shown with regard to the Chinese. Just as we had formerly proffered the hand of friendship to militarist Japan if only she would refrain from attacking our interests in China, so now we were assuring the Soviet dictator that we would be delighted to cooperate with him once again if only he would keep his demands within reasonable limits. We still held the whole German people responsible for Hitler's crimes, while prepared to condone and abet Stalin's if only he would not attack us and our friends. We blamed the Germans for having submitted to Nazi dictatorship, but we ourselves continued to demonstrate our willingness to renew our wartime collaboration with Russia's national socialists.

While treating the representatives of the Soviet dictator with deference, and pleading with Stalin to come to terms permitting us to embrace him, we continued to regard the democratic leaders of the Berlin population as inferiors unworthy to sit down with us to discuss our mutual defense on terms of equality. General Clay and his staff who had formerly had no scruples in entertaining and being entertained by the military representatives of Stalin's bloodstained tyranny, never met the elected representatives of the Berliners except as masters giving orders to their subordinates. True a little more courtesy has been shown to the Mayor and members of the Berlin City Council, but there has been no disposition to treat them as friends.

In Shanghai there had been the International and French concessions where the white people lived in safety with all the conveniences, services, and material advantages of a master race, protected by their own soldiers and the power of their governments, while the great mass of the Chinese population fought and labored and starved in the Chinese city. The Japanese had had their own concession to use as the base for their attack on China, just as the Russians now had their sector of Berlin from which to operate.

In Berlin there was no native city; the whole town was divided up among the four "master races," all enjoying special privileges comparable to those which the Western Powers and Japan had enjoyed in China as a result of the "unequal treaties" which gave them "extraterritorial" rights on Chinese soil. We, the Western Powers, had won our privileged position in China by aggressive war and threats; the Germans whom we now treat like the "inferior" peoples of Asia had got themselves into their present situation by their failure to aggress successfully.

The whole setup in Berlin was so similar to the one I had known in Shanghai in the twenties and thirties that I found myself unconsciously referring to the British, American, French, and Russian "concessions." The Germans, commonly referred to by the American Military Government as "the indigenous population," were as wretchedly housed and fed and as rightless and defenseless as the mass of the Chinese population; and the "conquerors" seemed as callous in their attitude toward German sufferings as the whites had been toward "the natives" in India and China in the bad old days of Western imperialism at the height of its power. Susceptibilities had been hardened by the constant sight of poverty and hunger and our belief in our own moral superiority.

In China during the war, the Westerners had shown rather more sympathy for the poorly armed Chinese attempting to resist Japan than the majority of Americans and British in Berlin showed toward the Germans, part of whose country was already under Soviet Russia's Iron Heel by our consent. Then as now we wanted to "do business" with the aggressors, but we had at least sympathized with the Chinese and cheered them on to fight. The Chinese were not "enemy nationals," so it was correct to be sorry for them and to collect money for their relief. On the other hand the Chinese are not white, so Washington and London never considered Japanese aggression against China as nearly so wicked as German aggression in Europe.

When I came from China to the United States in 1938, I found there was infinitely greater indignation over the rape of Czechoslovakia than over Japan's partial conquest of China with the aid of the American and British war materials she was permitted to buy in huge quantities.

Sun Yat-sen described the China of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a "subcolony," meaning that his country was in an even worse situation than a colony, since all the Western Powers together with Russia and Japan had exploited and oppressed China, while no one of them was responsible for her defense. Today it seemed to me that Germany was in much the same situation. Her conquerors, while quarreling among themselves, jointly hold Germany down. Her people, deprived of all means of self-defense, have no guarantee that the West will defend them from Soviet aggression; and they fear that at any moment Russia and the Western Powers may resurrect the Yalta and Potsdam agreements for their mutual benefit. The Germans had ample proof in the first years of the occupation that democratic principles were of little or no importance to any of their conquerors, and that it is only Stalin's greed and openly declared hostility toward America which has caused the rift between the Eastern and Western victors.

The Germans in Berlin and in the Western zones were being permitted to raise their heads again only because their masters were at odds. They knew only too well that should Stalin choose to make concessions to the Western Powers they, the conquered, would once again be crushed, and might once again be forced by the Western occupying Powers to pretend that Communists are democrats and to admit Stalin's German stooges into a "coalition government."

In their defenseless situation the Berliners might have been expected to resign themselves fatalistically to whatever blows fate still held in store for them. Instead, they were drawing upon spiritual forces, the very existence of which had been denied during the thirteen years of Nazi domination. They were displaying greater courage and fortitude in adversity than in the days of Hitler's power and glory. Alone among the peoples of Europe close to the terrifying power of Soviet Russia, the Berliners were defying it.

Perhaps it is true on earth as in heaven that the last shall be first and the first last. France, who had once been in the forefront of the struggle for liberty, now seemed to be lagging behind Germany in the will and courage to resist tyranny. The French, who ten years ago had asked, "Why die for Danzig?" were now saying, "What, die for Berlin!" Yet the Berliners, ex-enemy nationals as they are, were surely right in believing that if the Western Powers failed this time to recognize the indivisibility of Europe, the need to defend principles as well as self-interest, and the call of the unarmed millions in Germany and Eastern Europe endeavoring to resist the Communist terror, not all the arms and atom bombs manufactured in America would later on be able to save our civilization.

Without weapons, hungry, and in rags, living in squalor in the bomb-shattered buildings of their once proud city, and well aware that the Western Powers would not risk a clash with the Soviets to protect them from "arrest" or kidnapping by the Communists even in the Western sectors of the city, the people of Berlin refused to be cowed.

They were being encouraged in their resolution by General Clay, who, although his attitude towards the Germans was still that of a conqueror, had shown a bold front toward Stalin and was credited with having prevented the State Department from giving way to the Soviets when they started the blockade. It was said that Clay wanted to run an armored convoy through at the outset but had been held back by Washington as well as by the British and French. While the Berlin Mayor and the city councilors resented the cavalier treatment they too often received at the hands of the Military Government, they realized that General Clay was mainly responsible for the air lift and the preservation of a free Berlin.

It was my impression that on the whole, American military men behaved better toward the Germans and had more sympathy and respect for them than the civilians. There was still a good sprinkling of "Morgenthau Boys" among the civilian officials in the economic, financial, and information sections of the Military Government; and it is in any case a truism that those who fight wars do less hating than the civilians who have never learned to respect a brave enemy.

Many United States officers, air-force pilots, and GI's openly proclaimed their admiration for the courage of the Berliners. Colonel Babcock, Deputy Commandant in Berlin, said to me in August : "The courage of these people is really something to wonder at. The City Council members risk their lives and liberty, each time they go to a meeting, since the Stadthaus ("City hall") is in the Russian sector and we can give them no protection there."

I realized how true this had become, for, the day before, I had met Jeanette Wolff, a woman Social-Democratic leader who had been manhandled by the Communists on her way home from a meeting of the Council, and been called a "dirty Jew" by Stalin's bullies. She had escaped serious injury only because a Soviet sector policeman, who had known her when they were together in one of Hitler's concentration camps, protected her and led her to safety.

As against the encouragement they were receiving from Military Government, the Berliners had to reckon not only with the anti-German sentiment still spread in America by most of the press, but also with the influence of such advocates of appeasement as Walter Lippmann and Sumner Welles. The extent of this influence was exaggerated in Germany because the New York Herald Tribune was the only stateside daily newspaper with a European edition, and because the German Communist press seized upon Lippmann's and Sumner Welles's columns as evidence of the lack of support in the United States for General Clay's bold stand in Berlin.

At a meeting I attended in Berlin at America House, a German newspaper editor told a joke then current in the city : A telegram had been dispatched to Washington by a mass meeting of Berlin citizens saying : "Take courage, don't be afraid and give way to Russian threats. We are a hundred per cent behind you!"

This witticism contained a substantial truth. It was in fact the courage of the Berlin population and their unwavering support of the stand against Russia at the cost of acute hardship, which had given the United States the backing it required to hold on in Berlin.

It was interesting in Berlin to witness the "conversion" of many visitors. However great their resistance to the idea on their arrival, many of them left at least partially convinced that the capital of Hitler's infamous Third Reich has been transformed into the focus of resistance to total tyranny. This seeming paradox is not only the result of the rapid tempo of history in our times. It also must be remembered that in the tragic record of Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Berlin was conspicuous for its anti-Nazi vote, and succumbed only after the Communists had made common cause with the Nazis to destroy German democracy.

It seemed to me, in August and September 1948, and even more forcibly at the end of November when darkness and cold were adding to the misery of the inhabitants, that a phoenix had arisen from the ashes of the ruined city. A new resolute, hardened, and purified democratic movement was inspiring the unarmed people of Berlin to resist Soviet Russia's armed might with a courage unequaled anywhere else in Europe. German bravery, discipline, and singleness of purpose were at last, to judge from Berlin, being directed toward the defense, instead of the destruction, of Western civilization.

The unanimity of the Berlin population, in contrast to the divisions which weaken the democratic forces in France and even in Britain, is the more remarkable because the Germans are receiving less encouragement and help from America than any other European country. Although it is true that the United States has saved the German people from mass starvation, they have been at the end of the line in the allocation of food and raw-material subsidies from America. Even more important is the fact that the Germans still lack the moral support they would derive from being accepted as fighting allies in the American-led opposition to Communist aggression. Although they are in the front line of the world-wide struggle against Communist tyranny, the Germans are still suspect for their former acceptance of Nazi leadership. While struggling to be free, they drag the chains with which the democracies have shackled them as punishment for Hitler's crimes. Nevertheless the Germans in Berlin were providing a lesson for all Europe, and in particular for divided and frightened France. They were risking their lives for liberty, while others only talked about their devotion to democracy.

The Germans, it seemed, have learned through bitter experience that the battle today is not one between different economic systems, or between classes or even nations, but one for or against the basic values of Western civilization. A nation whose best spirits recognize that it has sinned mightily was demonstrating in Berlin that it now has greater courage in resisting evil than others who have never been tempted, and have never learned what are the consequences of succumbing to a dictatorship which repudiates all moral values.

"We know, now," a young German said to me, "that in the long run power depends upon the extent to which it is based on spiritual and moral values. Everything which Germans ever won by the sword is lost; our only permanent gains have been those won by moral force. Frederick the Great, Bismarck, and Hitler gave us nothing which has not passed away, but the influence of Luther and the Reformation have been permanent."

The man who said this to me, Rainer Hildebrandt, is not a pacifist. Nor did he think that his own country was alone guilty of "crimes against humanity." To him it seemed that Western civilization as a whole was on trial, and had failed so far to meet the test of the machine age and of a world in which the misery of one people affects all others.

"The crisis in Berlin," he said, "is an explosion of all the evils which evoked the previous totalitarianism and now threatens us with the endless night of Communist domination."

Hildebrandt was one of several Germans I met whose ancestry was partly Jewish. They were treated as second- or third-class citizens by the Nazis and never shared, nor, wished to share, in the fruits of Hitler's victories, but they have identified themselves with the German nation in the hour of its defeat and humiliation. He combined an abiding love for the country of his birth with the international and humanitarian outlook of the most idealistic Jews. Thin to the point of emaciation, with classically perfect features and eyes which are both brilliantly intelligent and kind, Rainer Hildebrandt has a vision which transcends nationality and race, burning energy and a zeal for "righteousness" in the Biblical sense of that almost forgotten word.

Hildebrandt had been a friend of the younger Haushofer who was executed for his part in the July Twentieth plot against Hitler and he has written a book for a Swiss publisher on the German resistance movement. He told me that prior to the Soviet occupation he had been among those Germans who had imagined that the Russians would liberate them. Today, having met the Communists face to face, having witnessed the horrible atrocities they committed when they took Berlin, and knowing all about the concentration camps in the Eastern zone and in Russia, he is one of the most fearless and active anti-Communists in Germany. He is in constant touch with the resistance movement in Russian-occupied Germany and has organized help for the neglected victims of Communism who escape to Berlin from the lands under Soviet domination. When I first met him Hildebrandt was trying to get permission from the Military Government to organize an international league to help the victims of Communism on the same lines as the associations formed to help the victims of Nazi terror in prewar days. Failing to obtain American or British support, withheld presumably in the interests of lingering hopes of an accord with Stalin, Hildebrandt has on his own initiative started an organization called "Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit" ("Action Group against Inhumanity").

The following is an extract from a speech he delivered in Berlin :

Decency requires that we take up this fight. We have a responsibility toward ourselves and toward the millions of people in Soviet concentration camps. We want peace, but we do not speak the word peace if it means a continuation of the Cold War. We want a peace which presupposes freedom and respect for human values; a peace which will eliminate the internal as well as external causes of war. The two great motive forces of history are, on the one hand, fear, a bad conscience, and lust for power; on the other hand, responsibility, confidence, brotherhood. These two motors cannot run side by side. The road grows ever narrower, the course which humanity takes will be determined by whichever car takes the lead. If the first car draws ahead, the other will never be able to pass it; a curtain will descend upon us heavier than the Iron Curtain, and the darkest word in the history of the world will have been spoken : "Too late."

27

The reaffirmation of spiritual values, faith in the spirit of man, and readiness to die for liberty; in a word, recognition of the importance of the intangibles which decide the fate of civilizations was, it seemed, the explanation for the spirit of hope which pervaded the besieged city of Berlin.

Reading the stateside press was as depressing as the bombed and fire-gutted buildings of Berlin which stretch mile after mile in every sector of the city. One had an unhappy feeling that the role of the Germans and that of the victorious and powerful democracies had been reversed. For, to judge by most of the American and British newspaper reports and commentaries, the conflict in Berlin was regarded in terms of pure power politics; as if the city where West meets East was just a point on the map, worth so much or so little as a bargaining counter in an American-Russian conflict.

It was more than a little ironic to read the comments of Walter Lippmann, Sumner Welles, and others whose writings were quoted almost daily in the Russian-licensed German press. The same writers who were advocating a deal with Russia which would involve extinction of the lamp of freedom lighted in Berlin, were reproving General Clay for standing up to Russia instead of "concentrating upon the conversion of the German spirit to individual freedom and democracy"!

How was it possible, one thought in Berlin, that anyone could still imagine that the punishment of opinion by denazification courts and penalties, "decartelization," land reform, or the preaching of democracy would decide the issue in Germany? How was it that these and many other writers failed to see that it was example, deeds, our own attitude in the face of totalitarian aggression, and our support and protection of the fighting democrats in Berlin which were all-important? That if we should decide to retire from the battle for the sake of a temporary truce in the Cold War, and leave the Berliners to be overwhelmed by the Soviet Union, it might never again be possible to enlist the German people on our side; and that the resistance movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia and other Soviet satellite countries would be dealt a mortal blow.

If we should once again appease Russia and betray those who trusted in our promise not to abandon Berlin, the unholy alliance of Communists and Nazis—so evident in Berlin where even the Chief of the Russian Sector Police, the notorious Markgraf, is a former prominent Nazi—would be able to destroy the democratic movement of infinite promise born in this ruined city. Germany might then once again be driven to repudiate Western civilization instead of becoming a bulwark for its defense.

As one woman Social Democrat said to me during the Moscow negotiations, "You can't treat people like pawns in a chess game to be moved forward, encouraged to fight for freedom against tyranny while America is at odds with Russia, and then sacrificed in another move to appease Russia. If you once again come to terms with Stalin over our heads and at our expense, you will never again be able to evoke the spirit which is now keeping us on your side in spite of Russia's greater strength and the hunger and terror Communism uses to break men's spirits."

As in a performance of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, the role of the chief protagonists in the drama was omitted in much of the American comment on Berlin. Occasional tributes were paid to the courage and endurance of the Berliners who were daily risking their liberty or their lives by defying the Soviets in the Eastern sectors of the city. But the effect on them and all the Germans of the decisions being arrived at over their heads in Moscow, Washington, London, or Paris, was barely mentioned. The elected representatives of the Berliners in their City Council were not even allowed to participate as advisors in the abortive currency negotiations which began in Berlin in September. We were still the conquerors and the Germans the conquered. While still vainly proffering the hand of friendship to the Russian dictator, we still refused to treat as allies even those Germans who were daily proving the reality of their democratic professions.

The German people have suffered too much not to be realists. Ready as many of them were at the beginning of the occupation to atone for the sins of the Nazis, they naturally refuse to accept the thesis that other nations should be allowed to commit crimes against humanity with impunity. They have begun to ask questions about our deals with the dictators, and our failures to take action against the Communists.

The Berlin weekly, Sie, stated on August 22 :

We do not understand why the Communists are allowed to act according to the old maxim, Might is Right, which they have reformulated as, Arrogance Wins. We do not understand why Lübeck (in the British zone) continues to supply the Communist zone with electricity while tormenting darkness reigns in the Western sectors of Berlin. We do not understand why the gangster Markgraf who is wanted by the prosecutor (for war crimes) can arrest people while his employees are not arrested when they come into the Western sectors. We do not understand why what was regarded yesterday as the collective guilt of the German people, namely tolerance of SA-like gangsterism, today passes as "conciliation."

When I returned to Berlin at the end of November, more questions were being asked. Why were the British exporting planes and machinery to Soviet Russia and even repairing the Red Army's transport in the British sector of Berlin? Why were the French surreptitiously exporting machinery from Berlin to Russia? Why was the United Nations in Paris failing to condemn the Soviet blockade of Berlin—surely an obvious "crime against humanity"? Why was machinery still being dismantled and sent to Czechoslovakia and other Soviet satellite countries from the Western zones?

I had never thought of the Olympic games as of great importance, but Germans of all classes in Berlin in August 1948 asked me how we justified the exclusion of German athletes from the games being held that summer in England, although the very same people, Lord Vansittart among them, who today held all Germans responsible for Nazi atrocities had themselves come to Berlin in 1936 to participate as Hitler's guests in the Olympiad of that year.

To the Berliners our former readiness to "fraternize" with the Nazis was on a par with our more recent willingness to accept the Soviet Union as a "democratic" state and join hands with Stalin in depriving all people of German race of liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Why should only Germans be punished and others go scot free?

In spite of all the questions and doubts about our good faith, the Berliners were still holding on. Indeed the most remarkable and significant fact, it seemed to me, was that neither our long-continued appeasement policy toward Russia, nor our treatment of the Germans as a conquered people without rights, nor our original identification of Communism with democracy, had failed to destroy all faith in Western professions and principles.

Here among the ruins and the rubble, among a great people brought down to an Asiatic level of subsistence by war and defeat and the universal abhorrence of Nazi crimes which has led us to treat all Germans as deserving of punishment; here where the children went ragged and barefoot and left cold schoolrooms to wait in dark homes for their mothers to return from work—work like that of Chinese coolies—stacking bricks, pulling heavy loads along the streets, and doing a man's heavy labor on the airfields; here, in spite of hunger and humiliation and back-breaking labor, one found, not despair, hatred of the East and West alike, and a futile lust for revenge, not nihilism or a cynical defeatism and self-seeking, but a stubborn faith in the values of Western civilization which the Nazis had denied and Western occupation policies have done little to revive.

In the city where the anti-Nazis had fought hardest, but not hard enough, to prevent Hitler's coming to power, one sensed in every word and deed, not only of the Mayor and the City Council, but of the mass of people, a determination never to let it happen again.

A student from the port of Rostock in the Russian zone, who came to see me in Berlin in September, said that the German workers there would prefer war, even if it meant death, to the misery of their life under the Communists. He also told me how depressing it was to hear every night on the radio that the Western Powers were still negotiating in Moscow, although they had said originally that they wouldn't negotiate until the Berlin blockade was lifted. "We are allowed no other papers but the Russian-licensed ones," he said, "and it is not encouraging to see the headlines about 'The great defeat of America' and to read how you are begging Stalin to talk to you and come to terms."

I talked to many other visitors and refugees from the Soviet zone, to returned prisoners of war from Russia, and to several people who had escaped, or been released, from the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen in the Soviet zone, where hundreds of thousands of Germans are today even worse treated than Hitler's victims in the same camps. I met others who were ostensibly free, but to whom life in Russian-occupied Germany seemed little better than prison. One and all they echoed the saying I heard everywhere in Berlin : "Better a horrible end, than horror without end."

In America, "Give me liberty or give me death," is only an echo from the past, without urgent appeal for people who take freedom for granted. But the liberties men fought and died for a century and a half ago are felt to be worth more than life by those who live in or near the Russian zone, and have experienced a servitude far more terrible than any which formerly existed in Europe under its Kings.

The word democracy has been too debased by identification with communism for it to be heard often in Berlin. An older, cleaner word is used by the people and their leaders : freedom. At the great demonstration I witnessed on August 26, held outside the gaunt, fire-gutted Reichstag building after the Communist storm troopers and police had driven the City Council out of the Stadthaus in the Russian sector, the keynote of all the speeches was "freedom." This was the word which roused tumultuous applause among the hungry, shabby multitude.

The faces of all the people around me showed signs of privation and sorrow. Everyone, from the skinny children to the women old before their time, might have been expected to care more for promises of bread and peace. But it was not until a speaker said, "The fight is not only for Berlin but for freedom everywhere," that the tired sad faces lit up and the applause rang out.

"We are unarmed but our spirit is stronger than theirs," said Ernst Reuter, the elected Mayor of Berlin who was prevented from taking office by the Russians. And the eyes of the crowd turned toward the Russian soldiers standing guard close by at the Soviet War Memorial.

The cynic may say that the Berliners are not democrats, that they are merely fearful of the Russian terror which every one of them has experienced in one form or another. True, that tragedy has touched every German one speaks to in Berlin, whether it is the women raped by the Soviet soldiers; the mothers whose husbands or sons were massacred in the Russian sack of the city or are still held as slave laborers in Soviet mines or factories; the families whose homes were burnt over their heads by the Russians; or those who have recently had someone arrested by the Communists and sent to the dread concentration camps at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Yet Reuter that day had the crowd with him when he said : "If the Russian people were free to speak, they would be fighting together with us for liberty."

Another popular speaker, the lovely and gracious Frau Annadora Leber, whose Alsatian husband was killed by the Nazis, declared at an open-air meeting I attended in Spandau : "Not every Russian is responsible for the crimes of those who rule over him. We all know that some Russians have shown us kindnesses. They are victims of the same system which oppresses us in the Eastern zone and now threatens all Berlin. Germany must become part of the Western world again. To win freedom, we must endure starvation and face death."

And she continued with these words of warning : "In the depression years many of you said : 'it couldn't be worse,' but you found out later that under the Nazis it eventually became far worse. Now in spite of our terrible difficulties with food—no Berlin woman knows from day to day how she will be able to feed her family—we know that it would be even worse than now if the Russians ruled over us. We know that we would be taken away to slave labor camps and be ruled over by the same methods the Nazis used. The new PG's* (Communists) are the same as the old PG's (Nazis)."

Every speech I heard and every talk I had with Germans of all kinds in Berlin, convinced me that it is not only the close and ever present fear of Russia which inspires the German resistance to communism. It is as much their experience under the Nazis, and their realization that communism means a repetition of it, which holds the Germans on our side of the Iron Curtain.

Those who have experienced life under a totalitarian dictatorship are better aware of the supreme value of liberty than others who have never known servitude. This perhaps explains why the Germans, in spite of their aptitude for a century past in submitting to authority, are less susceptible today to Communist propaganda than Americans who have accepted liberty as their birthright and cannot even imagine what it means to be without it.

The Berliners are regaining their self-respect and that of the whole German nation by their courage in resisting the Communist threat to themselves and all Europe. The former enemies of democracy have become its foremost defenders.

"Berlin is not Prague" is more than a patriotic slogan. It expresses the German determination to show the West that those whom we fought yesterday are more to be relied upon in today's world-wide struggle against the totalitarians than some former allies in whom we put our trust, but whose leaders succumbed without a struggle to Communist pressure.

In a long talk I had with Ernst Reuter in his house in Berlin, he said that the feeling in the city was that by a certain kind of behavior the Germans could redeem themselves and "make it impossible for the West to treat us any longer as 'natives.'"

When I asked how it was that, after all they had experienced, not only under the Nazis, but also under Western occupation, the Germans had not all become nihilists, Reuter replied : "Today we have a chance to do something to help ourselves; to struggle in our own defense even though we are unarmed. The most effective remedy for despair is action. Our life has been given meaning again by our struggle against Communism. Berlin today is proud of itself. We have won back our self-respect, and we are confident that eventually we shall also win your respect."

33

The war was, however, still too recent for the United States and Britain to accept the Germans as allies. If the courage of the Berliners had convinced American military men, from generals to GI's, that the Germans could become our best allies on the Continent, sentiment at home, French fears and blindness, and the original pattern of behavior set by our occupation policies, precluded a radical change in our attitude toward the Germans. We had made a half turn since we began to understand that "you can't do business with Stalin"; we had begun to revive Western Germany and to set our faces against further dismantling; and friendly relations with the German people were now encouraged rather than discouraged. But we still failed to treat the Germans as equals. We were still obsessed by the totalitarian concept that some nations are "good" and "peace-loving" and others wicked and aggressive. We still refused to recognize the fact that people are people everywhere, and that our primary purpose should be to encourage and support the truly liberal forces to be found among all peoples.

In besieged Berlin American and British buses, reserved for Allied personnel, still drove around town almost empty, while the Germans trudged on foot or waited in long queues for the few and overcrowded streetcars and buses allowed by the Russian blockade. We "the conquerors" still occupied the best houses, reserving ample space for ourselves, while the majority of Berliners lived in squalor in cellars and bomb-wrecked apartments. We still ate to repletion, drank well, and even had fresh milk imported by air from Denmark, while Berlin babies had none, and no Germans except black-marketeers had enough to eat. The demarcation line between the occupation forces and the "natives" was still applied even to the lavatories in Military Government offices—some were labeled only for use by Americans, and others were permitted to German personnel. We had electric lights eight hours out of twenty-four, while the Germans had only two hours' use of current and only enough gas to boil a kettle of water a day. In some parts of the Western sectors of the city electric light and gas were available only at 1 A.M. and tired women who had worked all day had to rise to cook and wash in the middle of the night; but we could still dance by electric light till 11 P.M. When winter came our houses or apartments were warm night and day, but the Germans had no coal. German hospitals overflowing with patients were in darkness and lacked medicines and even bandages, but almost empty American and British hospitals had their lights burning all night.

The automobile and jeep drivers, and all other Germans, from clerks to experts, employed by the Military Government were not only receiving their wages six weeks in arrears, thanks to the control over the Berlin banks which we had originally given to the Russians in 1945. They were also receiving only a quarter of their wages in the new Western marks introduced after currency reform. The other three-quarters were paid in the Russian marks which were worth only a fourth of the Western marks we had half-heartedly brought into Berlin. Appeasement, or what was more politely called the desire "not to provoke" the Russians, had led us to penalize all the Berliners, including those working for us, by using the Russian marks as legal tender.

The June currency reform will be discussed in a later chapter. It is, however, necessary to comment here on the curious policy of the Finance Office of the Military Government. Having first given the Russians an excuse for their siege of the city by introducing the new Western mark, it then refused to bring in a sufficient quantity to permit the city administration and the Military Government to pay wages and salaries in Deutsche (D) marks. While flying food into Berlin at tremendous cost, we accepted Russian marks in payment for it, thus effectively supporting the value of the Russian sponsored currency.

The Communists had the whip hand over the city administration, since the banks are in the Russian sector, and the Communists could withhold the funds necessary to pay wages. They were also in a position to block the accounts of every factory owner and business enterprise in the city.

On the other hand, if more D marks had been flown in, more of them would have fallen into the hands of the Russians to use for the purchase of the goods they needed from the Western zones. For, whereas we accepted the Russian mark in payment for the supplies we flew into the city, the free, or black, market was controlled by the Russians, and D marks were demanded for most unrationed supplies, such as the meager quantities of fresh fruit and vegetables and coal which entered the Russian sector of the city. D marks were also required for the purchase of the clothing and household goods which had appeared in the shops following currency reform. The trouble was, of course, that there was little of anything to be bought in the Russian zone, which the Soviets were stripping for their own use. Such few goods, or raw materials to make them, as could be brought into Berlin through the blockade had to be paid for with D marks. Naturally the Russians would not sell anything they controlled for their own paper marks.

In these circumstances it would have been more sensible to give the food ration free to all workers in the Western sectors than to take Russian marks in payment for it.

The day I left Berlin on the air lift I was provided with a small, but symbolic, example of how our attitude toward the Germans hampers us in the Cold War for Berlin.

While I stood watching the German workers unloading the plane on which I was to fly to Frankfurt, the United States Air Force pilot waiting beside me said : "We'll be delayed at least half an hour longer beyond our scheduled time, because our cargo, as you see, is airstrips, and the Germans can't handle the stuff fast, not only because it's so heavy, but because they haven't got gloves."

The United States was spending millions of dollars each week to supply Berlin. "Operation Vittles" is a miracle of American organization, as I realized to the full while I listened in on the radio operator's headphones to the instructions being given even few seconds to each of the Big or Little "Willies," which take off and land at two- to three-minute intervals. A second's mistake or miscalculation of time, altitude, or position could be disastrous. Yet operations can be slowed down, and tired American pilots compelled to work a fifteen, instead of a normal twelve-hour shift, because a hundred or so dollars have not been spent to provide the Germans who load and unload the planes with gloves!

Obviously this omission was not due to the practice of petty economies, although in effect cents were being saved and dollars wasted. It was the hardening of our sensibilities through the accustomed sight of hungry, cold, and ragged people, through three years of occupation of a conquered country, which had, no doubt, induced this costly disregard for the human needs of the Germans working with us in Berlin. Not that the GI's and pilots and American mechanics I talked to on the airfield and during this and subsequent flights had a "master race" attitude toward the Germans. On the contrary, they called my attention to the barefooted women strewing sand on the runway and exclaimed : "Did you ever see anything like it! Aren't those German women wonderful?" And my pilot said : "I used to think that it was only in China you could see women working like that; I never imagined white people could do it. I admire their guts."

I admired them too, but I also wondered how it must feel to go home at night to cook and wash and care for children after doing a man laborer's heavy work all day. I also wondered how these ragged women would be able to work in the cold of winter.

The women are the silent chorus, the unsung and weary heroines of the struggle dramatized by the spectacular air lift. The women outnumber the men by more than two to one in Berlin, and it is upon them that the chief burden of the struggle rests. Many of them have lost their husbands, or wait in vain for them to return from Russian prisons. They are the sole support of their children and often also of a grandmother or some relative crippled or blinded in the air raids. Day after day they must not only earn their living but also tend to and comfort their cold and hungry children, while never getting enough to eat themselves.

The ration in Berlin is now 1,800 calories; before the blockade when the Allies could have provided enough food, it was even lower. One wondered in Berlin how human flesh and spirit could stand the long ordeal of the women whose life is one continuous round of drudgery and want without any pleasures ever, or any future hope of a happy married life. Yet the Berlin women knew that there was one thing left they had not yet lost : and they would endure to the end to preserve it for their children : freedom. A greater proportion of women than men had voted in the October 1946 elections which defeated the Communists in Berlin; and in December 1948, 86 per cent of the population was to register its vote for the democratic parties. In the happy West such a large proportion of voters has never gone to the polls, although we have streetcars and subways and automobiles and plenty of leisure.

I visited the "homes" of several German workers and their families, and marveled that the women, somehow or other, managed to keep a cellar, or one or two patched-up rooms in a bombed tenement house, clean and neat in spite of overcrowding and the lack of hot water and sufficient soap. Their children, who in most other countries would be dirty and unkempt in such circumstances, are still kept looking respectable by their mothers' continual darning and patching of clothes.

Instead of the extraordinary industry of German women evoking sympathy and respect, it too often only results in Americans' thinking that the Germans are quite well off. Mrs. Roosevelt, for instance, after spending a day or so in Berlin reported that she saw no destitute and hungry children, and that the Germans did not seem to be as poor as the French and other former victims of Nazi aggression. She cannot have had time to see more of Berlin than Dahlem and Zehlendorf where the United States occupation forces live—suburbs inhabited by the former well-to-do which we never bombed with the same intensity as the working-class districts of Berlin. But even if she had taken the time to visit the poorer parts of the city, Mrs. Roosevelt might not have revised her opinion. To win the pity of some people it is necessary to imitate those beggars, who although they may be "earning" a good living by appealing to the charitable for alms, appear in rags and dirt to evoke sympathy.

I wished that all the complacent visitors and residents from the victor countries could see what I had seen, and that they had the imagination to put themselves in the situation of the majority of Berlin's women and children.

There were some Military Government officials who felt as I did. Elizabeth Holt, for instance, wife of a State Department official and herself assistant to the head of the Educational and Religious Affairs branch of the Military Government, was in constant contact with German women and was wearing herself out, not only because of the help and encouragement she gave them, but also because she could not rest or enjoy life thinking of the suffering all around her. Thanks to Mrs. Holt, I made my first contacts with German women active in the social work conducted by all three parties : Socialists (SPD), Christian Democrats (CDU), and Liberals (LDP).

Ursula Kirchert, a Socialist, took me to spend a morning at a medical clinic, where I watched a procession of the sick, the crippled, the undernourished, and the old receiving what help could be given them by the doctor, in the absence of many medicines and the even greater need of nourishing food. One patient had a huge abscess on his neck, which after being lanced had to be bound up with paper, since the Germans had no cotton bandages, no absorbent cotton or lint. The doctor told me that his great difficulty was that medical supplies could be bought only with D marks, since the Russian zone could not supply them. Consequently social-security funds, which are under Russian control, are useless in obtaining them, and his patients whose wages or pensions consisted mainly of Russian marks could not buy them.

The saddest and hardest-working people in Berlin are the women with children whose husbands fell in the war, or are still prisoners. The expellees from Silesia thrown out of their homes and driven westwards with nothing but what they could carry on their backs are in an even more destitute condition.

I visited one woman from Silesia, Frau Scheibner, whose husband was, she hoped, a prisoner of war in Russia and not already dead. She had three young children and they had all walked to Berlin, the mother carrying the youngest child. Her mother and father were Berliners and until a week before my first visit they had all lived with her parents in two tiny rooms. Now she was "happy" because by great "good fortune" she had obtained possession of a not-too-damp cellar in the same building. She had of course no linen and her furniture consisted of two mattresses and a packing case used as a table. Her eldest child, a girl of twelve, looked after the two youngest while the mother worked as a "trimmer"—the German word used in Berlin to describe the thousands of women who collect, stack, and cart the bricks from bombed-out houses.

The youngest child, a pretty girl of five, was playing on the stone cellar floor with a little friend from next door, while her brother, a boy of eight, did his school homework, sitting on one of the mattresses. When I gave her a can of dried milk, Frau Scheibner told me what upset her most was the little girl begging for more milk every day. Of course these children, like the rest of those in Berlin, never received any fresh milk, but there was a small ration of dried milk. Their mother felt that if she could only get enough food for her children, she would be content in their new "home."

Upstairs in the same house, I found a couple who considered themselves among the luckiest people in the world because the husband, missing for five years, had returned from Russia a few days before. Frau Woltherz had had no news of her husband since 1943 and had given him up for dead. Her joy was indescribable when he suddenly appeared, having been freed because he was too ill to work any more. I wondered how he would ever be able to get well on the inadequate ration on which the Berliners somehow exist, but his wife was so happy to have him back that she thought nothing of their hardship. Woltherz said to me : "If the Russians had behaved differently, they would have won us. It is too late now. After the treatment we have received we will never go along with them. I shall probably be an invalid for the rest of my life, but if I could fight again I would join up with America against the Soviets."

Another day I visited a widow with two children whose husband had been killed on the Russian front. She had just been joined by two younger sisters who had spent three years as Russian slave laborers in the Urals. One had been a seamstress and the other a worker on a farm, and both looked to be typical "proletarians." But in March 1945, they had been arrested, put in a cellar and beaten until they "confessed" to having been members of Hitler's Jung Mädel. Apparently the Red Army soldiers who had arrested them had been ordered to round up a certain number of Nazis, and the simplest way to do this was to take anybody they could lay their hands on and torture them until they would say they had been Nazis.

After signing a paper written in Russian which they could not understand, the two girls, whose name was Graubusch, had been placed in cattle trucks and transported to the Urals. There had been forty-three people in the car and several had died of suffocation and thirst. They had been given only one cup of water each two days. On arrival at the prison camp they had been set to work making bricks. They had been forced to take the hot bricks out of the ovens with bare hands, and to push loads of them in wheelbarrows for fourteen hours a day.

Many of the German women in the camp had died—in one year, more than half of the original number. Typhus had carried off many in spite of a German doctor prisoner who had tried to help them. The manager of the camp had been a Volksdeutsche and very brutal. Presumably he had saved his own life, which would have otherwise been forfeit on account of his race, by taking the position.

The prisoners had to sleep on wooden benches without blankets. They were fed on cabbage soup and a small bread ration, but had been told to say how good it was in Russia and that only Germans behaved like devils. They were never allowed any contact with the Russian population, being led out to work under armed guards and returned to their prison after their day's labor. A few of the guards had been kind but most of them were brutes. One "bitch of a woman" had forced the prisoners returning from work to stand at the prison gates for an hour or more in the cold with their clothing damp from perspiration and their dresses "burning on their bodies."

Atrocities are now "old stuff." No one cares what innocent Germans suffer, although still ready to make them pay for Nazi atrocities. But I think that if Americans at home could see and hear what the Germans have gone, and are going, through we might begin to help the people of Berlin and the released or escaped victims of Communist cruelty and oppression. It was with a sense of impotent pity that I learned that only one of these two German sisters was permitted to remain in the United States sector of Berlin. The other was forced to live in the Russian sector, where she might at any moment be arrested again, because she had not formerly lived in Berlin, and the regulation is that only those may register and receive ration cards who were residents before 1945. The elder sister was in bad enough circumstances herself, but she would somehow or other have found room for both sisters, if only the United States authorities had permitted her to shelter them.

It was not only the poor and the victims of Communism who aroused one's pity in Berlin. The most overworked widows and wives of prisoners of war, if they had children, were perhaps less unhappy than such lonely girls as Elsa, the housekeeper of my billet in the Press Camp. She looked after an empty house reserved for visiting American women journalists, who were so few and far between that it was usually empty. No longer a girl, but still not old and quite good looking, she spent day after day alone. Her fiancé had been killed in the war and her only surviving relative was her mother who was not allowed to live with her in the house reserved for the conquerors and their servants. As one of the latter she had more to eat than most Berliners, but the hunger of the heart is perhaps worse than physical starvation. She was not the type for light love affairs and had no "boy friend" among the Americans; nor was it likely she would ever have the opportunity of social intercourse to meet a German who might marry her. The future offered her nothing but loneliness.

In contrast to the timid and gentle Elsa for whom there was no place in the harsh world of today, Annalena von Caprivi, editor of the Women's Page of the British licensed Telegraph, had the spirit, intelligence, and adaptability to overcome the handicap of an aristocratic origin and an unhappy marriage. Her maiden name was Lindquist, and her family, originally of Swedish origin, had owned the island of Ruetgen in the Baltic for centuries past. Her grandfather had been one of Bismarck's ministers, and her father, Ambassador to South Africa before World War I. Annalena was therefore of real Junker origin, but many Prussian aristocrats, like her parents, had never been pro-Nazi, or taken office under Hitler. Her parents, who had for long been living retired lives on their island, had committed suicide when the Russians came. Annalena had found them dead when, after the war's end, she had made her way on foot from Western Germany to the Russian zone, carrying a bundle on her back and dressed like a peasant.

The Russians had, of course, confiscated the family property and Annalena now worked for the support of her two little girls as well as herself. She had divorced her husband, heir also to an ancient name and as incapable of adapting himself to conditions in defeated Germany as his wife was capable.

I came to know Annalena von Caprivi well and to have a great liking and respect for her character and keen and objective mind. She was not in the least sorry for herself and somehow managed always to look well groomed, and even elegant, although her clothes were made out of such relics as her grandfather's military uniform.

There are one hundred women to every 60 men in Germany and the tragedy of many of them is that they have no hope of marriage. But Annalena, who is both attractive and intelligent, wrote an article for her newspaper in which she said that many German women could not now "afford" a husband. German men, she said, still expected to be waited upon hand and foot by their wives, as if they were the breadwinners, even if their wives were earning the family's living. It was too much to expect, and unless German men would abandon their lordly ways they could not expect any capable women to marry them.

A young unmarried woman who had been a war correspondent, but had taken up a rifle and fought herself in the last desperate days of Berlin's defense against the Red Army, gave me another angle on the relation between the sexes in Germany. She said that German men not only cannot forget that they were once "brilliant and victorious" and are therefore incapable of adapting themselves to the lowly work and status which is all life now offers them. She also thought that they were too bitterly ashamed of their failure to defend their country and save its women from rape and rough treatment at Russian hands to be psychologically capable of loving.

42

They hate the girls who go around with Americans but are themselves unable to offer companionship or any possibility for happiness in marriage.

Of course not all German men have developed complexes which keep them in bitter isolation and drive German women either to have affairs with the "conquerors" or to live alone. But even in undefeated and prosperous countries men who have spent years soldiering find it difficult to settle down to civilian life. In Germany where many men have spent ten years of their life in the army, and the younger ones have known no other life since they left school; where most jobs offer a bare livelihood and where there are so many sick as well as crippled veterans, the problem is even more acute.

In these days of adversity it is the endurance of German women and their determination to keep their families alive that constitutes the strength of Germany even in defeat.

Having lived six years in Soviet Russia, I too had been a wife struggling for food and shelter for my family in a world not very different from theirs. Consequently, I felt a sense of identification with the people of Berlin. Today I was one of the privileged enjoying the same comforts, conveniences and luxuries as the rest of the American and British correspondents and occupying forces, but I did not feel that I belonged with them. The memory of my life in Moscow, when I lived as ordinary Russians do, was still too vivid.

Most Americans and even the British have no real conception of what hunger means, nor any repugnance to eating well and driving in automobiles or jeeps, while the "natives" starve and walk. It was not that I was better than the rest, or even that I had more imagination. It was simply my past experience and the close presence of the Soviet Power which so vividly recalled it to me.

When I saw German women carrying heavy loads in the streets, I remembered how I had once thought nothing of carrying home 44 pounds of potatoes, happy only to have obtained so much food. When I saw the thin, sad-eyed Berlin children, I remembered my own son, born in Moscow, who had never suffered actual hunger but would have become like these German children if I had not escaped with him from Russia after my husband's arrest. When I visited German homes consisting of one dilapidated room, I recalled similar crowded and damp places where I and my Russian friends and acquaintances had lived.

When I bought my cigarettes, chocolate, and soap ration at the PX store, I remembered how much in those distant days in Moscow a gift of coffee, soap, or toilet paper from some friend in England, had meant to me.

In