Cecil Brown — Germany Can’t Be Trusted
DEFEAT HAS TAUGHT HERRENVOLK TO BE BETTER PREPARED FOR NEXT WAR
Cecil Brown — Germany Can’t Be Trusted
Copied from the scan at the Internet Archive — See Magazine, November 1945
A very angry, unflinching appraisal of the peace and path forward presented by war correspondent Cecil Brown published in late 1945.
I couldn’t find the text printed anywhere else online and felt it too interesting to leave lost in a magazine scan. CW: Some disturbing images.
GERMANY CAN’T BE TRUSTED
DEFEAT HAS TAUGHT HERRENVOLK TO BE BETTER PREPARED FOR NEXT WAR
By Cecil Brown
(See Magazine, November 1945)
“Hitler is dead,” said Frau Keitel, wife of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the German High Command, and of the Wehrmacht, “but his ideas will live on, and become even greater.”
“Ja, ja,” agreed Frau Jodl, married two months before to Colonel General Alfred Jodl, last chief of staff of the German Army, “the war was necessary in order to bring the German people together.”
The Herald-Tribune reporter then inquired if they were not shocked by the atrocity camps, where the Germans had murdered millions of people.
Nothing but propaganda, they said. The photographs of bodies piled high and rescued living skeletons were faked. Furthermore, if there were atrocities, they were committed by Bolsheviks who somehow managed to get into the Nazi party!
“German women,” said Frau Keitel, “cannot understand why America and England interfered. All we wanted was a tiny bit of Poland.”
She was bitter about American air attacks on German cities. “It was inhuman,” she said, “to bomb our cities and kill our people.”
Reminded of Germany’s mass bombing of Rotterdam and the blitzing of England, she said, “Those were war measures.”
Frauen Keitel and Jodl, themselves not members of the Nazi party, were voicing the desires, hopes and unshaken faith of the German people, whether led by a Hohenzollern, Hindenburg, Hitler or 1965 leader named Hausenpfeffer [rabbit stew].
Nor is the innate German will to aggression controverted by pan-German propagandists or misled American innocents, who are demanding ‘justice’ for Germany.
An emotional campaign has already been launched by the defeated Germans, and by their friends — misguided and otherwise — in America and Britain, to create sympathy — and immunity — for the unhappy herrenvolk, despite the historical fact that the Germans ripped apart the peace of Europe three times in 70 years.
Each war had the hysterical support of the German masses. After each defeat the Germans promised to be good if given another chance. They must not be given another chance. They cannot be trusted.
There is in the United States an outfit called The American Association of a Democratic Germany, headed by Dean Christian Gauss, of Princeton University, Columnist Dorothy Thompson and Reinhold Niebuhr.
Like most Americans, and like various organizations of German political exiles, voluntary and otherwise, they are fervent anti-Nazis, anxious for peace. But they possess a great misunderstanding of the German people and wish other Americans to share their illusions. They say, “We support groups of tried and proven democrats underground in Germany and in exile [during the Nazi regime]!”
Fine. Everyone would. But where are they?
During the war, Dorothy Thompson wrote about a German underground waiting to help our forces. But there was no such thing! Our officials in Germany even now are beating their brains out, trying to find decent, responsible people in Germany.
American groups demanding “justice for Germany” and German exile and refugee organizations which shriek that Germany must not be carved up and hammered down, forget that 20 million people have died in the past six years because we heeded the same siren call in 1919 and 1920.
The campaign conducted by Germans in Germany, and their wishful friends in America, is centered around these arguments: most Germans are good people. They want to be democratic. They were misled or cowed by the Nazis, their methods, their principles and their objectives.
Germany should have her factories back, for Germany must have her rightful place in the world’s economic scheme. The Germans should be allowed to re-educate themselves. The German people went to war because they were on the rebound from the treaty of Versailles. The Germans have been taught that war doesn’t pay. The Germans were trying to save Europe from Bolshevism. The German people were betrayed by Hitler.
It is, indeed, a fact that there are good people in Germany now, as there were in 1919, 1914, and in 1870. “Good” Germans fought to uphold the Versailles treaty, gave their energy, loyalty and even their lives to support the Weimar Republic. “Good” Germans opposed Hitler, and died by the hundreds of thousands.
Others became exiles, and continued to fight for decency. They fought not only against the Nazis, but against the idea of pan-Germanism: German expansionism at the expense of others.
But what criminal folly it was, and would be now, to depend on a wholly ineffectual segment of the German nation! For the evidence is that Germany has waged three wars in 70 years, and in this war, committed barbarisms unparalleled in human history.
No, “good” Germans never “cut any ice” in Germany, never influenced the course of German history, never succeeded in teaching the German masses the meaning of honor or world responsibility. Nor is every German in a concentration camp a “good” German. Many of them were good Nazis until, in a moment of despair, they thought aloud that Germany might not win, or tiring of potatoes and infrequent meat, bought black market steaks, or neglected to turn in ration books they found. To put faith in such as these is to invite disaster.
Pastor Martin Niemoeller was a hero to those who claim there are democratic forces in Germany. With the defeat of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm’s U-boat hero — the pulpit hero of the anti-Nazi movement, the white hope of foreigners who can see democracy in the German heart, the shining knight who battled Hitler — emerged into the world of living men again, after seven years in prison.
Niemoeller Replies To Optimists
Well, Pastor Niemoeller gave his answer to the optimists who imagine they see liberalism and democracy in Hitler’s opponents and those who just went along for the ride. Said the Pastor, “Germany is unsuited to any form of democratic government. The German people like to be governed, not to mingle in politics.”
We do not need to take Pastor Niemoeller’s words that Gauss, Thompson, Neibuhr et al., have been trying to foist on others their pipe dream about “democratic groups in Germany.” The record speaks in trip-hammer terms. The Weimar Republic was sabotaged and destroyed by the German masses.
Pastor Niemoeller, who, by the way, admitted he was not opposed to Hitler’s political principles, said after his release by the Americans from a concentration camp, “The greatest shortcoming of the Weimar Republic was that it never could impose its authority on the German people, which longed for such authority.”
In 1914, when the Kaiser prated about his “divine right,” and told the Germans that now is the time for murder, the entire Socialist party jumped on the bandwagon to support what they called a “holy war.”
Stresemann, winner of the Novel peace prize, and regarded as a great German liberal, demanded the annihilation of England of France.
Maximilian Harden, leader of the German liberals and a journalist who won considerable distinction for exposing the debased morals of the palace clique, boasted, “Not as weak-willed blunderers have we undertaken the fearful risk of this war. We wanted it!”
In 1919, the Allies helped set up the Weimar Republic, believing the German pretense that they were anti-monarchist, as they now pretend they are anti-Nazi.
“Good” Germans organized their Weimar Republic to keep the peace. Yet, in 1927, German Industrialist Arnold Rechberg wrote, “Never under the Hohenzollerns has the military caste exercised such an important political influence as under the so-called German Republic.”
Nazism is not new. Nazism is simply a more violent expression of what German mothers have been teaching their children; German professors, their students; and the German politicians, their people, for 100 years. Hitler’s fancy talk about the “master race,” “inferior peoples,” and “dominating the world” was old stuff to the Germans.
The Hitler Jugend singing, “Today, Germany is ours; tomorrow, the world,” were not celebrating a mere Hitlerian promise, but ideas bred into their bones from the cradle.
Impassioned declarations of German generals, politicians, writers and statesmen, during the past 100 years, sound as though they were written and spoken by A. Hitler, unborn when his predecessors were clamoring for things the world now associates with Nazism. Nazism is no more a fancy name for pan-Germanism: the idea that all Germans everywhere forever owe their allegiance to Germany, and that Germany must expand unhindered.
In 1913, General von Bernhardi of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s high command, wrote in his pan-German book, Our Future, “For us, there are two alternatives and no third — world domination or ruin.”
Hitler Represented German Majority
In 1932, Hitler received 44 percent of the votes, almost twice as many as the Socialists, second strongest of 14 parties. With so many parties, it was not to be expected that the victorious candidate would receive even 50 percent of the entire vote cast.
No, the Germans were not misled by Hitler, for he was the modern symbol of pan-Germanism. They bought Hitler with their eyes wide open, and their hearts as well.
Hitler was not “imposed” on the German people, they elected him legally and wholeheartedly to his office. Hitler did not foist “alien” ideas on the German people. He gave up-to-date expression to ancient German ideals. Hitler and his gang of murderers, bandits and looters, intent on becoming the “master race” and snuffing out small nations, were perfect representatives of the German majority. The Germans read Mein Kampf before Hitler was elected in 1932, when it became required reading.
Hitler plainly told the German people just what conquests, murders and crimes he proposed to commit. The majority welcomed it; a small minority fought it.
Hitler betrayed the German people in only one respect: he failed to bring them victory, the opportunity to dominate the world, thereby immunizing them from punishment for their crimes. But, according to German General Karl von Clausewitz, “Even the final decision of war is not to be regarded as absolute.”
In this war, the Germans were not on the rebound from the “hard” Versailles treaty. German political refugees from Nazism even today defend Germany’s warmaking this time (“of course, Hitler was a bad man”), contending that poor Germany was suffocated by the Versailles treaty. Yet the Germans themselves admitted that seven years after the treaty was signed, the standard of life in Germany was higher than it had been in 1914.
In his book, Re-educating Germany, Dr. Werner Richter, devoted Republican member of the Prussian Ministry of Education and University of Berlin faculty during the Weimar days, suggests that the fact that Germany fought the war was not a defect in her culture; but that Germany was beaten is a serious indictment of her schools.
German Alibi in the Making
Dr. Richter, of course, wants German teachers restored to the classrooms. They know how to teach Germans, he says, and then admits that the majority of secondary-school teachers, university students and professors were opposed to the Weimar Republic!
This exile-German professor wants Germany to reinstate the teachers to sabotaged democratic ideas in Germany and denied German war guilt in the first World War, to teach their students that Germany is perfect and the rest of the world is out of step.
To a very great extent, German children will have to be taught by Germans. But in selecting teachers we must not be blinded by pretenses that German teachers will extol democracy.
Admiral Karl Doenitz, who set himself up as the fuehrer when Hitler disappeared, also gave the Germans their alibi for this war, their slogan for the next war, and all the warning we need that the Germans can’t be trusted to keep the peace.
Operating the German “government” at Flensburg for 10 days after the surrender, Admiral Doenitz told the Germans, in effect, that they had been stabbed in the back. Not by the home front, as the German high command had charged in 1918, when they wanted an alibi to save their prestige. No, this time the German people were fighting a pretty nearly total war. Not by the Jews — they had been murdered by the Germans. The Nazi Party? Well, that was a handy scapegoat for some captured German generals. But not the whole Nazi party! Hitler and his intuition! they said. That dumkopf Ribbentrop! If had not been for them, the German army would have had a better chance for victory.
After all, as a German submarine commander who surrendered his U-boat at Portsmouth, New Hampshire said, “There’s no difference between a German and a Nazi. A Nazi is a good German and a good German is a Nazi.”
“Herrenvolk!” said Admiral Karl Doenitz, “Germany was betrayed, stabbed in the back by the Americans and British! They insisted on fighting a brave and suffering Germany trying to save Europe from Bolshevism.”
The German general staff and the German soldiers surrendered unconditionally. It says so on paper. But they are convinced that they were not defeated.
Their excuses stream out of the mouths of German prisoners: “Too much Hitler interference with strategy… unexpected speed of American production… the stubborn British… overwhelming weight of American air power… mad savagery of unending millions of Russian soldiers…”
As Germany went down, German strategy to save the “honor” and respect of the German army was deliberate, and a warning to us. One after another, the German generals said to the German people, “Keep your confidence in us. Our day and your future dictators of Europe are not over.”
Colonel General Alfred Jodl: “The German people and armed forces… have achieved and suffered more than perhaps any people in the world.”
General Franz Boehme: “We are unbeaten…”
General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst: “We had mad leadership (meaning Hitler).”
This war has taught the Germans only that they must be better prepared next time.
Three years ago, the German general staff outlined to its students and the Potsdam Academy how Germany should conduct her next war. A direct consequence of that briefing was the attempt of a group of German army generals to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944 — a frantic effort to save German resources for a third World War.
Generals Opposed “National Suicide”
The Germans are vicious and calculating. Their program of organized murder, starvation and looting of occupied countries was not intended to prove how mean they are, but to make postwar Germany healthier, stronger, richer and more spirited than any other country in Europe. That would give Germany a head start in the next war!
When it because obvious to many German generals that World War II was lost, they decided to get rid of the man who insisted on national suicide, this dissipating the resources Germany would need for her next attempt at world conquest. The generals’ revolt had nothing to with democracy or decency.
