A BLACK RECORD

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 121, 24 May 1941, Page 8

A BLACK RECORD

Distinguished in diplomacy, and hardly less so in writing talent, Sir ; Robert Vansittart retires from his high diplomatic post, but by no means from the battle. The penetrating thought embodied in his broadcasts on the disease sometimes called Pan-Germanism has had more than a circulation over the air. Reprinted as Black Record (being the Black Record of Germans Past and Present) his seven broadcasts, dedicated to Dorothy Thompson, are now available to anyone who reads in English, and who wishes to see the Prussian plague surveyed in short space. The surgery which he has applied to the German character he has also applied to his own literary effort, for by heroic compression he has unfolded the Black Record in less than sixty pages, though, as he admits, a longer survey of the tragedy would have made more crushing his indictment of the Germans: indeed, "brevity has weighted the scale in favour" of the accused. But this brevity, ruthlessly self-imposed, gives the author the passport to the ear of the modern hustling world, which only reads as it runs and runs as it reads. The Black Record should be in the breastpocket of every coat. For it is the truth—the truth about a people that, under a cloak of fictitious righteousness, has been able to "spring two great wars on an unprepared world." Sir Robert Vansittart demolishes two fictions. The first fiction is that Hitler or the Hitlerites are responsible for this war and that the German people are not. The second fiction is thai Germany was not responsible for the war of 1914----18. Following 1.918, a swarm of writers in (he English language gratified their pacifist enthusiasm by countenancing, expressly or by implication, the German plea that the war was not of German origin. This tacit or expressed endorsement of a German lying pretence did not appeal to many observers of the changing post-war scene, but they took little notice of it because it was part and parcel of a pacifist propaganda which appeared to be on the side of the then young and hopeful League of Nations. The blurring of the facts of German war-guilt was therefore condoned or was suffered in silence. But for what gain? Has not. this denial of the spots on the German tiger —a denial flying in the face of facts —been a major factor in Hitler's early success and its later sanguinary sequel? Such pacifism and such blurring of facts are a link in the direct chain of cause and effect whereby twice in this century the German people have attained the position to commit an international crime. Hitler's war is "no accidental and ephemeral outcrop. If Germans [not merely Hitler] had had their way, there would have been a Avar every eight years for the last three-quarters of a century." We have interpolated the words "not merely Hitler" into this sentence because in many other sentences the author makes it clear that Hitler and the German people cannot be separated: This bird of prey is no sudden apparition. Hitler is no accident. He is the natural and continuous product of a breed which from the dawn of history has been predatory find bellicose. Bismarck, the ex-Kaiser and his clique, and Hitler are all in this Frederick the .Great line, and are a direct expression of the German people. So it is useless to sidetrack the issue of German guilt with a story of mere Hitler guilt. "The German is often a moral creature; the Germans never; and it is the Germans who count. You Avill always think of Germans in the plural, if you are wise." The italics are the author's, not ours. The guilt of the Germans, not of a German, is the main causal fact of the two wars of this century, and Sir Robert Vansiltart traces the same bloodspilling guilt back for centuries. He expressly repudiates Sir Nevile Henderson's contention that the present war was due to the "blind self-confidence of a single individual and of a small clique of his selfinterested followers." So much for the plain, all-reveal-ing facts of the German war-crimes. Passing from fact to prophecy, Sir Robert Vansittart draws on the German Jew Heinrich Heine for a definition of the German virus and a forecast of its poisonous effects. Heme —an eminent poet and writer now banned by Hitlerism for seeing too clearly, besides being a Jew — wrote somewhat over a hundred years ago, in his "History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany," a clear-cut picture of what has happened. For cause, he cites "that ancient German eagerness for battle which combats not for the sake of destroying, not even for the sake of victory, but merely for the sake of the combat itself." To Heine the Jew it appeared that "the fairest merit" of Christianity was that Christianity had "subdued to a certain extent, but could not entirely quench, the brutal warrior-ardour of the Germans." Later, against the failing Cross, "the frantic Berserker rage would rise." Here Heine rises into pure prophecy:

The old stone gods will then arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries, and Thor with his eiant hammer will

arise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals. . . . When you hear a crash such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then know that at iast the German thunderbolt has fallen. . . . There will be played in Germany a drama compared to which the French Revolution will seem but an innocent idyll.

And if we who listen to the crash should reply that surely half of the Germans are not monsters individually, here is Heine's reply: "That is precisely the half that does not bear arms, and whose friendship, therefore, would be of little help to you."

In these words of over a century ago, Heine wrote the epitaph of German Socialism, then unborn. The Heine prophecy finds its confirmation in the considered judgment expressed yesterday in Auckland by the Commonwealth Prime Minister, Mr. Menzies: "We face a people driven on by a diabolical spirit that has infested it for half a century." Or, as Sir Robert Vansittart puts it, "the German is often a moral creature: the Germans never." Tn this war, as in 1918, their weapon, with the help of Providence, will be struck from their hands. But the problem of their innate criminality will remain. Its solution is not in sight. Will it prove to be iri<soluble?