GERMAN IDEA OF HONOUR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 June 1940, Page 8

GERMAN IDEA OF HONOUR

DELIBERATE LYING TO MISLEAD OTHERS. “Some years ago, about the end of 1933, a German officer was talking to a senior member of the British Embassy in Berlin,” related Mr W. A. Sinclair in a recent broadcast talk. “He made the rather odd remark that the British are gentlemen, but the French are not. When he was asked to explain what, he meant, he related this illuminating incident. He said this: ‘After the war, in 1920, I was in charge of a barracks. One day some of the Military Control Commission, under a French officer and a British officer, came to my barracks. They said they had reason to believe that I had a store of rifles concealed behind a brick wall, contrary to the terms of the Peace Treaty. I denied this. I said, “I give you my word of honour as a German officer that I have no rifles concealed in the barracks.” Well, your British officer was a gentleman. He accepted my word of honour and he went away. But that French officer was not a gentleman. He would not accept my word of honour. And he pulled down the brick wall. And he took away my rifles.’ Now, that German officei' would never have dreamt of lying, and deliberately acting dishonourably in this way, to another German. The old German Army was extremely punctilious about questions of personal honour. But he obviously did not feel obliged to tell the truth, or behave honestly, to persons who were not Germans, where anything to the advantage of Germany was concerned.”