Wairarapa Times-Age TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1942. THE ORDINARY GERMAN CITIZEN.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 October 1942, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1942. THE ORDINARY GERMAN CITIZEN.

» . — ALTHOUGH a good many people agree with Lord Vansittart in his estimate of German character and mentality and contend that in this war the United Nations are fighting not only the Nazi dictatorship, but, in the fullest sense, the German nation the weight of opinion in the British Empire and the United States no doubt will approve the distinction drawn by the Archbishop of Canterbury in an address on. “Britain and Germany after the War” reported briefly in a cablegram received yesterday.

While he agreed that individuals responsible for atrocities should be punished after fair trials, Dr Temple, we are told,

emphasised that the ordinary German citizen of the future should be permitted to share all the benefits of civilisation; otherwise generations growing up under restrictions imposed for the acts ot their predecessors would be justly embittered.

It is no doubt the view of enlightened leaders of all the free nations that the peace to be built when the war has been won should be, as the Vice-President of the United States (Mr Henry A. Wallace) has said, “just, charitable and enduring.”

Secure foundations for a peace of this nature assuredly will not be laid, however, simply by extending gentle consideration to those Germans —no doubt a vast majority of the nation —who are not personally open to indictment as being responsible for savage and bestial, crimes. In an entirely objective and dispassionate outlook it must be recognised that the German people in their modern history have been to an extraordinary degree ready to be led into unprovoked and criminal attacks on other nations. The docile acceptance by the German people of vicious and predatory leadership constitutes in itself a danger against which adequate safeguards must be established if peace, when it is achieved, is to be stable, as well as j'ust and charitable.

Long before the outbreak of the present war, which is only the latest and most terrible of a series of predatory attacks by Germany on peaceful nations, it became manifest that the Nazi creed was in essentials simply one of murderous banditry -—something much worse than the primitive law of the jungle. It is a commanding fact that instead of stamping out this foul abomination, the German people, with the exception of a gallant minority murdered, bludgeoned into submission or driven into exile, accepted it either voluntarily or unresistingly. There is little prospect even now of any internal revolt against Hitlerism short of the point of a fatal, collapse of the German military power.

On the facts of modern history it becomes an all-important condition of world peace that all nations sincerely intent on peace should organise collectively to suppress at its inception any new attempt at predatory aggression by Germany or any other nation. Neither the fear of providing Germany with a new set of grievances nor anything else should be allowed to cloud the plain issue thus raised.

The contention of the Archbishop of Canterbury that the ordinary German citizen of ( the future should be permitted to share all the benefits of civilisation may imply that some of these benefits were denied to Germany under the Treaty of Versailles and in the years that followed. While it is not for a moment to be denied that national and international economic organisation, for example, is open to very great improvement, the idea that Germany was driven into war by,economic or other injustice will not bear examination. Whatever economic and other disabilities Germany suffered prior to this war were due in a major degree to the unprecedented concentration of her labour and other resources on a preparation for war that was deliberately criminal and was not opposed in any effective degree by the German people.