Page:The War and the Future.djvu/14

 of Occidental Christian civilization and which were always opposed to nationalistic barbarism. We must not forget that the Hitler party never got a real majority of votes and that it came to absolute power only by intrigue and terror, by coup d'état. At the beginning of the present war, there were more than two hundred thousand people in German concentration camps, to say nothing of the many tens of thousands of victims of this system who were tortured to death in Nazi camps and Gestapo cellars. Even today announcements appear in the German press of executions of so-called national traitors whose real numbers we do not know as only limited numbers are published for purposes of intimidation. It is often said that German youth has been hopelessly corrupted by national socialism, but events that took place in the University of Munich, which created such a stir in America, prove that now, at last, after the experiences of years, German youth is ready to put its head on the executioner's block out of conviction that national socialism is a shameful aberration and that Hitler is the corrupter of Germany and of Europe. For the sake of justice these things must be put into the other side of the scales. Not that Germany and the German people should be relieved of guilt and of responsibility. Looked at from a moral, pedagogical point of view, after the appalling pride, the inexcusable superiority intoxication in which the country has lived for many years, its fall at first, cannot be too deep; and, after all that has happened, it does not become us emigrants to advise the victors as to how Germany should be treated. That the common future should not be too heavily burdened by their decisions is the hope of liberal America. Neither Germany nor the German people should be sterilized or destroyed. What should be destroyed is that fatal power combination, the world threatening association of the Junkers, the army generals, and heavy industry. The German people should not be prevented but should be helped to shatter forever the domination of these groups; to put through the already overdue agrarian reform, in short, to bring about the real, the honest, the purifying revolution which alone can rehabilitate Germany in the eyes of the world, of history, and in its own eyes, and open for her a path into the 14