The Wilmington morning star. [volume] (Wilmington, N.C.) 1909-1990, 1945-06-02
BY WESTBROOK PEGLER
fCanyrixht. 1915. by King Features Syndicate


Copvrisht. 1945, by King Features Syndicatel
NEW YORK-As people usually do who
have last won bitter var, we are acting
rather silly about the Germans and giving
the Russians great advantage, Tree. ALI
we hear side OF the line is that the
German people inherently and raclally
bad. which is pure Hitlerism for you, deny
inc our own old and cherished principle of
individual guilt and that for our own safety
and as form of punishment. we should re-
duce our Germans to the land. BY our Ger
mans l mean those in our jurisdiction.
But has anybody heard any such talk from
the Russians? On the contrary, right up 10
the fall of Berlin, the Russians were assuring
the Germans that it not their purpose
to obliterate them or even to decimate them
promiscuously and nothing was said about
any Russian intention to destroy their heavy
industries in the Russian zone OF occupation.
Their plan thus seems to be to recognize and
confer positions on those surviving Germans
who were communists before Hitler finally
achieved full power, wherein, incidentally,
those communists greatly assisted him, ex-
cepting however, those ex-communlsts who
became conspicuously bad personal Nazis.
It may be assumed, of course, that the
Russians will kill many of their captlves, CT
villains as we'll as service people and women
as we'll as men, and that they will transport
masses of them as slaves to Poland and Rus
STA to build better cities and DAMS roads
and other great public works. Meanwhile, in
our part of Germany the destruction has been
much greater and we talk about blowing un-
der The ruins, SO to speak, and making it
Impossible for them ever to manufacture any
thing more formidable than harmonicas
cuckoo clocks and musical bird-cages. Does
anybody believe that the Russians will de-
stroy any factories that are capable of man.
ufacturing anything that Russia needs for her
own uses both in Russia and in the countries
which it is her purpose to dominate by per-
suasion, if possible, but anyway. to domi-
nate? Those factories include some of the
greatest armament works in the world.
1t is impossible to overlook one fact in
this ferocious talk from our side. That is
that most of it and the most blood thirsty
proposals come from men in the United States
who comfortably sat out the war here and
made lot of money the air and IN
print, although there isn't a writer among
them who could get by any rewrite desk
calling Hitler and Himmler dirty names. They
are not elderly men nor so old but that
starting five years ago, they could have wan
gled their way to grips with the Nazis som9
where somehow.
One that 1 have in mind is communist
refugee from Germany who certainly had the
strongest personal reasons to declare himself
in for a personal piece OF the fight even
if he had to be content to ship massman On
cargo vessel. can understand why the Ger
mans made refugee of him all right. Still he
is on the air and all over the place, shooting
off his face with Weber and Fields dialect,
and lecturing us our duty and our demo-
cracy and hollering for the company officers
and many others that the actual physical
work of butchering many people would de-
stroy every decent instinct in all concerned.
Another of our brave conversational COM
mandos is that contemplate and utterly
shameless communist thief, calling himself
William Gailmor, which is not his real name,
who was only % when the war broke out
and is only "a now and weighs 200 pounds,
according to his criminal record. He wiggled
off the hook when he was caught stealing
his fifth automobile by declaring that he was
suffering rom a comDulsion neurosis, which
is one of those psychiatric euphemisms mean
ing that he couldn't control his larcenous i'm
pulses, common weakness of thieves.
After year under glass he was declared
cured bu: the Army seems tohave taken
doubled ointed attitude toward him. He is al.
lowed to lecture to shell-shock patients who
got that way honestly from personal expert
ence with high explosives in action and tell
them how he fought his way back so far
that nowadays he can pass a strange car
at the curb and not even monkey with the
ignition. But he isn't the kind of man the
Army wants for personal participation in the
war against aggreSSOrS enough to come and
get him
l don't know whether not you would
call this preachment for soft peace with
Germany but l don't much care what any
body calls it. 1 do know, however, that if
you accept this propaganda that as of GER
tain date all Germans became bad Germans
you swallowing whole the most abomi-
nable article of Hitlerism which was Jewish
racial guilt and all-around perfidy. And have
observed that this doctrine comes most Mostly
from propa gandists who members of a
group that has suffered most from this very
thing and repudated it when it applied to
them, as all the rest of us repudated it.
| I think ought to consult the fighting
men on our course with share of the
Germans but see no reason to discriminat e
between the Germans and the Italian people
who were bad fascistis only because they were
inefficient at it and would have been the
most overbearing tyrants on earth if they
had won
But we are just blowing off steam when
we talk of demolishing German industry and
reducing the German people to the status If
clods. and tell ourselves that they were all
guilty because they are Germans. In Ger
many from about 1885 on, a man had to
submit to Hitler to keep out of a concentra-
ton camp and when war came they all had
to fight whether they were Nazis or not.
-V
II