The Chronicle-star combined with the Moss Point advertiser., 1945-05-04
GERMAN GUILT

The other day here in P~ascagoula q man expressed A.
shallow and illconsidered opinion about the guilt-or rather
ne Innocence the German people which in its way was
whether the Germans should be made to labor in reconstruct
ng the ruin they have brought once more to Europe, this citi-
zen expressed himself of an opinion that helped snatch
sctual victory from the Allies in the earlier world war: the
opinion that the German people themselves were pretty
ikeable and an amiable sort, but had only been misled.
I'm all for Furnishing German generals and the other big
leaders-puttng them to work at hard labor rebuilding the
cities or even breaking rocks on the roads. But the German
soldiers and the people can't be held responsible for what
they were told to do. Why, Some of those German prisoners
they have working up around home in the Delta are just as
fine boys as you'd want to see. Why, those boys like this
country. They don't even want to go back home"
This is only the opinion of an individual, and obviously
it is an extreme minority opinion at the moment. II II were
not so, the cruel sacrifice of our own soldier boys-who are
pretty fine fellows themselves, including the ones who were
%machined- gunned as helpless prisoners and whose faces were
stamped in the mud in the Ardennes break th~rough-and the
achievements of our war industries would constitute some
monstrous joke. But let none of us forget this element ex-
lists in the easy-going American. nature-springfng perhaps
from our long struggle with the earlier frontier-the ten
dency to fight at the drop of a hat, if a fight is wanted, but to
forgive almost as quickly once the other fellow had taken his
~drubbing.
We were that way after the last war-a nation of big
hearted Charles, more or less. The Germans-so typically
arrogant in victory, and so typically ingratiating in defeat
played up to the soldiers in the army of occupation, and many
of our boys came home married to frauleins, or at least think
ing the Germans a pretty fine bunch, and willing to forgive
and forget the war that ravaged Europe in 19l4-l9l8. And
many of us at home, perhaps a majority, began to think, and
that the Germans were after all a pretty good sort of people
who had only been ~tragically misled. And the more we
Yielded to this easygoing American sentiment within our
selves, the more arrogant and insistent grew the propaganda
Of the rising nationalism and the newborn Hitler movement
in Germany. At last the reparations imposed on Germany
were forgiven. Hitler came to power while the German peo-|
pie shreiked and hened almost to the last man, and an in
finitessimal minority of German brains and honor like
Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein were exiled from the
country in disgrace" Our own forgiving mood became a
moral paralysis. For, having once started us on the soft
hearted road, the Germans kept rushing us off our feet, just
as a clever boxer does once he has jolted an opponent in the
ring. The Rhineland was reoccupied. Czechoslovakia and
the great Skoda arms works and thirty Czech divisions fell
to Hitler at Munich. The German people heied and cheered.
Let anyone who is not sure whether the Nazi party was the
German people, in spirit if not altogether in party member
ship, remember the news reels of the hysterical blond mothers
holding their uniformed and heiling little Nazis up to see
the new Wotan with the trick moustache pass by in the big
black Limousine. Hitler tore up the Versailles treaty and
threw it in our faces. And for a long time we looked on with
dazed amazement.
But when he tried to make us eat it, he of course made
his ultimate mistake. After the world war we had grown
once more generous and slow witted. But the frontier spirit
does not die out in a generation. America always turns UP
on the right of a scrap. We are long on good nature, or per-
haps ~gullibility is the word, but our supply is not i%nexhausti-
BILE. Ne fall for sucker tricks, for Just so long-for Nazi
Bufos, ana Frltz huhns and smiling Jap ambassadors, and
Pearl Harbors, And then, having at last realized the score,
we come in swinging.
Now, with the British and the Russians, we have given
the gangster nation of Europe another %drubbing. American
armament largely made it possible-at a cost which will
press upon us for generations. We have suffered over a half
million casualties. Some measure of sacrifice, or tragedy,
has touched almost every family in the country. With some
of our allies, the cost in blood has been even more severe.
Unless as a nation, we have the intelligence, the moral
~toughness, to learn the lesson of history, we are going to be
called on to do 1t again-1ust' as surely as one year succeeds
another, and one generation grows up to replace the last; Just
as surely as German military arrogance has left a trail of
blood and ravaged countryside through European history
since the days of the plundering Teutonic Knights in the
eleventh century.
Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, and that S one of
the Christian ideals that has outlived nations and empires.
We will not visit vengeance upon the German people. We
will not extract an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We
will not kill the Germans in their own gas chambers and
cremate them in their own furnaces. We have not fought this
fDr xn0onancn hit for self prpceruation