The Wilmington morning star., 1947-03-17
As Pegler Sees 1t
By PEGLER
Copyright, 1947, By King Features Syndicate,
Incorporated).

horrors inflicted on the German people in the
American and British occupation zones re-
veals the United States in the role of a bar
barian conquerer, even more brutal in victory
today than the military and political, northern
forces we're 80 years ago in the beaten Con-
federate states. The people of the United States
up to this time had had only a vague. though
guilty apprehension, of the conditions which
Mr.. Hoover found.
His review is supplemented in a manner
to humiliate Americans by a feature story
published recently in the Saturday Evening
Post by a young American woman, the wife
of an Army captain stationed in Berlin, who
reveals a disgraceful condition not merely Of
contrast but of legalized looting by a few
Americans. This officers pay is $525 a month. |
They have two small children. They live in a |
furnished. Groom house amid three million
slowly starving Germans in a city nearly so
per cent destroyed They have fresh meat
seven days a week, milk and one and one
half tons of coal a month and gas and e~lectrici-
ty without limit. And they are saving nearly
three fifths of the captains pay.
Mr.. Hoover reports that the housing situa-
ton in the American and British zones is the
worst that modern civilization has ever seen.
The average space among tens of millions SIS
equivalent to between three and four people to
a IL by IL foot ROOM and rnultitudes are liv-
ing in rubble and Easements. tuberculosis is
spreading rapidly.
The young. American woman reports that
a German couple are allowed only 200 pounds
of coal for the whole winter in Berlin. This
would be bad enough but Mr.. Hoover says
that in Hamburg no coal has been issued
since October and that other German cities
have been little better off. Indeed, he reports.
in this coolest of winters, the coal shortage
has been so bad that there has been a lack
of heat, even for cooking the starvation diet
that we allow them.
MI. Hoover confined himself to facts with
no expression of humanitarian feelings for
this mass of people" The captains wife per-
mits herself a few expressions which might
denote tWinges of conscience, but she says
they like it there because they can save so
much and tells us that the German woman
who gives her little boy piano lessons refuses
to name her price" but has asked for a bottle
Of ink, a bottle of hand lotion and black thread.
She mentions no regulation which would for
bid this frugal pair to name a price. them-l
selves, and a fair one, at that, and to insist
on paying, to the slight dininution of their
savings of nearly $500 a month.
Officers are allotted two maids to a bill
let, plus a combination firenan-gardener.
servants get eight cents an hour for a 60
hour week, or 81. 80 a week. and even these
miserable wages are not paid by the Ameri-
can men and women who enjoy these serv-
ices. They are included in the rent assess
ment' of not more than S120 a month in any
case, land eventually will be absorbed in the
occupation costs Germany must some day
repay to the allies
OF course Germany never will repay these
occupation costs and they are now being
paid by the American taxpayers. The p~retense
that the Germans someday will pay them is
a fiction to conceal an undeserved subsidy
to the members of an army of occupation who
trade cartons of cigarettes obtained at a heavy
discount for the finest Persian carpets"
MANY higher-up army officers and mill
tary government officials have, in addition To
their modest Is or 20-room houses, a sumptu
GUS lakeside villa for week-ends."
All this is consistent with the ethics of the
new deal parasites who occupied exclusive
and secluded villas in the national parks al
very moderate rentals and at public eX-
pense and, for several years, converted the
officers quarters at the abandoned Key West
Naval station in Senator Claude Peppers do
main. into a secret vacation resort. But it
violently mocks those Humanitarian feelings
which MI. Hoover had only to mention In pass
ing to remind us that we are trying to convert
the abominable Hun by hunnishness.
Any one who would try to justify all this
by citing the NaZis' own treatment of conquer ,
ed peoples thereby embraces one of the worst
phases of Hitlerism. Moreover, the people of
the United States never intended that in their
name, generals and self-indulgent officials of
the military government should be allowed to
install themselves in mansions and weekend
villas or that captains should be quartered and
kept in a condition of luxury far beyond their
own due and accustomed condition of life and
tho a ,,,ariooy, r. nd rd II oil chnuyc q lou md |
brutal selfishness and the moral unfitness for
their jobs of the officers and others who es-.
tablished this shameful system. The officers
should be brought home, reduced and retired
if not dismissed. The civilian brass should be
fired.
If it were necessary and the necessity
is not conceded that soldiers on foreign duty
should have their families with them, then
decency and even the faintest understanding
of the mission of the occupation should have :
provided that these persons should conduct
themselves in a way to arouse the respect Of
the German people, not their legitimate con-
tempt for an army of hypocriteS. The young
woman who wrote the story is not to blame.
She and her husband merely accepted condi-
tons created for them by men higher UP who
may know better but lacked the character to
resist temptation. We have better men avail
able who would choke on luxuries in the sight
of starving people. The job calls for consecra-
ton, not vanity.
The attempt to discriminate between Nazis
and non-Nazis is dishonest in all persons who,
here at home, have upheld compulsions that
were put upon our people by the new deal.
Many Germans held out and joined the Nazi
party only in desperation for exactly the same
reasons that millions of Americans Joined the
c. l. @. They had to join or starve. Many Ger
man business men joined for the same reasons
which, in this country, either silenced Republi'
cans in the 1914 campaign or drove uncom-
mitted business men into the new deal.
In New York, business men learned that
they had better keep their mouths shut if they
were against Roosevelt. Men who wanted con