The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. SATURDAY, MAY 6, 1944. GERMANY MUST UNDERSTAND DEFEAT

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 106, 6 May 1944, Page 4

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. SATURDAY, MAY 6, 1944. GERMANY MUST UNDERSTAND DEFEAT

IMPERIAL Conference discussions which opened yesterday on the Allied schemes for the liberation of Europe are naturally tentative and dependent upon the concurrence of the Allied Nations and also on the progress made by Unrra in the meantime. The discussions, however, will enable the British Commonwealth to clarify its opinions, and they have already achieved one purpose which will have unanimous support, a decision that there will be no repetition of the greatest mistake of the last war. Germany's war leaders will not be allowed this time to tell their people that they have been betrayed, but not defeated, that the home front let the Army down, and that the military machine of the Reich can be reconditioned for another war of cunning and calculated aggression. This time, it is stated by the diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail, the Empire leaders have determined that there shall be a march to Berlin so that the people can see for themselves how completely the Wehrmacht has been smashed. That is only one of the many things which must be done inside Germany to prevent a relighting of the fires of war. The German has been trained, and not only by Hitler, to idolise the primitive barbarism of the old Teutonic to make the greatest aim and virtue of German ''kultur,' which has nothing to do with culture, mastery over the rest of the world by the cruelly efficient methods of massacre, robbery and enslavement.

That gospel has been inculcated for generations. Hitler has brought it to its apex by bestialising and teaching even children of ten that they are born to die for Germanj', so that the Herrenvolk may rule the rest of the world, and that any methods of cruelty, oppression and treachery are right so long as they lead to ultimate triumph. That poison must be stamped out before there can be any lasting peace, and the people' must be convinced that war, the supreme German national industry, can never again be made profitable, or anything but an oveiwheming loss. That truth can only be brought home to the Germans by occupation of Berlin and the rest of the State, and the lesson must be made so complete that all the lies of the propaganda machine will never enable the Reich to forget it. The re-education must be complete, and it must enter every phase of life and society. Talk of "peaceful" Germans driven into war by the Nazi machine and ready now for immediate conversion is the same futile nonsense which led the world into, its second blood bath in a generation. There is no peaceful section in Germany, there never has been, and all attempts to develop sucn a movement in 1914 were derisive failures, their advocates numbering hundreds, while the Pan-Germanists, the arrogant junkers, whose one aim in life was to trample the rest of the world under the German jackboot, numbered millions. The treatment of the peace movement in Germany, both before 1914 and in the truce between the wars, illustrates the identity and continuity of the all-powerful stream of military tradition, the absolutism of those who canalised the stream and the willing acquiescence of the nation which fed it.

It is therefore necessary to be assured now, as was not done last time, that the war machine and all its millions of' spare parts are irreparably broken and scattered. That can only be done if Allied supervision is indefinitely maintained in every corner of the country, and if Germany is placed under such restraints as will prevent her manufacturing war materials in other countries—as she did after the last war—and of making careful arrangements under which her own war programme is stimulated and those of other nations sabotaged. The sadistic and terroristic basis of German frightfulness must be driven from the minds of the people and the character of the race so reformed that it will fit into the peaceful pattern of a regenerated Europe. If this be done the "furor teutonicus" which has overshadowed Europe for a thousand years may be overcome and the rest of the world given a chance to progress in lasting peace. It must be remembered that if at the end of the war the German masses revolt, after tasting the bitter waters of defeat, that revolt will not contain any of the elements of a constructive peace, for a revolt against the consequences of defeat, as was shown in 1918, leaves militarism still in charge of the field where it was stricken.