The Times TUESDAY, MAY 13, 1941. Not Truly Civilised

Manawatu Times, Volume 66, Issue 112, 13 May 1941, Page 4

The Times TUESDAY, MAY 13, 1941. Not Truly Civilised

One of the most striking passages of “The Geneva Backet,” the book in which Mr. Robert Dell, former correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, examines the causes of the failure of the League of Nations, is that in which he considers Germany’s place in the future Europe. He believes that the troubles of Europe are mainly due to the fact that the German Government has been treated as if it were a normal civilised government, whereas in truth the Germans are still a primitive and not a civilised people.

If the Germans were truly civilised, he argues, they would not have rallied to support a Government that 4s frankly barbarian. Various reasons have been advanced for the change that has come over the German people in the last decade. Some political, some economic and some psychological, but Mr. Dell’s theory is that the Nazi doctrine and the Nazi antagonism to western civilisation appealed to something in the make-up of the German people.

He quotes Dr. Hauput, one of the pioneers of the Nazi movement, as saying: “Ours is a primitive people, which has found its way back to the sources from which it springs—to its native soil. This primitive people is now conscious of the forces inherent in its nature. The reply to the Treaty of Versailles is that the German people has left the pale of western civilisation.” And again he quotes Rosenberg, the “spiritual dictator” of Nazi Germany, as saying that Hitler w r as the successor not of Charlemagne but of Duke Wittekind, the Saxon leader of the pagans defeated by Charlemagne in 785.

“When Rosenberg said that Wittekind had conquered in the twentieth century in the person of Hitler,” declares Mr. Dell, “he said in effect that the Nazi movement is a return to the primitive barbarism of tire most backward Germans of the eighth century. And that is what the fact is. The Nazis have returned not to the Middle Ages, but to the Dark Ages which preceded them.”

Hitler, in Dr. Jung’s phrase, is the mirror of the subconsciousness of every German, or, in Voight’s expression, the nightmare of the German genius come true. Mr. Dell’s point is that Germany is a pathological case, and that Germans can never safely be treated as normal people. He thinks that in the reconstructed Europe there will be no place for a unified Germany, that the German Empire should be divided again into small States, each with its own ruler, and that Prussia itself should be divided to deprive it of its dominant position.

“To allow Germany at present equal rights with civilised nations, especially as regards armaments,” Mr. Dell contends, “would be about as sensible as to open the doors of a madhouse and let the inmates loose on the countryside.”