GERMAN PEOPLE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 12 May 1945, Page 3

GERMAN PEOPLE

“ASHAMED OF DEFEAT’’ MILITARY (GOVERNMENT'S TASK There uro-abnul one hundred thousand Germans living among the ruins of Cologne. Most of them, however, are living in the suburbs, where habitable houses are comparatively common, writes George Orwell in a recent despatch from Germany to the “Observer," of London. The whole central part of the city, once famous for its romanesque churches and its museums, is simply a chaos of .jagged walls, overturned trams, shattered statues, and enormous piles of rubble out of which iron girders thrust themselves like sticks of rhubarb. When the Americans first entered, many of the streets were quite impassable until the bulldozers had swept them clear. The town has no piped water, no gas, no transport, and only enough’electric power for certain vita L jobs, such as keeping the electric ovens of a few bakeries working. However, the Germans appear still to have fairly good stocks of food, and the military government—in this area a purely American concern —is tackling the job of reorganisation with praiseworthy energy. FINGER-PRINTING entire POPULATION It has arranged a primitive water supply in horse drawn hearts. It has set up a health service, it is issuing a weekly paper in German, and it is about half-way through the considerable labour of re-registering and finger printing the entire population. This is a necessary preliminary to the issue of new ration books, and it also helps a little in the important task of sifting Nazis from non-Nazis. In the first day or two of the occupation there was civilian looting on a large scale, and it was obviously necessary to enrol some civil police. Under the control of an experienced American police officer a scratch force of about 150 Germans, unarmed and not in uniform, is already in being. With these and all other employees of the military government, the principle followed is never to employ a known Nazi in any capacity whatever. The new chief of police, for instance, is a Jew who held the same post until 1933, when the Nazis evicted him. Three separate Courts have been set up to try offences ranging from espionage to infringement of traffic regulations. I attended the first sitting of the intermediary Court, which deals with comparatively serious offences and has powers of imprisonment up to ten years. COURT PROCEEDINGS A young Nazi of rather unappetising appearance who had been the local secretary of the Hitler Jugend, was on trial, not for having belonged to this organisation—the military Government has declared that belonging to the Nazi organisation is not an offence in itself—but for concealing the fact and attempting to withhold the list of members from the American authorities. He was sen-; tenced to seven years’ imprisonment gnd a fine of 10,000 marks, with an' extra day’s imprisonment for every mark that remained unpaid. This would have seemed tolerably severe if such sentences were ever served in full, but he was obviously guilty, and the fairness of the whole procedure was so impressive that even the German lawyer who defended him remarked on it. All in all the American Military Government seems to have made a very good start, though one may guess that diffi- . culties will arise later when people have got over the shock of defeat and the food situation becomes more acute.

After years of war it is an intensely strange feeling to be at last living on German soil. The Herrenvolk are all around you, threading their way on their bicycles between the piles of rubble or rushing out with jugs and buckets to meet the water cart. WELL CLOTHED AND FED It is queer to think that these are the people who once ruled Europe from the Channel to the Caspian Sea, and might have conquered Britain if they had known how weak we were. Propaganda, and especially their own propagander, has taught us to think of them as tall, blond and arrogant. What you actually sep in Cologne is smallish, dark-haired people, obviously of the same racial stock as the Belgians across the border, and in no way extraordinary. They are better clothed and, by the look of them, better fed than the people in France and Belgium, and they have newer bicycles and more silk stockings that we have in England: really there is no more to remark. The servility on which several observers have already commented did not particularly strike me. It is true that some of the inhabitants try to curry favour, hang around the offices of the Military Government at all hours, and, when spoken to doff their hats with a rather horrifying readiness, but the majority seem aloof and perhaps slightly hostile.

In some of the eyes that met mine I caught a sort of beaten defiance which, if it meant anything, seemed to me to mean that these people are horribly ashamed of having lost the war.

It is not true that all of them deny having ever been Nazis. Some of them admit when making their registration that they have been party members, though they always claim that they were forced to join the party against their will.