A NEW WAR AIM

New Zealand Herald, Volume 78, Issue 24106, 27 October 1941, Page 6

A NEW WAR AIM

Germany has again shocked the world by her barbarities. Nothing has so outraged British and American opinion as the cold-blooded murder of groups of French hostages. It, is not as if the extent of German criminality has become greater. That would be impossible. The enormities committed in Poland, Czeeho-Slovakia and Yugoslavia, the ruthless bombardments of Rotter-, dam, Belgrade and Leningrad are all so terrible that the human imagination can barely cope with such cruelties. But there is something so cold-blooded about the wholesale execution of innocent men as a punishment for something of which they knew nothing that the leaders of both the great English-speaking democracies now define retribution as one of the major purposes of the war. Although retribution as a war object is new in the present conflict, it was a characteristic of the Great War, however inadequately achieved by the Leipzig trials. After 1918 there was a tendency to gloss over German atrocities and some even describe them as the result of propaganda. That was grossly untrue. Germany committed many atrocities in the last war, and she can largely thank British generosity that the criminals did not receive the whole punishment they so richly deserved. But the crimes of 1914-1918 pale into insignificance compared with the constant bestiality which makes the Nazi name for ever a symbol of inhuman brutality. The blood of innocent. men and women throughout Europe cries for retribution. If for the first time punishment figures as one of our war aims, the only surprising thing, in view of German crimes, is not that such a war aim has come now, but that it did not come earlier.