SAVAGERY A SET POLICY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24594, 30 April 1941, Page 8

SAVAGERY A SET POLICY

With the Germans savagery is deliberately inculcated, writes Professor L. B. Namier in discussing the German national character. They are the only European nation which glories in the barbaric period of its history, and they bear all the marks of it. They call it. being “ hard ’’—Hitler boasts of being “ the hardest German that ever lived ” —and they look upon brutality as the highest form of strength. Madame de Stael, writing about 1810, remarked that there seems to be no connection between the German’s thoughts and his nature; and in our own time some perfect brutes among the Germans have written wonderfully delicate lyrics. Even in the war of 1870 the behaviour of the German officers was notoriously worse than that of the common soldiers In the Great War “frightfulness” was prescribed by the German army regulations. The worst Nazi atrocities, both at home and abroad, have been systematically planned and organised from above. Still, hundreds of thousands of men have participated in • them, and tens of millions have watched them with approval. or at least with connivance.