The Guilt of the German Army

IN the flood of books on National Socialism, this study of the relation between the old and the new German militarism stands out by its qualities of seriousness, thoroughness, and good documentation. Mr. Fried’s principal thesis is that the Nazi Party and the Army in Germany are toots, each of the other, neither being master of the other. He shows with a good deal of concrete illustration how the methods and psychology of National Socialism are directly derived from the period of disorderly sporadic civil war which followed the end of the First World War. The typical tough, hard-hit ten Nazi Gauleiter had his schooling in the trenches of the western front, with a postgraduate course in assorted mayhem and assault and battery in one of the “free corps” that roamed about the country in the uneasy first years ot the Weimar Republic, smashing real or alleged “ Reds. It was a tragedy of the Republic that the majority of good citizens who wanted neither a Red nor a White dictatorship were inclined to pull down their shutters and let the extremists fight it out.

Mr. Fried believes that the salvation of Germany after the fall of the Nazis is to be looked tor, not in foreign armies of occupation, but in the arming of the country s democrats. Most German political refugees would probably subscribe to this idea, although only the future can show whether Germany possesses enough militant democrats to make such a scheme work. W. H. C.