Report on the Germans

As an old hand with Europe, William L, White is not beguiled by the trick which the Germans have lately developed to the point of a fine art, whereby they tell foreign inquisitors what they believe the outlander wishes to hear, rather than what they themselves think. His experience of Germany, his knowledge of the language, and his good fortune in being able to re-establish contacts with Germans he knew prior to 1940 all stand him in good stead. For these reasons Report on the Germans is almost unique in the flood of post-war studies of Germany.

There is a ring of authenticity in the story of Germany’s fall from the summits of pride, in the early days of the struggle, to the depths of apathy, confusion, and doubt in which her people flounder today. “We are all guilty,” says Herr Schultz, in the opening pages. “Some did terrible things. Others did nothing, but knew what was being done and approved. Still others of us perhaps knew little, but at least approved of some of it. Yet now all of us, regardless of how much we ourselves did or of how little we knew of what others did, today do not want to remember it. We would like to forget what we did or knew, and cannot believe that we ever approved. The amazing thing is that so many have forgotten so much and so can deny that they ever knew or approved.”

The passage sets the key for the book. In every chapter it gives this study unity. Herr Schultz’s story of the progress of the war, as seen from within Germany by a functionary in the lower echelons of government, is extraordinary. But it does not stand alone. Mr. White has supplemented it with some excellent investigation of the ordinary German’s attitude on such grim matters as the Jewish massacres and concentration camps. He has also marshaled a number of studies made through his legmen in restaurants, bars, business offices, and homes. He even sought to snare a sample of the unregenerate Nazi under his microscope, but in vain; so he had to content himself with interrogating an unrepentant German nationalist who hated Ihe Nazis for bringing the nation to ruin.

The Germans depicted in these pages are not startling, dramatic, or sensational — except as the events in which they were submerged were in themselves unusual. They are ordinary people, most of them. In this fact lies most of the value of Mr. White’s report.

The whole final section of Report on the Germans is given over to a stimulating assessment of the hazards of peacemaking; and some instructive comparisons are made in these pages between the procedure followed by Woodrow Wilson in shaping American policy after the First World War and the ineptitudes which have marked much of this nation’s approach to the problem since the second defeat of the Germans. In Mr. White’s view, Wilson’s grasp of world history and precedents in diplomacy far exceeded Roosevelt’s. He regards the highly advantageous position now occupied by the Kremlin as a direct consequence of the fact that the Russians have pursued the Wilsonian — which was also the orthodox — method while American diplomacy has not.

It is an interesting thesis, though open to some questioning. It will scarcely do, for instance, to contend that Mr. Churchill’s “soft underbelly” theory about the Balkans as a suitable major Allied invasion area would have produced a diplomatic situation essentially different from the one now before us, and that General Marshall’s insistence upon striking over the coasts of France was wrong. On this point Mr. White seems to be indulging in specious thinking. If the Italian campaign proved anything, it proved that the “soft underbelly” theory was ludicrously wrong, and that a Balkan drive might easily have proved extremely costly and slow, without providing the advantages in political position.

The real probability is that, had the Churchill proposal been accepted, the Russians, who were at the edge of Warsaw when D Day arrived for Europe, would have pounded west over the vast central European plains to “liberate” France and the Low Countries before the Allies in the Balkans could extricate themselves from the mountains. General Marshall’s insistence upon an invasion of Normandy has not been proved a mistake yet.

But this final section of Report on the Germans represents only a third of the author’s book. His real concern, which occupies the remaining two thirds, is to explore the German mind and mood today and to compare it with the mental climate of the Germany he knew before this latest war exploded across Europe. The substance of the Report, accordingly, is a sort of Gallup poll of personalities. As such it is most revealing.

JAMES H. POWERS