This does not mean, however, that we must close our eyes to the facts and to truth in regarding the other nations, to which Germany owes its final liberation from the Hitler yoke and to whose decision our future is entrusted.
We must and we may elucidate to ourselves how the others’ conduct has made our situation more difficult, on the domestic and on the foreign scene. For their past and future actions come from the world in which we, entirely dependent on it, are to find our way. We must shun illusions and come to a correct overall evaluation. We must yield neither to blind hostility nor to blind hope.
If we use the words, “guilt of the others,” it may mislead us. If they, by their conduct, made events possible, this is political guilt. But in discussing it we must never for a moment forget that this guilt is on another level than the crimes of Hitler.
Two points seem essentiaclass="underline" the political acts of the victorious powers since 1918, and their inactivity while Hitler’s Germany was organizing itself.
(1) England, France and America were the victorious powers of 1918. The course of world history was in their hands, not in those of the vanquished. The victor’s responsibility is his alone, to accept or to evade. If he evades it, his historical guilt is plain.
The victor cannot be entitled simply to withdraw to his own narrower sphere, there to be left alone and merely watch what happens elsewhere in the world. If an event threatens dire consequences, he has the power to prevent it. To have this power and fail to use it is political guilt. To be content with paper protests is evasion of responsibility. This inaction is one charge that may be brought against the victorious powers—although, of course, it does not free us from any guilt.
In discussing this further, one may point to the peace treaty of Versailles and its consequences, and then to the policy of letting Germany slide into the conditions which produced National-Socialism. Next, one may bring up the toleration of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria—the first act of violence which, if successful, was bound to be copied—and the toleration of Mussolini’s act of violence, the Ethiopian campaign of 1935. One may deplore the policy of England which in Geneva defeated Mussolini through the League of Nations and then let its resolutions stay on paper, lacking the will and the strength required to destroy Mussolini in fact, but also lacking the clear radicality to steer an opposite course, to join him and, while slowly changing his regime, stand with him against Hitler to insure peace. For Mussolini then was ready to side with the Western powers against Germany; as late as 1934 he mobilized his forces and delivered a threatening, since forgotten speech as Hitler wanted to march into Austria. The result of these half-measures was the alliance of Mussolini and Hitler.
However, it must be pointed out here that no one knows what further consequences different decisions might have had. And above alclass="underline" British policy also has moral aspects—a fact which National-Socialism actually included in its calculations, as British weakness. The British cannot unrestrainedly make any decision that is politically effective. They want peace. They want to utilize every chance of preserving it before they take extreme measures. They are not ready to go to war until war is obviously inescapable.
(2) There is a solidarity not only among fellow-citizens but also among Europeans and among mankind. The responsibility of the inactive bystander ranges from the mutual one of fellow-citizens to one that is universally human.
Rightly or wrongly, once the gates had shut on our German prison we were hoping for European solidarity.
As yet we had no idea of the last horrible consequences and crimes. But we saw the utter loss of liberty. We knew that now the arbitrary tyranny of those in power was given free rein. We saw injustice, saw outcasts, though all of it was still harmless in comparison with later years. We knew about concentration camps, though ignorant still of the cruelties going on there.
Certainly all of us in Germany were jointly guilty of getting into this political situation, of losing our freedom and having to live under the despotism of uncivilized brutes. But at the same time we could say in extenuation that we had been victimized by a combination of veiled illegalities and open violence. As in a state the victim of crime is accorded his rights by virtue of the state order, we were hopeful that a European order would not permit such crimes on the part of a state.
I shall never forget a talk in May 1933, in my home, with a friend who later emigrated and now lives in America. Longingly we weighed the chances of quick action by the Western powers: “If they wait another year, Hitler will have won; Germany, perhaps all Europe, will be lost.…”
It was in this state of mind, touched in the marrow of our bones and therefore clairvoyant in some respects and blind in others, that we felt increasing dismay at events like the following:
In the early summer of 1933 the Vatican signed a concordat with Hitler. Papen handled the negotiations. It was the first great indorsement of the Nazi régime, a tremendous prestige gain for Hitler. It seemed impossible, at first, but it was a fact. It made us shudder.
All nations recognized the Hitler regime. Admiring voices were heard.
In 1936 the world flocked to Berlin for the Olympic Games. Grimly we watched the appearance of every foreigner, unable to suppress a painful feeling that he was deserting us. But they did not know any better than many Germans.
In 1936 Hitler occupied the Rhineland. France let it happen.
In 1938 the London Times published an open letter from Churchill to Hitler, including sentences like the following (I remember it myself but quote from Roepke): “Were England to suffer a national disaster comparable to that of Germany in 1918, I should pray God to send us a man of your strength of mind and will.…”
In 1935, through Ribbentrop, England signed a naval pact with Hitler. This was what it meant to us: The British abandon the German people for the sake of peace with Hitler. They care nothing about us. They have not yet accepted European responsibilities. They not only stand by, as evil grows here—they meet it halfway. They allow a terrorist military state to engulf the Germans. For all the strictures of their press they do not act. We in Germany are powerless, but they might still—today, perhaps, still without excessive sacrifices—restore freedom among us. They are not doing it. The consequences will affect them, too, and exact vastly greater sacrifices.
In 1939 Russia made its pact with Hitler and thus, at the last moment, put Hitler in position to make war. And when war came, all neutral countries stood aside. The world failed utterly to join hands for one common effort, for the quick extinction of the devilry.
In Roepke’s book on Germany, published in Switzerland, the overall situation of the years between 1933 and 1939 is characterized as follows:
“The present world catastrophe is the gigantic price the world must pay for playing deaf to all the warning signals which ever more shrilly, from 1930 until 1939, portended the hell to be loosed by the satanic forces of National-Socialism—first upon Germany, and then on the rest of the world. The terrors of this war correspond exactly to those which the world permitted to happen in Germany while maintaining normal relations with the National-Socialists and joining them at international festivals and conventions.
“Everyone should realize by now that the Germans were the first victims of the barbaric invasion which swamped them from below, that they were the first to succumb to terror and mass hypnosis, and that whatever had to be suffered later in occupied countries was first inflicted on the Germans themselves—including the worst of fates: to be forced or tricked into serving as tools of further conquest and oppression.”