No Converts?

Under the Geneva Convention of 1929, the 281,344 captured German soldiers in the U.S. may give the Nazi salute, paste up small pictures of Adolf Hitler, drape the coffin of a departed comrade with the swastika banner. This situation understandably exasperates many U.S. citizens. Last week a letter from Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson suggested that the U.S. Army is well aware that it has the potential core of a future fascism on its hands, that it has already taken many preventive steps lately requested by outraged civilians.

Stimson rejected a Harvard University group's request to make an educational survey among captive soldiers and to send literature and lecturers into prison camps.

"The War Department," he wrote, "believes that any procedure such as you suggest would be met with suspicion, hostility and resistance, and instead of being persuaded by unwelcome teaching the prisoners would turn against it. American newspapers, including German-language periodicals, are subscribed to by prisoners. However, they frequently boycott the literature made available to them. A prisoner is given the opportunity to learn the facts of recent history and the practices of democracy if he desires."

A Halt to Coercion. The Secretary added other facts on U.S. treatment of German prisoners: censorship excludes books and periodicals containing enemy propaganda. There has been "substantial success" in preventing the coercion of prisoners by Nazi extremists. German-speaking American officers and enlisted personnel are assigned to camps whenever possible. Interpreters are available for U.S. officers who do not speak German.

To many, this seemed much inferior procedure to Soviet Russia's efforts to, convert captured German soldiers. Unhampered by the rules of the Geneva Convention, and with interests vastly different from those of the U.S., Russia has set up two effective and functional organizations among its German prisoners (TIME, Oct. 30). One is political and educates Germans to the merits of Communism; the other provides a cadre of Russia-lovers for the future German officers corps. Many an influential and respected German officer, facing the prospect of Russian domination, has accepted the Soviet offer in the hope of postwar influence.

But the U.S. War Department had neither the authority nor the desire to offer prisoners postwar security in exchange for political conversion.

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