Faces in the Wallow

Few things about defeated Germany and the Germans are as yet clear to the Allied victors. But one thing is already clear: Germany after World War II is going to be much the same sort of psychopathic wallow which produced Naziism and Adolf Hitler after World War I.

By last week U.S. soldiers had been on German soil a little more than five months. In Aachen, Roetgen, Eilendorf, Cologne they had seen the ruined face of western Germany. And they had seen thousands of German faces:

P: A German woman and her two children -- a boy and a girl -- walked toward their house in a village near the Rhine. A young U.S. officer, whose unit had commandeered the house, saw them coming and barked: "Go on, go on! Beat it!" The woman stopped and tried to explain in German , that she wanted something in the house. Again the officer ordered her away. The boy cried. The girl ran past the officer, marched up the front steps, and got a doll's buggy. As the woman and the children walked off, the officer turned to U.P. Correspondent Ann Stringer and said: "A year ago, I couldn't have done that. But now -- I hate the bastards, I hate them all."

P: Karl Fuzeler, 16, was a blond, hand some boy, a Nazi youth leader who made three trips through the U.S. lines with military information for the retreating Wehrmacht before he was caught. A U.S. Army court sentenced him to death; on review, the sentence was reduced to life imprison ment. When a U.S. correspondent saw Karl Fuzeler in his cell, he was quite will ing to admit that Germany had been beaten. But he had lost none of his belief in Hitler and Naziism, none of his conviction that Germans are superior to Americans, Britons, or Russians. The Allied armies happened to have more materiel--that was all.

P: Franz Oppenhof, of Aachen, was a director of the local armament works, Veltrup, which manufactured parts for German guns and V-2 rockets. He knew everyone, he was respected, and the Nazis had allowed him to prosper without joining the Party. So the U.S. Military Government installed him as Aachen's occupation Buergermeister. Fifty-seven of the first 300 city functionaries chosen by him had been Nazi Party members. U.S. officers, weeding out 27 of them, had to agree with Herr Oppenhof that it was almost impossible to run the town efficiently without experienced Nazis.

P: At Harbach, a U.S. military court tried Karl Packbier and his friend, Robert Hogen, for hiding three German soldiers on Helen's farm. On trial, Herr Hogen and Herr Packbier turned out to be middleaged, prosperous, respectable--and innocent. Had not the Allies' broadcasters instructed Germans to give every aid to German deserters? Acquitted, Herr Hogen and Herr Packbier bowed their thanks to the court, walked out with dignity.

P: An old printer, no Nazi, had a son in the SS. Said the father, thinking of his black-shirted son: "If the 55 men must be executed as war criminals, let them execute him, too."

P: A correspondent asked a seven-year-old girl in Aachen what she thought of Adolf Hitler. Remembering her candy ration at school, she said: "He's a nice man who gives me chocolates." Her brother, 12, piped that Britain was a robber who ought to be punished, the U.S. a country run by "Jewish plutocrats."

P: Said a handsome, listless Jewess who had turned Protestant and married a German Catholic and now spoke as a German: "You must not hope for too much from our people. Those who have grown up under Naziism can never be the same again. The good ones have been killed in the Wehrmacht. I don't know why but that's always the way it is. The good ones get killed. There aren't any left now."

Men Without a Country? A team of U.S. civilian investigators--Author-Historian Dr. Saul K. Padover, Dr. Paul Robinson Sweet of Bates College, and Lewis F. Gittler, an OWI propagandist--went into western Germany to study German civilian attitudes. After chatting with scores of German workers, grocers, professional men, housewives, Nazis and non-Nazis, Dr. Padover reported:

"To me the most astonishing thing that came out of our talks with these Germans is their lack of nationalism. They don't want to govern themselves, and in a dozen different ways they expressed the same idea: they regard Germany's future as an Allied problem. One after another they expressed the hope that they will be treated as some sort of American colony. Instead of resisting the thought of being ruled, they welcome it with almost childlike relief."

Such Germans now feel that Naziism-- the only "nationalism" they have known since Hitler came to power--was forced on them by the Nazi Party zealots, most of whom had fled when the Americans arrived. The ordinary German blames Hitler not for beginning the war, but for losing it; not for killing Jews, but for bringing the Allied world down upon the Germany where Jews were killed.

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