Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  You fell in love with one another for the only real reason that ever makes people fall in love; because you were strongly attracted to one another. If there should be difficulties in the way, as there only too often are, they are difficulties that may perhaps in time be overcome; that can, at all events, be talked over together.

  Such difficulties arise, as a rule, from circumstances. Sometimes, though less often, they are the result of somebody else’s unkindness, or folly, or selfishness.

  But your world isn’t in league against you, young lovers.

  Now think of yourself in a Nazi-ruled Britain.

  Imagine that two young people have been strongly attracted towards one another: that they have fallen in love.

  One of them has spoken his mind too freely about the local — Nazi — authorities.

  Perhaps, like a young Frenchman whose case was recently reported in the English papers, he has refused to salute a German official when told to do so.

  He will be arrested: beaten-up. If he is very fortunate, he will only get a year or so in prison; but how many have simply disappeared? Perhaps an official postcard from the camp at long intervals, then silence: if you are lucky your uncertainty may be ended by a cask of ashes. You will not have been allowed to see him all that while. Indeed, you and all your family will be suspect, because of your association with him. Everyone who wishes to stand well with the local authorities — naturally, these will all be sound Party men — will be at liberty to spy on you, and report you to the police if there is the slightest excuse.

  Two stories have reached me, one at first hand and one at second hand, about fugitives from Nazi oppression.

  The first story is about a young Austrian girl. She found friends in England, and was kindly looked after, and it was her English hostess who told me what had happened to her in a suburb of Vienna.

  This girl’s lover was wanted by the Gestapo for anti-Nazi political activities, and both of them had realised that their parting was inevitable. In haste and secrecy they met one evening at the girl’s home to say good-bye.

  Whilst they were together another lad, a friend of the girl’s, came in to warn them that the man must leave at once — his presence in the house was known. There was a small garden at the back: he could get out that way.

  The girl, listening in an agony, at first heard nothing after shutting the door behind her lover. Then there were sounds —

  When she crept out, much later, she saw him once more — lying dead on the ground, amongst the footmarks of many trampling feet.

  This story happened to reach me: there are many, many others of the same kind.

  The one that was told me at first hand came from an elderly man, also a refugee, who every evening in the club-room of the organisation that was giving him shelter listened-in to the news, given in German, on the wireless.

  He understood English perfectly. But he listened-in to the German voice, although knowing that much of what it said was false, because he thought that his wife and children, in Germany, might be listening to it also. That was the only link left between them.

  His wife had been ordered to divorce him. She was told that if she did not obey, her sons would be seized and put into concentration camps. The man himself was told that if he attempted to communicate with any of them, from abroad, his wife and children would be punished with the utmost severity.

  So he listened-in, every night, because they might be listening-in too, and that was the nearest that he could ever get to being in touch with them.

  You see how well the Nazis understand that human love and affection can be turned into a powerful instrument for smashing down the individual and furthering the purposes of the State. The two examples I have given you are just two individual examples. You know, and I know, that similar, and even more cruel, things have happened under German tyranny over and over again.

  You, who are young now, may have heard what was done to the young students of Prague University in this year — 1940. Because there had been murmuring and discontent under Nazi rule, it was decided to make “an example” of a number of students. So a party of them were called out, at random, stood against the wall and shot without more ado.

  Understand that when I use the words “at random” they mean — at the will of the local authorities. So that if your Nazi small bureaucrat dislikes you, or has quarrelled with one of your relations, he has his opportunity for paying back old scores with interest, and no one to ask any inconvenient questions.

  It was in Prague, too, that a woman who had incurred local Nazi enmity was ordered to choose which of three men — her husband, her son, or her brother — should be shot before her eyes.

  There is no protection against brutality of this kind, for the simple reason that the people in authority are all placed there because they are trusted members of the Nazi Party. So there is no one to whom the victims can appeal.

  In Great Britain, under our present rulers, law-abiding citizens still say instinctively, when violence has been either threatened or actually perpetrated: “Send for the police,” and feel confident of help and protection.

  What would it be like, I wonder, to know that the members of our Police Force were carefully trained to harshness and cruelty and that their jobs, and probably their lives, depended wholly on their unwavering allegiance to that training?

  We should find out just what it was like, if we lost the War and Germany won it.

  The Nazi dictatorship, like any other dictatorship, does not permit independence of any kind. There must be no individual development; only State-controlled thinking, and speaking, and acting.

  How can thinking be controlled by the State? Surely a man’s thoughts are his own?

  Perhaps, but the Nazis have realised that, by taking young children away from home influences and putting them under the control of their own agents, they can mould them according to the will of the State.

  What they make of the child will assuredly govern the development of the man.

  The Nazi “education” consists primarily, not in training the young to think for themselves, but in training them not to think for themselves. Can there be any greater crime against the mind of a child?

  Think of it, once more, in terms of yourself and of the people belonging to you.

  In England, within the last twenty years or so, children have been getting a much better chance. They are allowed more freedom, schools and parents have given up the old idea that whatever a child seems to enjoy doing must necessarily be bad for it — the children are, in a phrase that has become almost a catchword, allowed to “develop along their own lines.”

  But if the Nazis are in England.... their rule prevails, because if it is disobeyed the concentration camp, the rubber truncheon, or the firing squad, are going to enforce obedience.

  You little boys... you’ve got to start your pre-military training from the time you’re six years old. There is a weekly afternoon at school, devoted to “the training of character and political outlook.” You will learn the following catechism:

  Q. “Who is the man now living most like Jesus Christ?”

  A. “Adolf Hitler.”

  Q. “Who, by their devotion and sense of honour, are most like the disciples?”

  A. “Goring and Goebbels.”

  You will be told that the Jews are a contaminated race. It is quite right to hurt or humiliate any Jew. It is praiseworthy.

  Your one aim as you grow up must be to see that all countries which contain any German children are incorporated in the German Reich. You will be shown a great many pictures of war, with the German soldiers always triumphing, of battleships and machine-guns and aeroplanes, and of enemies lying dead or horribly mutilated.

  If your father and mother, my little boy, should have other ideas — gentler, and perhaps more like those that were taught by One who came out of Judea — then they are bad, disloyal people. You must neither trust them nor listen to them, little boy. Instead, you must be a splendid young
patriot and denounce them as “politically unreliable.”

  If you are very little, and something in your mind seems frightened and made unhappy by such an idea, then your State-controlled teachers will help you to overcome that fright and that unhappiness. They will ask you questions — what your parents talk about when they sit at home in the evenings — what kind of people visit them — whether any Jews come to the house — whether they speak of politics, and if so what they all say.

  The more you can tell, the more you will be praised. Why, at one of the great Hitler Youth Meetings, some children who had denounced grown-up people for speaking disloyally of the Party, were given prizes. The best prizes went to young boys who had betrayed their own parents to the Gestapo. That was a very fine, splendid thing to do.

  You are being made into patriots, little boys — obedient, unquestioning cannon-fodder obeying without so much as one single independent thought the behests of your great Leader, Adolf Hitler.

  Little girls, your education is just the same — except that, of course, you can’t be made into soldiers, or given any work that requires mental ability. Your mental abilities don’t matter.

  But you must learn to cook, and clean, and wait on the men, and above all you must grow up to know that your duty to the Party requires you to have children, and more children. Why, that’s what you’re for! Let a man have his will of you — give him children, in agony of body and then, in agony of mind and heart, lose them to the State while they are still babies.

  Your Nazi owners are, in accordance with their system, going to familiarise you with these prospects by seeing to it that you are made to stitch your dolls into the likeness of storm-troopers.

  You see, in the Book of Books, the author of Mein Kampf specifically states that the mental and spiritual training of girls must all be made subordinate to their preparation for motherhood.

  And all of you, boys and girls alike, are sent by your Ministry of Education to look at films showing the storm-troopers at work, and showing Germans in other countries being brutally tortured.

  But teachers would never....

  Oh, yes they would, if they were the teachers appointed by the Party — as, of course, they would be. They wouldn’t have any choice.

  Fathers and mothers wouldn’t have any choice, either.

  And after all, you must always remember that your little child may be a spy for the Party, repeating what is said and done at home, to Nazi agents in the schools.

  Here is a quotation from a speech made in 1933 at Munich by Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi Youth Leader. He shouted:

  “You say that the children of Germany cannot be regimented. I say that they can and will be! Every boy and every girl in this nation will be made a National Socialist! There will be no escape possible from the channel which we shall mark for the German to follow from childhood to manhood. And we shall produce Hot humanitarians and other weak-kneed types, but good soldiers, strong men and loyal National Socialists.”

  You see what it means?

  The children to whom he referred then are the young Nazis of to-day: the young airmen who bombed the East Dudgeon lightship: the young 17-year-old parachutist in Holland who, when asked why he had shot at fleeing women and children, replied: “Why should not I do it? You read Mein Kampf? The Fuhrer wrote that our race is the best in the world, and that’s why we must exterminate all other races.” Von Schirach spoke quite accurately when he said that there would be “no escape possible” for them. The machine was far too powerful for that. It was a Government machine, worked by ruthless and resolute men, against young children and helpless parents.

  The first thing done by Dr. Rust — the Nazi Minister of Education in Germany — was the cutting-down of the number of school-years. The school-leaving age for most German boys and girls is now thirteen instead of fourteen. In many schools, Dr. Rust has decreed that all lessons must end at noon. The afternoons are given up to military drill. In 1930 there were approximately 104,000 students at German Universities. Dr. Rust has cut the number down to 43,000.

  There is a German book on education, written by Dr. Stellrecht, Senior District Leader of the Nazi Party, which has been enthusiastically praised by Dr. Rust. Its main thesis is that “all knowledge and experience should serve the sole and supreme purpose of shooting straight to kill the enemy. Our boys must handle a rifle in as matter-of-fact a manner as they do a pen-holder.”

  Nor does German thoroughness neglect the preparation of girls for the inferior positions that are the only ones open to them. Government papers declare that “we need a generation of women who do not look upon the soldiering activities of their men folk as a necessary evil, but as a sacred duty. The militarisation of the women, of the entire female part of the population, is one of the great tasks of this century.”

  In no case will the individual be taken into account. The Nazis have no respect for individuality. Indeed, they proclaim openly the doctrine that the people are there for the State — so many actual or potential producers. All of them are part of the State machinery — they have no existence as individual human beings.

  Hitler himself has declared that “the German youth of the future must be as hard as steel from the factories of Krupp.” He has said that “the development of mental capacity is only of secondary importance.”

  We know — there can be no possible reason to doubt it — that similar pressure would be brought to bear upon the children of our own lands, should the Nazis ever come to power here.

  So if you, young parents living under the Nazi rule, have a highly gifted child, or an artistic one, or one of specially sensitive temperament, you must realise that the development of such qualities is not going to be taken very seriously. On the contrary, if your child’s talents interfere with his training as a good, unquestioning, tough young Nazi, then his talents — his individuality, in a word — must be crushed.

  And you may be sure that they will be. For it will not, of course, be you who will decide what he is to learn. Neither you, nor the child, will have any say in the matter.

  All teaching is State-controlled, which is to say: Party-controlled. It is strengthened by almost every other influence you can think of: wireless, films, theatres, newspapers — all are agencies of the Government and are used to further Nazi political aims. It is so in Germany now. And it most certainly would be so in Britain if the Nazis were ever to come here.

  There would be no relief from this State teaching, even in Church Schools. The Nazi system has taken away from the Churches in Germany — Lutheran and Catholic alike — the liberty that was solemnly promised to them by Hitler when he came to power. He did this in a very cunning way. The Church authorities were nominally left free: in reality, everything was done to take their pupils away from them and get them to go to the “Community” or Party Schools.

  In Bavaria, about 84 per cent, of the children attended Catholic schools. Then, in 1935, a big campaign was started. Slogans of the following kind appeared all over the countryside:

  “He who sends his child to the denominational school wrongs his child....”

  “We do not want Catholic or Evangelical Schools, we want the School of Adolf Hitler.”

  The Church authorities were, on the other hand, not allowed any form of publicity. Their letters and leaflets were forbidden, their printing presses closed down.

  The schools that the Churches were financing themselves were treated in another way. The entry of new’ pupils was made illegal.

  Church-run youth organisations were not forbidden: they were just made impossible. That is to say, the young people belonging to them were not allowed to have any of the fun that the State youth organisations enjoyed freely. They were not permitted to go for rambles, excursions or camping expeditions, they were forbidden to carry flags or wear uniforms or even badges, and they might not even have organised games.

  Naturally, it has become more and more difficult to prevent the young members from leaving the Church organisation
s where they had no right to any activities except “purely religious ones” for the State organisations.

  You must remember, too, that propaganda against the Churches is going on all the time. It must influence the young in the long run — as Hitler and his followers know very well.

  I fully realise that there are people in this country, as in all countries, who have no bias whatever in favour of the Churches. But I do not think that there are any of you who have not a very strong bias in favour of personal freedom of choice. And it is just exactly that which the Nazi regime is out to crush. It has crushed it in the Reich, and is fast doing so elsewhere.

  Read, and ponder, this quotation from Dr. Ley — Nazi controller and organiser of the Hitler Schools, and Labour Front Chief: “The Party claims the totality of the soul of the German people. It cannot and will not suffer that another party or point of view should dominate in Germany. We believe that the German people can become eternal only through National-Socialism and therefore we require the last German, whether Catholic or Protestant.”

  It is hardly necessary to add to that: yet here are two quotations from Alfred Rosenberg, officially the “final arbiter of ideological attainment.”

  “To-day a new faith is awakening... the belief that it is by blood that the divine nature of man is to be manifested. Veneration for the soldier fighting for the honour of his people is the newly-born attitude to life.”

  “A German Church, by and by, will abolish the Crucifix and replace it by the... hero in his highest manifestation.” Never mind whether you are, or are not, a professing Christian. I do beg of you to realise that whatever your views, they will be of no account at all as regards the teaching of your children. You will be permitted neither to direct nor influence them. All that will be done by the agents of the Party — on their lines, not on yours.

  A book for children, which has already sold more than seventy-thousand copies in Germany, is on my table as I write.

  It is very well produced, with brightly-coloured illustrations, which are technically very effective, bold print — and a high recommendation from the authorities. They tell German parents to place this picture-book in the hands of their children. “You will give them great joy and help to educate them so that in later life they will have their eyes opened as to who is the greatest enemy of mankind. The Devil in the world is the Jew!”