Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  The picture-book is called “Trust no fox on green heath! And no Jew on his Oath!” and it is by a twenty-year-old German girl, Elvira Bauer.

  I have never, I think, seen a more sadistic, sickeningly cruel and obscene book than this, which is put into the hands of little children in order to teach them hatred and cruelty towards their fellow-creatures. I will not describe the illustrations, beyond saying that every page contains a gross caricature of a bent, pot-bellied, thick-lipped, hook-nosed figure engaged in some vile form of behaviour. There is one, even, of a Jew with a blonde German girl, and the scene is described in the text as the “Jew who doesn’t want his own women” but “steals for himself a German woman.” And over and over again come the words— “the Jew is the Devil in the world.”

  This book would revolt any normal, decent-minded adult. The thought of seeing it in the hands of young, impressionable children makes one feel physically sick.

  Yet if you and I were Nazi-ruled parents we could, at the very outside, do nothing except keep the book out of our home. We could not prevent its being shown to our children, at school or by other children. We could not even tell them that it is a horrible, disgusting book — because that would be treason, and put us in danger of imprisonment.

  This is literally true.

  The parents of quite young children have been taken away to prison for making derogatory remarks about the National Socialist party. The child, or children, have been committed to a State Children’s Home, so that they may be made into “good National Socialists.”

  There is another book, written by a German woman also, which is very different from Elvira Bauer’s hideous production. It is called “School for Barbarians” and is written (in English) by Erika Mann, daughter of the famous German writer, Thomas Mann.

  Read that book, if you wish to know more about the Nazi education of children. Of all the facts that she gives, there is one that, personally, I found most unendurable. At a German State School where milk was daily given to the children, they had to line up with their mugs. The little Jewish children lined up with the others. When their turn came, they were told to “Run along, little Jew,” and given no milk.

  They were always forced to come up with the others, so that they could be thus disappointed and humiliated, and so that the non-Jewish children could become accustomed to seeing such treatment of Jews.

  Children become adolescents.

  They are not little any more.

  They are young people, and now their plastic minds have received and responded to the strong, relentless pressure that has been applied all through the baby-years.

  The Hitler Youth plan, now in force in Germany, would certainly come into force in Great Britain, if the Nazis came to Britain. The plan, as now operating in Germany, includes some of the following features:

  A weekly evening or afternoon is devoted to the training of character and political outlook for boys and girls alike.

  There is compulsory sports-duty weekly, for those under sixteen. If necessary, it may take place on a Sunday.

  Boys aged from 16 to 18 undergo a pre-military training which is spread over twelve months. There are Saturday classes — shooting practice, and field-exercises.

  There are monthly Leadership courses, because the vacancies made by the calling-up of Leaders must be filled.

  In summer there are monthly Rallies — in winter they take place every other month.

  There are summer-camps... work in the harvest-fields... extra duties such as making collections... long marches to distant centres... the hours at which work must cease are fixed. For younger children they vary between 6 p m in mid-winter to 8 p m in summer. For the older ones, work stops at 10 p m.

  Everything is compulsory.

  It doesn’t matter, my dear young people, if the end of the day finds you tired out, if there is never any time in which to sit and dream, or follow your own bent in the familiar surroundings of home. The Party knows best.

  Besides, the Party has taken home-life into consideration, in planning out your days and nights for you. You can be certain of having every second and fourth Sunday of the month at home.

  In England, those of you who are not quite children and who could still remember the time before the Nazi rule, would suffer and rebel — but in silence. You would be made to learn very swiftly, by example as well as by precept, what it means to yourself and to your family, to disobey or to complain. In Adolf Hitler’s own words: “A German youth must learn to remain silent not only when he is rightly rebuked but also when he is wrongly rebuked.”

  You may be quite sure that those words would be made to apply a thousand times over to English youth, while English childhood would grow up in the shadow of the Swastika and would remember nothing, and be allowed to learn nothing, of the old traditions of tolerance and kindliness and freedom.

  We have all either read or heard of the things that have been done in the countries that Germany has, for the time, conquered. I am not going to write about them now. But I am going to ask you to notice how very often, in some description of foul and sickening cruelty, the expression occurs:— “A young Nazi—” did thus-and-thus— “Some young Nazis—” behaved in such-and-such a manner.

  Why is it always the “young Nazi”?

  Because the Nazi is made and not born. Just in the manner that I have tried to show here, the Hitler administration has taken, and is taking, the children of the country and turning them into what it wishes them to become.

  A grown man or woman may be forced, or influenced, or persuaded to a new point-of-view. Far more often, the point-of-view of the adult remains fundamentally that which was first instilled into his or her mind in babyhood.

  Ignatius Loyola knew what he was talking about when he said: “Give me a child until he is seven years old, and he will belong to me for life.”

  Trained in the Nazi school of thought as a child, with no counter influence permitted, the “young Nazi” of to-day has grown up honestly believing that might is right, that cruelty is no sin but something strong and splendid and lawfully to be enjoyed, and that his sole duty is to accept, ready made, everything that he is told by the Party.

  And so, under Hitler’s rule, would a new generation grow up in this, our own, country and it would, just as in Germany, be a generation of “young Nazis” — for the Nazis are not a race apart. They are only those people of any country in the world who are in agreement with the Nazi outlook, the Nazi beliefs, the Nazi code of behaviour.

  All this would make life so wholly different from anything we have ever known, that we can say that England would no longer be England.

  That is perfectly true.

  There would be no England any more, because there would be no English freedom, or way of living, or homes as we understand the word.

  For girls and women, there would be scarcely any possibility of personal happiness until or unless a generation grew up into whom the Nazi point-of-view had been completely instilled. difference: that even in this limited sphere, their rights are now subject to every form of tyrannical limitation.

  Women are expected to have as many children as possible for the State, either in or out of wedlock, so long as they are healthy and the parents are what is considered “racially pure.” But the children are State property.

  Even in the old Germany, before it fell into Nazi thraldom, women always ranked very low in the national conception of social life. Under the National-Socialist regime Germany has reverted altogether to the famous slogan of the three K’s (Kinder, Kuche,Kirche) — women have no concern with anything except children, kitchen and church — with this Nazi husbands hate to feel a woman’s brain busy — and the tradition that only her hands should be occupied may be well ingrained amongst men and women alike — but the least rebellious and most regimented woman on earth knows what it means to live in continuous privation and insecurity, to find herself unable to trust even her own nearest and dearest, to see her young children without sufficient
food or warmth and to have her men-folk forcibly taken away for cannon fodder.

  In the whole of the Nazi organisation there is not one woman whose voice counts for anything. It is the men who have made the war — the men in power — and it is they who are responsible for the appalling tyranny under which all Germany is suffering to-day.

  In England, we can still say with truth that “We live in a free country.”

  Certainly we have had to submit to new restrictions, to heavy taxation, and to privations that so far only deserve the name of inconveniences, but that may very well become much more severe.

  All the same, we are still a free country — and if you want to realise just how free, think of England and of ourselves under the conditions that would prevail, should Germany ever defeat us. All the privations, all the hardships and sufferings that Germany has herself undergone and is now inflicting on the countries in her power would be inflicted on us in the same degree or a greater.

  And it would not be of our own free will and for our own country’s sake, that we should suffer. It would be through merciless coercion, through fear, and at the dictation of those who hate England, and who would never again let her have any claim to the words: “We live in a free country.”

  We have got to win the war, whatever it may cost. We can’t afford to lose it, for if we do we lose all.

  We have got to avert the evil things from this country.

  I have tried to show you what would happen to us, here, in England in our own homes — in London, in the industrial centres, and the Cathedral cities, and the old-fashioned market towns, the farms and the bungalows and the cottages. And I say again that these things are not what might happen, should we fail to win the war, but what would happen.

  There are other aspects of Nazi rule that have been officially dealt with in print. They are of a kind that cannot be written of here.

  We have heard and read the words Concentration Camp and most of us have some idea of the horror for which they stand. We have heard and read of the rubber-truncheon men. Shall I tell you of one woman — a woman whose husband had been taken away and put into a Concentration Camp — not for any crime, but because of his political opinions? They were, or had been, wealthy and influential people. The wife had powerful friends and relations in other countries — countries that were still free. By dint of influence, of money, of bribery and threats, the next-to-impossible was accomplished, after months of effort. He was smuggled out — alive — and taken straight to a Paris hospital, where his wife rushed to meet him. They told her that he could not live.

  The rubber-truncheon men had beaten him up — young Nazis, in whose hands lies absolute power over their captives. Before she was allowed to go to her husband, the woman who had procured his release was warned by a white-faced, grave-eyed Sister: “You must be prepared — you understand — you won’t know him.”

  And because the human mind is what it is, and quails involuntarily before the uttermost limits of human anguish, the wife thought, for a split second, that the Sister had only said: “He won’t know you.”

  When she stood beside the smashed, blinded, bandaged thing on the bed, she understood.

  You have not been told these things to frighten you, nor to make you hate your enemies.

  You are told them because they might happen to you, and to the people you care for — your lover, husband, friends, children — just as they have happened, and are happening now in other countries where the people never dreamed that fear and horror and cruelty could be let loose.

  We are not going to let them happen here.

  Nothing else matters.

  If we undergo privations, restriction of many of the privileges and the freedom we have had, and if We have to face the actual invasion of the enemy, there is only one thing to be remembered: We have got to win.

  Nothing else matters.

  In writing the things I have written here, I have only told you, as well and as accurately as I can, some of the things that would happen to us if we — all or any of us — failed to resist at all and any cost.

  We are not going to fail.

  The Delphi Classics Catalogue

  We are proud to present a listing of our complete catalogue of English titles, with new titles being added every month. Buying direct from our website means you can make great savings and take advantage of our instant Updates service. You can even purchase an entire series (Super Set) at a special discounted price.

  Only from our website can readers purchase the special Parts Edition of our Complete Works titles. When you buy a Parts Edition, you will receive a folder of your chosen author’s works, with each novel, play, poetry collection, non-fiction book and more divided into its own special volume. This allows you to read individual novels etc. and to know precisely where you are in an eBook. For more information, please visit our Parts Edition page.

  Series One

  Anton Chekhov

  Charles Dickens

  D.H. Lawrence

  Dickensiana Volume I

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  George Eliot

  H. G. Wells

  Henry James

  Ivan Turgenev

  Jack London

  James Joyce

  Jane Austen

  Joseph Conrad

  Leo Tolstoy

  Louisa May Alcott

  Mark Twain

  Oscar Wilde

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  Sir Walter Scott

  The Brontës

  Thomas Hardy

  Virginia Woolf

  Wilkie Collins

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Series Two

  Alexander Pushkin

  Alexandre Dumas (English)

  Andrew Lang

  Anthony Trollope

  Bram Stoker

  Christopher Marlowe

  Daniel Defoe

  Edith Wharton

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  G. K. Chesterton

  Gustave Flaubert (English)

  H. Rider Haggard

  Herman Melville

  Honoré de Balzac (English)

  J. W. von Goethe (English)

  Jules Verne

  L. Frank Baum

  Lewis Carroll

  Marcel Proust (English)

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Nikolai Gogol

  O. Henry

  Rudyard Kipling

  Tobias Smollett

  Victor Hugo

  William Shakespeare

  Series Three

  Ambrose Bierce

  Ann Radcliffe

  Ben Jonson

  Charles Lever

  Émile Zola

  Ford Madox Ford

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  George Gissing

  George Orwell

  Guy de Maupassant

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Henrik Ibsen

  Henry David Thoreau

  Henry Fielding

  J. M. Barrie

  James Fenimore Cooper

  John Buchan

  John Galsworthy

  Jonathan Swift

  Kate Chopin

  Katherine Mansfield

  L. M. Montgomery

  Laurence Sterne

  Mary Shelley

  Sheridan Le Fanu

  Washington Irving

  Series Four

  Arnold Bennett

  Arthur Machen

  Beatrix Potter

  Bret Harte

  Captain Frederick Marryat

  Charles Kingsley

  Charles Reade

  G. A. Henty

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Edgar Wallace

  E. M. Forster

  E. Nesbit

  George Meredith

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Jerome K. Jerome

  John Ruskin

  Maria Edgeworth

  M. E. Brad
don

  Miguel de Cervantes

  M. R. James

  R. M. Ballantyne

  Robert E. Howard

  Samuel Johnson

  Stendhal

  Stephen Crane

  Zane Grey

  Series Five

  Algernon Blackwood

  Anatole France

  Beaumont and Fletcher

  Charles Darwin

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton

  Edward Gibbon

  E. F. Benson

  Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  George Bernard Shaw

  George MacDonald

  Hilaire Belloc

  John Bunyan

  John Webster

  Margaret Oliphant

  Maxim Gorky

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Radclyffe Hall

  Robert W. Chambers

  Samuel Butler

  Samuel Richardson

  Sir Thomas Malory

  Thomas Carlyle

  William Harrison Ainsworth

  William Dean Howells

  William Morris

  Series Six

  Anthony Hope

  Aphra Behn

  Arthur Morrison

  Baroness Emma Orczy

  Captain Mayne Reid

  Charlotte M. Yonge

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  E. W. Hornung

  Ellen Wood

  Frances Burney

  Frank Norris

  Frank R. Stockton

  Hall Caine

  Horace Walpole

  One Thousand and One Nights

  R. Austin Freeman

  Rafael Sabatini

  Saki

  Samuel Pepys

  Sir Issac Newton

  Stanley J. Weyman

  Thomas De Quincey

  Thomas Middleton

  Voltaire

  William Hazlitt

  William Hope Hodgson

  Series Seven

  Adam Smith

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Confucius

  David Hume

  E. M. Delafield

  E. Phillips Oppenheim