SLAVE-LABORING GERMAN PRISONERS OF WAR
By AUSTIN J. APP, Ph. D.1.
The Soviets Know How To Kill Off A Christian People
"Russia Holds Five Million German Prisoners," 2 as estimated June 29, 1945, is a caption in Senator William Langer's heart-rending speech, "Famine in Germany, in the United States senate (March 29, 1946. p.19). The war ended a year ago. Since then millions of American soldiers have returned to their mothers and wives and sweethearts. Ninety-nine per cent of our boys whom the Germans had captured, many of them civilian terror bombers, have been home a year.
But German mothers and sweethearts are still waiting for news of their men swallowed up in Russian prisons. Are their men dead or alive? Nobody knows. But they are worried. They have cause. A Russian general said to Lieut. General Ira Eaker, commander of the Mediterranean Allied air forces, "We've decided just to kill all the German men, take 17,000,000 German women and that will solve it" (San Antonio Light, Jun: 14, 1945).
What the Russians Do To the Women Is Now Known
German, Austrian and Hungarian women know that the Russians are keeping their war prisoners and that they have rounded up and deported all other workable males, but they can only surmise and suspect how they are treated. But they don't have to guess how the great Russian liberators treat the conquered women. They know. In Danzig, in Berlin, in Vienna, in Budapest, they know. A priest in a letter smuggled from Breslau. September 3, 1945.
reports:
"I unending succession were girls, women, and nuns violated . . . Not merely in secret, in hidden corners, but in the sight of everybody, even in churches. in the streets and in public places were nuns, women and even eight-year old girls attacked again and again. Mothers were violated before the eyes of their children; girls in the presence of their brothers; nuns, in the sight of pupils, were outraged again and again to their very death and even as corpses" ("In den Haenden unserer russischen Allierten," Der Wanderer, April 11, 1946). Sylvester C. Michelfelder, of the World Council of Churches. recently returning from Germany, confirms the pastor's account. He writes. "The women and girls are violated in sight of everyone. They are stripped of their clothes" (See Senator Langer's Famine in Germany, p.37. Also, "Ravishing the Women of Conquered Europe," by A. J. App. Ph.D.).
1 Until drafted into the army in 1942, the writer was head of the English department, University of Scranton, Scranton, Pa. Now professor of English at Incarnate Word College, San Antonio, Texas. Born in Milwaukee; A. B., 1924. St. Francis Seminary, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; M. A., 1926, Ph. D., 1929, The Catholic University, Washington, D. C. Spent four summers in Europe, 1927, 1931. 1932, and 1934. Dated, July 1, 1946.
2 Italics throughout the Pamphlet are my cwn.
The Soviets Rounded Up All Men. Abused and Deported Them
Suggesting that "If refugee scientists did go to Spain to work on atomic energy, they at least went there voluntarily," the Chicago Tribune asserts that "Stalin rounded up all the German scientists he could lay his hands on and carried them off to Russia. Nothing has been heard of them since" (Quoted from Our Sunday Visitor, May 5, 1946). The same pastor from Breslau describes that while the Russians ordered the women to stay put, they rounded up all adult males, clergymen included, and marched them sometimes in the middle of the night, to concentration points. These men, Catholics and Lutherans as well as Nazis, were ruthlessly and without warning torn from their families.
In fact, non-Nazis who had awaited the Russians confidently, suffered especially. They were questioned and tortured in a manner unbelievable. "They were beaten with every imaginable club, including iron rods until they were left lying with broken bones. With knives and bayonets the hooked cross was cut into their flesh . . . Similarly treated were prisoners of war who. discharged in the British and American zones, unsuspectingly entered the Russian zone to look for their relatives. Not even clergymen were spared," though in the end they were usually released. But all other workable men and youths were dragged off to work camps. Their families have not heard from them again (Ibid., Der Wanderer, April 18. 1946). Eastern Germany and much of Austria have become lands of old men, dying children, and "white" slaves!
Among the millions of prisoners of war, Soviet Russia either holds or has already done to death are boys who could hardly be called combatants. The Pope says, "Among the prisoners. some very young were conscripted in mass just before the end of the war and, without ever having handled a rifle, find themselves thrown into concentration camps" (June 1, 1946, Brooklyn Tablet, June 8, 1946).
The Pope Calls For "A Speedy And Efficacious Remedy"
Reminding the victors that he had spoken about the war prisoners scandal previously, in his Christmas allocution and in February, the Pope again on June 1, 1946, deplored "the hundreds of thousands of men still held prisoner," and declared that "such a situation calls imperiously for a speedy and efficacious remedy." He exclaims that moral rights and sacred needs "cry to heaven . . and demand that an end he be put to this regime of prisoner of war and concentration camps."
Because I want it ended, too, and believe that all decent people all over the world would want it ended if they knew. I am writing this pamphlet.
With The Principles Our Morgenthauists Pervert, Russia Destroys Millions of Christians
Some day, Americans, horrified at what Time Magazine called "history's most terrifying peace" (Oct. 15, 1945), will want to blame it all on Soviet Russia. But ladies and gentlemen, as long as our government lets any German girl be raped without punishing the G. I. who did it and lets our soldiers debauch German women but prohibits marrying them, recommends that one single German city be torn from Germany against the will of its people, endorses the pillage and expulsion of one single family on mere racial or national grounds, and keeps one German prisoner of war or scientist as a slave laborer, we, the United States, violate the principles of law, justice, and Christianity involved just as certainly and finally as Soviet Russia violates them when she extends to millions what we vengefully do to only one.
For principles. as for ropes, one break is as final as a million. Until we absolutely and honestly get back to principles in every case, for victor and vanquished, to the very last man we have no moral right whatsoever to complain when Soviet Russia practices our own Roosevelt-Morgenthau brutality policies more efficaciously and extensively than we anticipated: When Soviet - Russia takes five provinces and whole countries, whereas we wanted only two taken; When she loots and expels 12.000,000 people, whereas we recommended the expulsion of only the East Prussians and Rhinelanders; When she loots featherbeds along with watches and factories, whereas we believe in looting only cameras, paintings, and factories; When she tries to liquidate all clergymen, Christian and Nazi, whereas we liquidate only Nazi-tinged ones; When she rounds up all workable males, from garbage collectors to scientists, whereas we rounded up only the scientists; and finally. When she holds, slaves, and indoctrinates in communism five million German prisoners of war, whereas we hold, slave. and indoctrinate in our ism only 300,000 of them!
The Old Testament Revenge Policies of Our Government Must be Changed For Christian Policies
The Roosevelt-Morgenthau peace policies towards Germany are revenge-lusty jungle policies. They are responsible for making this "history's most terrifying peace". Their fruits are starvation, misery, and death for the vanquished and their neighbors; and moral degeneration — loot, rape, drunkeness sexuality, distrust, and quarrelling—for the victors. Let's have an end of them.
The most conspicuous and vicious Big Three lapse from Christianity into paganism and Judaism is its reparation slavery of German prisoners of war and civilians. It is not a Soviet invention: it was Roosevelt who in the Morgenthau Plan proposed it at Quebec, in September, 1944. where in Article 5 (d)
he called for "forced German labor outside Germany." Let's end it now. Once and for all, let's get rid of the Old Testament revenge-lusty influence in our government and stop giving Soviet Russia the chance to say with Shylock. "The villany you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction"
The Eye-For-An-Eye Boys Induce The Army to Put "America's Convenience" Above God's Inclienable Rights
On October 21, 1944, "Liberator" Roosevelt had said, "The German people are not going to be enslaved, because the United Nations do not traffic in human slavery." On V-E Day, according to Newsweek (May 21, 1945, p.38), "Briefly the Army informed its German prisoners that the Geneva Convention called for their repatriation as soon as feasible after the end of hostilities."
This was legal and Christian. But it did not please the harsh-peace boys. Typical of their attitude was and is Walter Winchell's declaration, who, lumping all German prisoners together as Nazis, screeched.
"Sending back healthy Nazis to live in Germany is an insult to living and dead American soldiers. Those Nazi prisoners deserve to be put behind bars for the rest of their ignoble lives—like all vicious and hardened criminals" (San Antonio Light, May 30, 1945).
Quickly the Army backed down, and like Mr. Winchell, lumping the estimated third Catholic and third Lutheran boys all together as Nazis, announced that, after eliminating the sick and the officers, "The other 300,000 Nazi POW's here, assigned to jobs on farms, factories and military posts, will stay 'as long as it suits America's convenience'" (Newsweek, May 28, 1945. p.34). For German prisoners of war, therefore, God's inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were now abrogated, and "America's convenience," no less than Stalin's convenience, became the Moloch over the lives of the vanquished prisoners of war.
"America's Convenience" Sometimes Spelled Ill-Treatment for Our Prisoners of War
In his Christmas Eve allocution, seven months after the surrender, the Pope declared, "we remember with profound sorrow all those who, although the end of the war has been proclaimed, must this year again pass the beautiful season in a foreign land and feel . . . the torment of their uncertain lot and of their separation from parents, wives, children, brothers, sisters, all their dear ones."
A Catholic nun, forty years a teacher who, like millions of other Americans, had near or distant relatives in Central Europe. also remembered a nephew of hers in an American prison camp. and
three days after the Pope's mournful words, was able to visit him in a New Mexico prison camp. When, before unconditional surrender, she had visited him in a former camp, he had looked well and praised American adherence to the Geneva Convention. Now, seven months after surrender, she saw him approach as a gray, unrecognizable, walking skeleton.
Starved Forty-Three Pounds in Three Months
"I lost forty-three pounds," he said, "since I was sent to this camp three months ago. We had to pick 190 pounds of cotton a day . . . For breakfast we get three slices of bread and black coffee without sugar; for dinner two slices of bread, some kind of soup with a thimble full of fat in it and three or four spoons full of vegetables; for supper two slices of bread and again three or four spoons full of vegetables."
When his aunt gave him something substantial to eat, his stomach, shrunken from long starvation, rejected it. This prisoner is a good Catholic, was never a Nazi or a communist. He is a husband and father, thirty-six years old. Until Germany's surrender, he used to get letters from his wife. But for some reason, tormentingly unknown to him, he had been getting no mail from home since the surrender (to January, 1946).
Geneva Says Prisoners to be Fed Like Base Camp Troops
In the Geneva Convention for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, drafted July 27, 1929, proclaimed August 4, 1932, the United States, and most of the other civilized nations, Russia notoriously excepted, pledged themselves to certain standards of humane treatment of prisoners. Regarding food, Article 11
specifies that "The food ration of prisoners of war shall be equal in quantity and quality to that of troops at base camps . . . All collective disciplinary measures affecting the food are prohibited."
General Marshall Says We and Germans Followed Geneva During the War
While Germany was still fighting and capable of reprisals, American army leaders insisted successfully that these provisions be carefully lived up to. The American General Staff declared that the Germans were doing so too. To the constant pressure by Morgenthauists and American Legion bosses for a brutilized treatment of German prisoners of war, Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, in a letter of January 5, 1945, to the American Legion Commander, declared:
"Our treatment of them (prisoners of war) is governed by the Geneva Convention which, among other provisions, requires them to be furnished rations equal in quality and quantity to those of American troops at base camps in this country. This is done as a matter of treaty obligation and our soldiers in
German hands receive generally reciprocal treatment" (In National Legionnaire, February, 1945).
For Americans, who are only too ready to believe any general's word, their Chief of Staff's assertion that "our soldiers in German hands received generally reciprocal treatment" ought to be sufficiently final. The truth of his contention was confirmed after Germany's unconditional surrender, when in spite of the obliteration and terror bombings, the communication breakdown, and the chaos of Germany's last days, "the American Red Cross reported officially that '99 per cent of the American prisoners of war in Germany have survived and are on their way home'" (See Progressive, Feb. 4, 1946, p.1).
Germans Treated American Prisoners Much Better Than Confederates Treated Yank Prisoners
Such a high percentage of survivals is remarkable and may prove higher than our record towards German prisoners. In our Civil War, for example, as Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago recalled, in one Southern camp alone, Andersonville, Georgia, "out of 50,000 men, 13.000 died" (See, Commonweal, July 6, 1945, p.283). Compared with that mass murdering of Americans by fellow Americans the alleged "massacre of more than 100 U. S. trops at Malmedy. Belgium, during the 'Battle of the Bulge,'" (INS, Frankfurt, May 6, 1946), however tragic and criminal, is nevertheless, even if the number should eventually prove five times as large, only a relatively small incident, not a mass crime. It becomes still smaller when compared to the now-quite-generally admitted massacre of 8,600 Polish officers at Katyn by Soviet Russia, one of our fellow war trialists of the Germans (See Our Sunday Visitor. Dec. 3, 1944, p.12)!
As the Assistant Judge Advocate of Jefferson Barracks, said in St. Louis, Missouri, April 27, 1945. "The Germans even in their greatest moments of despair obeyed the Convention in most respects. True it is that there were front line atrocities— passions run high up there—but they were incidents, not practices; and maladministration of their American prison camps was very uncommon" (Lt. Newton L. Margulies: see Vital Speeches, May 15, 1945, p.480).
No American or Other Prisoners of War in German Concentration Camps
Correcting the perversions of our publicists who kept giving the impression that German concentration camps (maintained for conscientious objectors, war resisters, saboteurs, spies, and common criminals) and prisoner of war camps were one and the same thing. Assistant Judge Advocate Margulies said emphatically, "Those bodies lying in Erla, Belsen and Buchenwald were never clothed in American uniforms."
It ought, of course not to be necessary for General Marshall or anybody else to prove that the Germans
generally lived up to the humane conventions regarding prisoners of war for us to live up to them. True Christians would treat German prisoners of war and anybody else right no matter what they or their government had done. But in its attitude towards the Germans, America is not Christian: it has been demoralized into an eye-for-an-eye Judaism. The "policies of our Government under the control of Mr. Baruch and Mr. Sidney Hillman and Mr. Morgenthau." to use Senator James O. Eastland's words (Senate, March 29, 1946). is a revenge-lusty eye-for-an-eye pile of sadisms.
To get even a minimum of justice out of revenge hounds, one must beg them at least not to take an eye for a finger nail. One must begin by honestly delimiting German violations so that the revenge-lusty victors won't continue casting beams where there were only motes. The Germans did not put American prisoners of war or other prisoners of war in their concentration camps. So presumably even our eye-for-an-eye boys should not suggest doing it to our German prisoners of war and should be horrified when France and Russia do it to them. Likewise, the Germans did not starve their prisoners of war, but as Marshall said, fed them generally according to the Geneva Convention.
But there were a few cases of starvation, especially in the last hectic weeks before German surrender. It is a sad reflection on American OWI and journalistic honesty that these few cases have been so presented to the public as to suggest that all American prisoners of war were starved. I have seen the picture of the very same starved soldier (now recuperated in Wisconsin) at least twenty times. The fact that these perverters of the truth could apparently find only that case for publicizing is just another proof that General Marshall was right.
It is however obviously true that during the last bitter and chaotic days of Germany's collapse prisoners of war there suffered some of the same hardship the population suffered. On March 17, 1945, the war department explained that as "the inevitable result of Allied drives into the Reich," hardships for American prisoners would develop, but that "There was no disposition to blame the Germans for these hardships" (INS, Washington). The report continued, "For the most part, the Germans have abided by the Geneva convention regarding prisoners of war."
"American prisoners released on April 26 from a camp at Unter Thurheim. Germany, said their treatment was 'swell'" (Peace Action, May, 1945). One American prisoner in the well-known Stalag Luft camp for fliers declared, "There have been no atrocities in this camp. The treatment by the Germans is fair and good" (San Antonio Light, Nov 26, 1944).
No Evidence That Germans Were Essentially Less Correct in the East Than in the West
Wherever Soviet Russia's "iron curtain" has not kept Americans from seeing for themselves, they have been reluctantly forced to see that in their treatment of women, property, and prisoners of war the Germans were remarkably correct. Nevertheless, determined to extract their "eye" and vent their sadism on the vanquished, they then take refuge in the uninvestigated and cry, "Oh, but what the Germans did to the Russians in the East is something awful!"
It is probable, conjecturally. that since Soviet Russia had not signed and dd not abide by the Geneva Convention. German treatment of Russian prisoners in many incidental matters reflected Russian treatment of German prisoners. But otherwise, so far at least, there is no evidence whatever that German behavior in the East was substantially different from that in the West. A year ago, the U. S. Army turned over to Soviet Russia General Andrei A. Vlassov and thousands of his Cossacks who had deserted the Russian army to fight with the Germans for the liberation of their bolshevik-ridden country (AP, Frankfurt, June 1, 1946). This February, the U. S. Army again "turned over to Russia more than 50,000 men caught fighting for Germany who have been classified as Russian nationals" (AP, Frankfurt, March 2, 1946). No army in World War II had as many deserters fighting on the other side as Soviet Russia had deserted, or would they have continued to fight on the German side to the bitter end. if the Germans had treated Russian prisoners of war or the occupied parts of Russia badly, or nearly as badly as our hate-spewing eye-for-an-eye boys try to suggest? In the meanwhile, we also remember that the Soviets called the London Polish government fascist criminals for suggesting a Red Cross investigation of the 8.600 skeletons of Polish officers at Katyn!
While Germans Could Retaliate we Carefully Respected the Convention
In brief, all evidence supports General Marshall's assertion that the Germans generally lived up to the Geneva Convention towards our prisoners of war. Before Germany's unconditional surrender, we, as well as Britain, also lived up to them. German prisoners declare this, General Marshall, in his letter of January 5, 1945, cites a Congressional Report to the effect that we "carried out to the letter," the Geneva Convention and that "the slightest deviation therefrom on our part would instantly result in more than retaliatory measures on the part of our enemies against American prisoners in their hands."
Children and savages, according to a God-given instinct, begin to be kindlier towards an enemy once he is down and out. Harshness during the war one might possibly try to justify as retaliatory pressure to induce better treatment on the part of the enemy.
But cruelty and harshness to the helpless captives after there is no more enemy is sheer sadism. Traditionally Americans were not known to be like that.
But there is something curiously satanic about our harsh-peace boys. The more down the German opponent is, the nastier they get. After unconditional surrender, the Sister's nephew. previously well treated, was rapidly starved down forty-three pounds. picking 190 pounds of cotton a day on seven slices of bread, black coffee, and some vegetable soup. The change from the correct and decent treatment before the surrender to a rude, often harsh treatment after the danger of retaliation had passed was planned and deliberate.
After Germany Surrender Our Attitude Became Mean
Entitling an item "Tightening Up," Time Magazine for May 7, 1945, describes army orders to reduce the quality of the rations for the "300,000-odd German war prisoners." Also the prisoners "were ordered to substitute the American for the Nazi straight-arm salute, get rid of all Nazi flags, pictures and emblems in their barracks". This "tightening up," violating the spirit of the Geneva Convention, though not explicitly the letter. seems to have been a hint to camp commanders to be just as brutal as they liked. How much this can be, (since Americans like the Germans made the mistake of belonging to Swift's human race), is somewhat suggested by the Lichfield affair, where one American advised regarding other Americans, "Just don't break too many bones" (See "Atrocities Or Our Own," Progressive, Feb. 25, 1946).
Some camps remained reasonably proper; a few certainly not. Of one, the teacher's prisoner-of-war nephew commented, "It was hard at home to be on the black list, being anti-Nazi, to keep out of a concentration camp. I had to get to America to find one, the last place where one would expect it." In addition to the starvation rations and hard work, "the worst thing is," he said, "to get put in the guard-house for things one actually cannot help. I was once imprisoned for five days because stems were found among the cotton, which I had not been able to get loose because as you see, my hands are all torn up from having to work under improper conditions."
Starvation and Other Cruelty
This prisoner insisted, as his aunt reported it to me. that during such special imprisonments, the men were stripped of their clothes, their hair was cut, and the hose turned on them. They were given two coverlets, but the yard was constantly watered to prevent their sitting down. He insisted, what only Lichfield could make me believe, that during the full five days he and the others were given absolutely nothing to eat, only water to drink. Such treatment comes under what the Holy Father in his Christmas Message of 1945 called an "unconscionable disregard for standards set up by international conventions."
Article 46 of the Geneva Convention declares that disciplinary punishment may be imposed only for acts for which the nation's own soldiers would be similarly punished, and furthermore. "Any corporal punishment, any imprisonment in quarters without daylight and, in general, any form of cruelty is forbidden."
As regards the violation of the Geneva Convention in this particular camp where the Sister's nephew and his comrades were abused. a quiet but firm protest brought a quick reform. By January 20, an unofficial letter was received reporting that the conduct of the commander of the camp was under investigation and that the 650 prisoners, including one priest, had been transferred. One of the most pathetic aspects of this case was that many of the American officers were revolted at the treatment they saw and administered, yet declared themselves afraid or unable to do anything about it! This is particularly pathetic when we remember that right now the Big Three Nuernberg war trialists are trying to hang 7,000,000 Germans, not for crimes, but for belonging to organizations some of whose members executed unjust and cruel orders!
In General, American, Like German, Treatment of Prisoners of War Was Not Too Bad
Nevertheless, in spite of the brutal treatment of German prisoners in the camp described and probably in some others, and of isolated acts of violence against them, as the massacre of nine German prisoners in their sleep by an American guard in Salina. Utah, on July 8, 1945, one can probably say of our treatment of prisoners of war what Allan Wood, front correspondent of the London Express said of the German treatment of prisoners. He observed that "the most amazing thing about the atrocities in this war is that there have been so few of them. I have come up against few instances where the Germans have not treated prisoners according to the rules, and respected the Red Cross. (From The Progressive, Feb. 4, 1946, p.1).
Victors Accused of "Unconscionable Disregard for Standards"
If we have not treated prisoners of war too badly, why then did our own American Catholic bishops last November cry out against "the cruel treatment of prisoners of war which should have no place in our civilization" (Nov. 19, 1945, N.C.W.C. News). Since the Germans and Japanese had long ago surrendered their prisoners, this charge of cruelty was against the erstwhile crusaders for the Four Freedoms. Or what caused the Pope at Christmas to devote three long paragraphs to a sorrowful and direct condemnation of the treatment of war prisoners by the victors?
Among other things the Holy Father declared, "we cannot conceal the pain we felt when, in addition to the sufferings inevitably accruing from the war. we heard of others which were almost on purpose inflicted on prisoners of war and deported peopose."
ple; when, in some instances, we saw their captivity prolonged without reasonable cause; when the yoke of imprisonment of itself oppressive. was aggravated by hard and unjustified labor, or when in unconscionable disregard for standards set up by international conventions and by the still more sacred standards of Christian and civil conscience, they were refused in an inhuman way the treatment due to the vanquished" (From New York Times, Dec. 25, 1945, p.14C).
From the gentle and kindly Holy Father, this is strong language. He charges that the victors refused the prisoners of war "in an inhuman way the treatment due to the vanquished," that they are guilty of an "unconscionable disregard" of the international conventions. This is serious: those who proclaim themselves holy enough to treat virtually the whole German people as war criminals are charged bluntly by the world's great impartial observer with inhumanly violating those international conventions which, by the explicit statement of the supreme Allied chief of staff, the Germans carefully respected!
Victors Base There Injustice on a Verbal Ambiguity
This June 1, while declaring that the duty to repatriate prisoners of war cries to heaven, the Pope added. "We are not unaware that the cold texts of international law do not oblige the victor to free his prisoners till after the conclusion of peace" (Tablet, June 8, 1946). Here is the "cold text" to which he refers. Article 75. of the Geneva Convention, reads,
"When belligerents conclude a convention of armistice, they must, in principle, have appear therein stipulations regarding the repatriation of prisoners of war. If it has not been possible to insert stipulations in this regard in such convention, belligerents shall nevertheless come to an agreement as soon as possible. In any case, repatriation of prisoners shall be effected with the least possible delay after the conclusion of peace."
Unconditional Surrenderism can "Justify" any Other Barbarism
It can easily be seen that the Big Three unconditional surrenderists violated this Article when they refused to admit conditions for the repatriation of German prisoners of war. Any honest man can also see that keeping German prisoners a year after the cessation of hostilities violates radically and unmistakably the whole spirit of the Article. That keeping German prisoners a year after the shooting has stopped is a brazen, deliberate violation of the spirit of the Convention becomes doubly apparent when we find, in the margin opposite Article 75, in the "Official U. S. Statutes At Large," the Article officially summarized as "Release and repatriation upon cessation of hostilities." That expresses the real meaning and intent of the Article.
Nevertheless the cold text of the French original is literally translated "after the conclusion of peace." not "cessation of hostilities." Consequently, when
the Big Three insisted on unconditional surrender and destroyed all government in Germany with which to conclude a peace, they made it technically possible for themselves to crucify every Christian and civil standard and yet slither along within the letter of most international conventions, which were framed for normally bad men, not for principle-breaking Goliaths. Men who could append the Atlantic Charter to the Yalta betrayal of Poland can certainly also sentence German prisoners of war to permanent slavery without violating the forced letter of the Geneva Convention—simply by rationalizing that no peace has been concluded, since there is no German government with which to conclude it!
Ancient Jews and Pagans Used to Kill or Enslave the Vanguished
When President Roosevelt, returning from Yalta, prepared Congress for his having authorized "Russia to take several million Germans as slave laborers," by saying that this "would be a good thing" (See, Peace Action, May 1945), decent men throughout the country were horrified. Here at one blow Christianity was reverting to the central atrocity of paganism and Judaism. When the Jews conquered the Chanaanites at Jericho "they took the city, And killed all that were in it. man and woman, young and old... But Josue saved Rahab the harlot" (Josue. 5:21), which policy was the ancestor of the present Morgenthau Plan! When Greek and Roman fought, the vanquished became the permanent slaves of the victors. That practice was the Moloch mark of ancient Judaism and paganism. The banning of that horrible practice has been Christianity's most dramatic softening of man's inhumanity to man. And now at Yalta, the self-acclaimed re-educators of Germany with one stroke of the pen restored slave labor, the enslavement of the vanquished!
Labor-Slaving Vanquished, Like Cannibalism, Not Mentioned in Geneva Convention
When "Liberator" Roosevelt's staggeringly barbarous suggestion was first made, the Most Rev. J. Francis A. McIntyre exclaimed, "When we hear of war indemnity being satisfied by slave labor, can we accept that such is for the common good? Slave labor is against the dignity of man. It is unjust. It is a tyranny, and the common good cannot be served by injustice" (From Brooklyn Tablet, March 17, 1946). The Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin pact to take human beings as war indemnity chattels, to keep German prisoners of war as labor slaves, is so monstrous a reversion to barbarism that the Geneva Convention, adverting only to the prisoner problems of presumably civilized nations, no more thought of specifically condemning slave labor reparations than of prohibiting their consumption in cannibalistic rites! Cannibalism, rape, and slavery, (until the Big Three undertook their crusade for re-educating the Germans!) under the pressure of Christianity had dropped out of the vocabulary of International Conventions.
U. S. Becomes Slave Laborer and Slave Dealer
But the almighty Big Three revived the last two on a very idealistic plane: they unofficially debauched German women to prove to them that their warriors had been defeated, and they officially kept German soldiers as slave laborers to teach them that it was wrong to fight for their country. Our own government, having captured more Germans than it could use became not only a slave laborer but also a slave dealer. By October 1945, we had in this manner handed over to France 450,000 German prisoners of war. By the spirit of the Geneva Convention and by "the still more sacred standards of Christian and civil conscience" invoked by the Pope, it was our sacred duty to get them home to their families as quickly as we got our own prisoners back from the Germans.
Laboring Prisoners After the War is a Crime, Not During the War
Since it is often asserted as a conscience-smotherer that the Germans used French prisoners of war as laborers, and that they conscripted civilians from occupied countries as laborers, one must emphasize that the most important factor as to the right and wrong of things in war is precisely whether they were done during the war or after the war. Both sides were perfectly within their rights to employ prisoners of war as non-military laborers while the fighting was in progress. Article 30 expressly permits such labor. What the Geneva Convention does not permit is keeping prisoners of war after the fighting is over. That is where the crime lies, and that is the crime we and the British and the Russians commit as long as we have not taken all German prisoners home.
Catholic and Protestant Churches of Germany Give Victors a Lecture in Justice
That is the crime the German bishops described in their joint pastoral this spring, which so irritated the conscience of our AMG, over their to teach the Germans the democratic Four Freedoms. that they promptly caused it to be withdrawn (INS, "U. S. Catholics Indignant At Gag on German Bishops," Alamo Register. May 3, 1946). What the German bishops, apparently more imbued with the Four Freedoms than their re-educators. said was, "The German people's sense of justice suffers also lately from the fact that today, almost twelve months after the cessation of hostilities, millions of German prisoners of war are still detained indefinitely, often under miserable conditions, and deprived of their freedom.
"Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are put like slaves to forced labor, although the only thing with which they can be reproached is the fact that they were soldiers. Many of these poor fellows are without news from home and have not been allowed to send a sign of life to their dear ones" (From Brooklyn Tablet, May 4, 1946). Protestant Church leaders in Germany felt the same way about the detention of millions of German boys by the Allies. Dr. Otto Fricke, director of foreign relations for the Evangelical Church in Germany, declared after the Catholic joint pastoral had been suppressed that previously "a similarly critical, though more mildly phrased letter, was read in Evangelical churches" (RNS, Frankfurt, April 29, 1946).
The U.S. in Principle Just as Guilty as Soviet Russia
It would be "nice" if this German condemnation pertained only to Soviet Russia. But unfortunately, as long as we hold thousands of Germans as slaves over here and possibly a million farmed out to France and Britain, we are in principle just as guilty as Russla—and so our AMG boys, unwilling to free the slaves, perferred to shackle speech and the press, too. When one starts being unjust, one can't stop with one injustice. Any just and honest American will hang his head in shame that his country should be partner to the pagan and Judaistic reparation slavery of prisoners of war. "Multitudes of civilians and prisoners of war have been deported," charged the American Catholic bishops this spring, "and degraded into forced labor unworthy of human beings" (NC, Washington, May 5, 1946)!
German Alien Labor Draft in War no Justification for United Nations Labor Slavery in Peace
Some harsh peace boys, determined to be as brutal as possible but on an eye-for-an-eye pretext, like to remember that the Germans drafted foreign labor while they were waging a last ditch fight against what has proven the rape of their women and the looting of their dearest possessions. Conscripting foreign labor during a war can no more be used as a precedent for doing the same in peacetime than shelling cities in war can be used to justify shelling them in peace. The problem is too complex to be handled briefly. Deep thinkers see that all conscription, in peace and war, by friend or enemy, violates the spirit of Christianity, exactly as slavery always violated it, though it took Christian thinkers centuries to fully recognize the violation. Actually, conscripting civilians during a war for so-called defense is no more wrong than conscripting soldiers. Someday, we will recognize both as equally wrong.
But in the meanwhile, nations that frown on any conscription in peacetime, adopt it unblushingly in wartime. Similarly, if a nation during a war, defending itself against the obviously unjust policy of unconditional surrender, conscripts alien labor as an emergency measure and as a military necessity, she cannot really be justified, but no international lawyer and no right-minded person anywhere would consider such conscription comparable in iniquity to the permanent use of the vanquished as slave laborers, when hostilities and "military necessity" have ceased.
The one is like the bombing and destruction of cities and civilians during a war, wrong enough; but the other is like making the destruction of cities and civilians a permanent way of life, unthinkable (except
of course to our Morgenthauists who want to keep German industrial centers in a permanent state of destruction!)
German Foreign Labor Was Partly Voluntary, Partly Drafted
Furthermore, regarding the so-called German use of slave labor, it is necessary to explain that it was not literally slave labor at all. At worst it was conscripted labor, alien labor drafted to work in Germany for the normal wages given for such work. Slave labor is our practice towards German prisoners of war, whom we farm out at eighty cents a day to work at jobs for which the employers pay the government prevailing wages of six to twelve dollars a day. That is slave labor, and that is what the Germans did not do to their alien workers. They merely drafted them to work where the Germans needed them and paid them their full customary wages, in some cases more than they had ever earned before. A Saturday Evening Post article informs us that. "French, Dutch and other western workers often were paid on the same level with the Germans, and many of them were allowed to move about with a certain degree of freedom, visit cinemas and ride the street cars" ("Hitler's Slave Plan Worked," July 14, 1945). Obviously, this is metaphorical rather than real slavery.
Incidentally it should also be noted that much of what our war propagandists called German slave labor, not only was not slave labor, but it was not even conscripted labor. It was exactly the same kind of labor as that of the Mexicans who voluntarily came to work in the United States during the war. "It must be remembered," continues the Post article, "that some foreign workers had gone to Germany of their own free will."
In any case, the German use of alien labor, in the first place, was never literally slave labor, only drafted labor, secondly, it was a war emergency measure. To try to use it as a justification for the cold-blooded peace-time literal slave-labor use the Big Three are making of German prisoners of war and some civilians is possible only to people who are bent on proving themselves "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin" Swift denounces.
The U.S. Trades Some German Prisoners to France for Work and Abuse
But still more shocking than the sufficiently immoral retention of the prisoners is the treatment given the millions of prisoners we either handed over as slaves to our Allies or at Yalta encouraged them to keep. Instead of sending German prisoners of war home, as law and Christianity demanded, we apparently contracted to hand 1,750,000 of them over to our Allies. As of March, 1946, some 560,000 Wehrmacht soldiers, slave-traded to her by us, were toiling in France. All former SS or Gestapo suspects had previously been weeded out and were presumably being treated outright as war criminals. The French government, paying 10 to 13 francs for or to them, farms them out for 90 to 120 francs a day—literal
slavery ("Slave Labor," Progressive, March 25, 1946)
How were the slave prisoners of war, really our responsibility, treated? They were abused, starved crippled, so that after a few months 200,000 of these boys, whose mothers and wives were crying for them at home, were too sick and broken to work any more.
French-Belgian Abuse of Our German Prisoners Was Funny!
Their treatment and condition attracted no notice, except amusement on the part of some American officers, who related with chuckles that "most of the food they're getting is stuff... our boys wouldn't touch... and then we work the tail off them." Lt. Col. Thomas L. Donnelly, commanding officer of a repatriation center in Belgium, reported gleefully, "But get one of those Russian boys or a Pole out there with a crew of P.W.'s and you never saw people work so hard in your life" (See Social Justice Review, October, 1945, p.191).
One French Paper Thought Starving German Prisoners of War Not Funny
Suddenly a small, sour whiff appeared. The French paper, Figaro, to its eternal credit, protested that "In certain camps for German prisoners of war... kiving skeletons may be seen, almost like those in German concentration camps, and deaths from undernourishment are numerous. We learn that prisoners have been savagely and systematically beaten and that some have been employed in removing mines without protection equipment so that they have been condemned to death sooner or later."
Daily Many Died of Over-Work and Starvation
In one camp of 20.000, the prisoners were given only 900 calories a day (our soldiers get nearly 4000), and twelve died every day of this starvation. Some prisoners tried to stay alive by eating coal found near the tracks. A young French soldier reported that he watches them "dying of hunger, sleeping on cold cement floors, in no way protected from rain and wind. I see kids of 19 who beg me to give them certificates that they are healthy enough to join the French Foreign Legion" (See Louis Clair's "The Revival of the Slave Trade." Progressive, January 14, 1946). Another witness of another camp reports, "I have seen them beaten with rifle butts and kicked . . . in the streets of the town because they broke down of overwork."
Many men were beaten till their limbs are broken. They were given hardly enough straw to sleep on. They died of hunger, and exhaustion, and of tuberculosis. And the authorities to whom we, whose responsibility they were, had given them as slave laborers, grinned happily; and our men who knew of it grinned, too: after all, what was the Morgenthau Plan for, if not to destroy the German race biologically! And keeping German men from home, and starving them and working them to death was the quickest way to that end. Besides, it also left German girls and mothers less protected and more amenable to chocolate hers — and "re-educatio" by de-
bauchery! "'That's the way it is,' said the captain. 'Americans look on German women as loot, just like cameras or Lugers'" (N. Y. World-Telegram, January 21, 1946)!
When Red Cross Complains, the Brutality No Longer Seems Funny
But somewhat like a conscience-shocker occurred when the International Red Cross charged that the prisoners of war we slave-traded to the French "were being treated below standards set by international convention" (AP. Nov. 3, 1945). Then General Eisenhower, high-ranking re-educator of the Germans, the same Germans whom General Marshall declared to have lived up to the Convention, ordered the delivery into French slave labor of further American-captured German prisoners stopped until the French gave guarantees of better treatment!
90,000 Germans Broken and Ruined in a Few Months
When the prisoners whom our French fellow-re-\neducators of the Germans had in a few months
broken and crippled started coming back, some 90,000
of them, they looked like corpses and skeletons. AP
reporter, Mel Most, declared, "I can report that many
of them looked almost like corpses resurrected from
the horror camps of their own fatherland" (where,
be it said again, the Germans put no prisoners of
war but conscientious objectors, war resisters, saboteurs. spies, and common criminals). They were "a
beggar army of pale, thin men clad in vermin-infested tatters" (AP, "'Operation Skinny' Well Named:
German PWs Half Starved." Nov. 3, 1945).
In spite of this peacetime, bestial mistreatment of the prisoners of war of a country which by our own testimony treated ours decently and correctly, the "U. S. Group Control Council," according to the New York Times of December 8, 1945, "has recently decided that all German POWs of this country are going to be turned over to the French, starting with those leaving this month." In March, according to The Progressive, General Buisson asserted that "France requires another 500,000 German slave laborers and expects to receive them from the United States." This General Buisson, who wanted another half million German boys, is the same one who replied to Figaro's charge, on September 22, 1945, that the rations given to German prisoners of war in French POW camps were "precisely sufficient to keep a man alive who stays lying down and passive, without having to fear that he will quickly die"!
of Anti-Christ".
Unbelievably, after a temporary interruption following the Red Cross protest, the U. S. Army this spring was "again handing" German prisoners of war over to the French "at a rate of 100,000 a month" (Progressive, March 25, 1946). Of this type of crime, the Chicago Tribune, specifically referring to our prisoner deal with Britain, said in an editorial en-
titled. "Uncle Sam: Slave Dealer" (Feb. 20, 1946), "This is nothing but slavery. The United States, by turning over the prisoners, becomes a common slave dealer. There is nothing in the rules of war . . . that permits such a practice . . . We turned hundreds of thousands of German prisoners over to the French. The French abused and starved them . . . There has never been in the history of Christian civilization a parallel to the actions against its conquered enemies of which this nation has been guilty . . . Our administration, along with our allies, both the godless ones and the professed Christians, is trying to turn the clock back to the times of pagan Rome. It has undertaken to build a brave new world on the principles of anti-Christ."
Horrible, nauseating, but true. The crusaders, the "holy" re-educators of Germany, have become the most large-scale debauchers of women in the Christian era; the most extensive looters and pillagers, official and unofficial, in the history of warfare; the most enormous and brutal deporters of peoples, twelve millions of them, in the history of the world, and finally the slavers and slave-traders of more human beings than have ever before in one single year been so degraded.
We Also Slave-Trade Our Prisoners to Britain
Reporting for the week of June 10. The Progressive states: "While the Big Four identified themselves with another appeal for the restoration of freedom in Spain, each continued to traffic in slave labor. Exposure of the slow starvation and exhausting work in French prison camps drew from the French a promise to liberate 60,000 veteran German soldiers. At the same time, the U. S. Army informed the French that deliveries of German military captives would be discontinued." This at long last is one small thin ray of decency. But its effect is immediately nullified by the next sentence. "German prisoners of war from wartime camps in the U. S. are being shipped to England." Our sacred duty is to send these boys
Slave-trading them to England, however, is a lesser evil than condemning them to France. While Soviet Russia's treatment of prisoners of war has been worst among the United Nations, that of Britain has been best. One would so wish that its record might have remained unspotted! Unfortunately historians may finally have to record it as less correct than that of the Germans, whom they, too, have appointed themselves to re-educate. The Duke of Bedford's People's Post, declared, "The treatment of German prisoners in England conforms also with Mr. Morgenthau's proposals. The moment victory removed the possibility of reprisals, German prisoners here began to be treated in a way difficult to reconcile with our obligations under the International Convention. Their rations were severely cut . . . " (Sept. 25, 1945. 33 Maiden Lane, London).
Possible Points of Re-Education for the Germans!
We recall again that General Marshall asserted
that the Germans generally did live up to these obligations! Perhaps, therefore, when we speak of re-educations! Perhaps, therefore, when we speak of re-education in reverse! Perhaps we mean to teach them that the next time they fight a war they must fight it by the old pagan rules: rape the conquered women, loot everything from featherbeds to factories, take what territories they wish and expel to starvation, misery and death all the inhabitants, and finally, keep the men as slaves until they are too starved and crippled for further work! If actions speak louder than words, that is what we are teaching them!
The Real Way to Destroy a Christian People is the Morgenthau Plan in the Hands of the Soviet Russians
The Progressive item goes on to the last of the great freedom-for-Spain agitators, namely Soviet Russia, where, according to George H. Earle, former U. S. minister to Bulgaria, "there are still more than 15,000,000 people in Russian concentration camps" (Boston Traveler, March 23, 1946). "Able-bodied Germans in the Soviet occupation zone." reports the Progressive (June 10, 1946). "are being spirited away by the thousands for slave labor and, as in Poland, technicians are being 'drafted' for rehabilitation work." And this brings us to the worst of the story. To Quebec in September, 1944, "Liberator" Roosevelt carried the Morgenthau Plan for "forced German labor outside Germany". At Yalta, Stalin is said to have demanded "10,000,000 such slaves to work in Russia after the war for an indefinite period" (Peace Action, May, 1945), and Arsenal-of-Democracy Roosevelt in a press conference lightheartedly thought this "would be a good thing"!
Few people dragged into Soviet Russia ever return—even as corpses. So here was an efficient way to kill off a Christian people. After all, Roosevelt's chief U. S. prosecutor. Justice Robert H. Jackson, apparently was instructed to, and declared that he was trying to kill off in cold-blooded legal lynching 7,000,000 German males (AP Dispatch, Nuernberg, Feb. 28, 1946). It is obviously much simpler and less shocking to let the Soviet Russians kill off 10,000,000 German males (and to give German women the worse-than-death treatment)!
Massacred 8,600 Christian Poles, Why Not 5,000,000 Christian Germans
Unless America and Britain soon protest — protest for human lives rather than for Iran oil—there is great danger that something like this might be happening. We remember shudderingly the Soviet General who said, "We've decided just to kill all the German men, take 17,000,000 German women and that will solve it." Of course, it won't be literally that bad. Nevertheless, true to those words, and without Anglo-American protest, they have mass-outraged German women. If they commit this foulest of atrocities without the slightest Anglo-American protest, should these Soviet harsh-peace boys, who could
cold-bloodily massacre 8,600 "bourgeois" Poles, not feel encouraged to help out Justice Jackson and simply work and starve to death their estimated five millions of German prisoners of war and kidnapped civilians?
In a Berlin AP Dispatch of May 18, 1946, a hair-raising little item appeared, namely, that a year after cessation of hostilities 1,500,000 Wehrmacht soldiers were still missing! Where were they missing? Here is the hint. "The bureau's file on eastern front casualties was sketchy, gathered from scattered sources, because the Russians did not report them through the International Red Cross."
What Has Become of a Million German Captives
At Potsdam, President Truman reportedly asked Stalin what had become of one million Germans captured by the Russians previous to unconditional surrender. Stalin gave him no answer. And Mr. Truman instead of protesting, boasted that "The German people are beginning to atone for the crimes" of their leaders (Dept. of State Bulletin, Aug. 12, 1945, p.208)! Have these million German boys, mostly Catholic and Lutheran, been done to death like the 8,600 Polish boys at Katyn?
Way back in August 21, 1945, right after the Potsdam conference. Pierre J. Huss reported that "the worry uppermost in the average German mind even above that of food and coal for the coming winter—is over the fate of more than a million German soldiers taken prisoner by the Russians... Not one German soldier captured in Poland or Russia has been heard from, and not one word of information has leaked through on their fate from the Russian side" (INS. Berlin. Aug. 21, 1945).
Article 36 of the Geneva Convention specifies that after not more than a week of imprisonment "every prisoner shall be enabled to write his family a postcard informing it of his capture and of the state of his health." Even if the Soviet Russians had treated these million German boys well otherwise. not letting them write home was of itself a crime against justice and international law. Before inviting these Soviets as sanctified fellow-prosecutors of the Germans was it not our duty to require these Soviets to live up to at least the obvious letter of international law?
The Tragic Fate of the 100,000 Captured at Stalingrad
In the last year, however, some news of what may be left of those million boys has transpired. In October, 1945, the Russians finally sent home a remnant of the hundred thousand boys captured at Stalingrad, and some of the others. But the trains in which they were supposed to arrive came with 200 to 300 corpses. An AP Dispatch (Oct. 24, 1945) from Berlin suggests "that of approximately 100,000 Nazi troops captured at Stalingrad barely 6000 are still alive."
Captain J. G. Johnson of Oxford, English commandant of a transit camp for these returnees, said, "One can well believe that death rate when one sees the miserable wrecks coming through here at the rate of 2000 per day." He also added that, "Released women of the Wehrmacht auxiliaries are either pregnant or venereally diseased." The prisoners "limp into the Invaliden camp daily without shoes, their feet bound in rags... They estimated that 200 out of 2000 prisoners aboard one train had died" (AP. Oct. 24, 1945).
How the Soviets Help Justice Jackson Kill Off Germans
Nevertheless, while that train of broken and dying remnants came in, the Allied occupiers filled another train with 2000 German boys at Frankfurt and sent it back into Russia. According to the survivers, the new slaves will eat "watery fish soup and 400 grams of bread daily." According to David J. Dallin's The Real Soviet Russia, they will work twelve hours a day, often in below-zero weather. They will be dressed in rags, and will sleep without covering in the same rags, and many of them will die of starvation, overwork, and exposure. Any one who fails to complete his assigned task over a period of a week, "is considered guilty of deliberate sabotage . . . locked in an isolation cell, and condemned to death without trial" (Quoted from Peace Action, May, 1945, p.2). In this way it was easy to reduce the 100.000 boys captured at Stalingrad to 6000 in two years. How long it will take to reduce to a few trainloads of cripples the 10.000,000 Four-Freedom-ite Roosevelt at Yalta thought it "would be a good thing" for Stalin to slavelabor can only be imagined.
One G.I.: "All This Misery So Long Atter the War's Over"
But as to this type of treatment, the Geneva Convention in Article 30 provides: "The length of the day's work of prisoners of war, including therein the trip going and returning, shall not, in any case, exceed that allowed for the civil workers in the region employed at the same work. Every prisoners shall be allowed a rest of twenty-four hours every week, preferably on Sunday." Since the German surrender we have often violated this Article, but American war prison authorities, even at their worst, are not capable of the barbarity of our Russian fellow-war-trialists. One American soldier, seeing the "sick, emaciated German soldiers" hobble into camp out of Russian imprisonment, "with swollen, congealed legs and feet like an elephants," exclaimed, "I feel like getting drunk every night to forget this camp. It gets me down to see all this misery so long after the war's over" (Berlin, Nov. 28, 1945, Chicago Tribune Special).
For all this misery "so long after the war's over" Morgenthau and Roosevelt wrote the blueprint at Quebec and Yalta when they proposed "forced German labor outside Germany." If this is a democracy, then the people get what they want. If the people don't rise in righteous wrath to put a stop to this
monstrous slave labor abuse of German prisoners of war (and of German civilians), then we shall someday get what the Jews got when they cried, "His blood be upon us and upon our children."
If Our Principles Don't Extend to the Vanquished They Aren't Principles And We Aren't Christians
After the recent Paris Council fiasco, Senator Vandenberg declared in the senate, "We can 'compromise' within the boundaries of a principle. We can no longer compromise principles themselves. . . History leaves no doubt upon that score. The wrong answers will breed wars for tomorrow" (Time, June 3, 1946). Let's remember that. But let's remember also that in the main it wasn't other nations that made us compromise principles. Roosevelt's Morgenthau Plan, virtually adopted at Potsdam, violated every principle of the Atlantic Charter, and, excepting rape (implied in unconditional surrender though happily not urged in the Morgenthau Plan), proposed every crime that made this peace 'history's most terrifying peace."
All that Soviet Russia has done is apply our shameful Morgenthau policies logically and viciously to as many people, vanquished and liberated, as possible. It was our Morgenthauistic policymakers who compromised the principles. Now, appalled at the clearly enough predicted consequences, the better part of the government is at long last trying to salvage a few of them. But a few won't do. We must have all of them all the way all the time. We must have them not only for the victors, but for the vanquished. In fact we must precisely begin with them for the vanquished, because it is how the vanquished are treated that determines whether we are Christians or whether we do merely as the pagans also do. Releasing our prisoners of war and demanding that Russia, Britain, and France do likewise is a first and fundamental step in the road back from pagan and Judaistic revenge barbarism to Christianity and decency.
One copy, a stamp; 4 copies 25c; 20 copies \$1.00; 400 copies \$15.
3 According to an AP Dispatch of June 30, it now transpires, as headlined, that "Reds Hold 700,000 Japs As Siberian Labor Force, Russia Irritates U. S. and Other Allied Powers By Lone-Hand Conduct of Affairs" (San Antonio Express, July 1, 1946). That the Soviets should slave-labor 700,000 Japanese is a crime. But that the U. S. government should be "Irritated" when the Soviets slave-labor 700,000 Japanese Shintoists, while in the Morgenthau Plan it proposed to the Soviets slave-laboring German Christians and not only connives in Russia's slave-laboring of 5,000,000 German Christians but has been slave-trading to France, Belgium and Britain and slave-laboring herself some million or more German boys, must make the Soviets smile queerly at American ethical principles! These Soviets don't know that the Baruches and the Frankfurters, Morgenthaus and Winchells, dominating our policies, are out to destroy Christian Germany, not also, happily, pagan Japan, Nevertheless U. S. "irritation" shows what happens when a government breaks principles to impose a harsh peace on one nation. Before long the broken principles aplinter into everybody, even ourselves. If slavelaboring German prisoners of war is noble and fine, then someday a victor will consider it noble to labor-slave and slave-trade our prisoners of war—and we will have deserved it.