Modern men are inclined to disregard the power of ideas. With Hitler and a number of his lieutenants dead and the others in captivity it seems to them that Clio has written finìs to the short, though comprehensive chapter, “National Socialism”. Our age is wont to see things purely in terms of politics and politics in terms of material power. If this were true, National Socialism would have found its end with the destruction of .its material power and its organisation. National Socialism, however, was not only a political machinery, masses and guns, it was also, and above all, an idea. When the Nazis spoke of totality they avowedly wished to make it clear that they would not confine themselves to economics and politics, or indeed, confine themselves to anything. Their idea was that of an all-embracing Weltanschauung, a definite order of values with the claim to be absolute, or in other words, a religion.

While insane national pride, injured by the defeat in 1918, together with economic and social pressure created an atmosphere suitable for revolution, the real core of the Nazi movement lay in a much deeper stratum of the people's minds. The revolution against the religion of love and the spirit of the Sermon of the Mount—prepared during centuries and manifest in Bismarck’s fight against “Ultramontanism”—rose immediately after 1918, sponsored by Hitler’s forerunner and temporary companion Ludendorff. His wife Mathilde, especially, attempted to preach a romantic mysticism in form of a queer combination of pantheism and Wodan idolatry, which seemed to her the adequate expression of the Teutonic religious spirit. This experiment failed since the theatrical nightly ceremonies in woods and the sight of spectacled German schoolmasters growing wild beards and drinking beer from wassailhorns proved too much even for the most romantic German little bourgeois.

True to his pagan, military code, the SS officer was a full Nazi, even in defeat. He was haughty, even truculent, and stayed with his SS men apart from the amorphous mob of German Wehrmacht prisoners. When casually asked by an American soldier how he felt about the defeat, he did not accept the role of a prisoner being questioned; he lectured: “You Americans have not won. You are only deceiving yourselves. We have suffered a defeat but we shall rally again and beat you in another war. You think you have crushed us, but we will show you one day that we have not been completely defeated.”

Furthermore, when shown pictures of concentration-camp victims, he showed no sorrow, no sympathy. It was a regrettable necessity. This callousness so infuriated an old soldier that he threatened the SS officer with his M1 rifle.

“You wish to kill me? Why certainly you can,” he said, as he theatrically opened his overcoat and stood erect. “I am your prisoner of war and you can do with me what you wish. I am not at all afraid to die and you cannot frighten me.” .

He was playing the same role in defeat that he had played before and during the war. He was not only playing it out to the bitter end of the tragedy, but even after it. His unit had surrendered, together with a whole army, five days before V-E day. He was not a part of the ultra-fanatical SS groups sent for the mythical last stand in the south of Germany—he was simply a typical SS officer. He had been proud before the war, courageous and cruel in the war, sullen and haughty when captured. One unknown thing about his character remained—how will he be in national defeat He had seemed to answer that by his conduct and it seemed to leave no room for optimism.

One thing is certain: the total population of the Jewish people has been considerably reduced. For the last twenty years it has been customary to reckon this roughly at sixteen millions, now the two or three millions ruthlessly and wantonly done to death by demoniacs, will have to be subtracted. This ghastly process cannot be regarded as a winnowing; as the avowed intention has not been to eliminate undesirable elements, but to exterminate all who could, in the widest stretch of the term, be designated Jews. Non licet esse vos has been the guiding principle. The arch-fiends who adopted this worse than barbaric policy have not been able to carry out their fell design to the full; but their failure is not due to any lack of malice: they have made a desperate attempt and seem to have been backed by diabolic assistance. The account of a Rabbi-survivor—one of a tiny remnant—rescued from the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, published in The Times, of June 21st, 1945, is a lurid, but exact summary, of the nightmare horrors perpetrated there until the Nazis were forced to relinquish their grip on Bavaria. In this Ghetto, as he styles it—compared with which the worst mediaeval ghetto was an earthly paradise—it was normal that there should be at least a hundred burials, or burnings, a day, most of these the result of what was morally murder. During his three years as an inmate of this inferno, ‘ he estimates that fifty-five thousand perished. Such a violation of the primary instincts of human decency has already suffered a nemesis which, though severe, is mild compared with the crimes that provoked it. But the mills of God have only commenced their work of retribution.

Adjustment to the novel life one is condemned to lead behind barbed wire begins the moment one has been assigned one's quarters. This adjustment is at first purely physical; but long before one has mastered the routine of living in such a place, there are naturally attempts at adjusting oneself to it also mentally. The obvious and most general first adjustment comes by way of resentment, disguised in most cases by a forced jocularity, which tries to laugh off the whole thing. “Are we downhearted?—NO”, used to be the slogan for this sort of attitude during World War 1. In my own case this kind of light-heartedness came naturally as a reaction against the period of uncertainty preceding it: for we had lived for months in a daily atmosphere of anxiety, as to whether our place (an S.V.D. seminary in Manila) would be commandeered by the Japanese army or not, and where we could go in such a case. The wearying part of this had been that one day it seemed quite certain that the Japanese would never take this place, whilst the arrival of another military party of inspections the next day made it certain that they would. When, therefore, on July 8th, 1944, the thunderbolt struck, cancelling our previous release on parole, I for one, felt a great relief that all uncertainty and futile conjectures were over and that now one found onself actually interned, with no more anxieties as to what course to take and what decisions to make. There was nothing now to do, but to wait and “suffer fools gladly”.

I am only too conscious of the impertinence of this heading: What value could such memories have? And how far are they trustworthy? Yet they are my memories, and though some sixty years have elapsed, they remain as fresh in my mind as though they had happened but yesterday.

When I was just over four years old my mother took me to a dairy kept by a Mr. Godwin, who had been Newman’s butler in Ireland. He put me on his knee and said: “Do you know Jack Smallman?” I did, for Smallman—whom I had always thought of as Mister Smallman—was a carpenter who fascinated me by working with saw and chisels, which I longed to handle. “Well,” said Godwin, “I was JJr. .Newman s butler and the lad Smallman was the ‘buttons!.” I saw my mother smiling at this; she was probably wondering what I was making of the term ‘buttons’.

“Young Smallman,” continued the old man, “was sometimes impertinent. So one day I put him over my knee and smacked him well” I gasped at the bare idea of smacking the man of chisels and saws. Gut the old man continued: “What do you think that lad said when I had done my duty by him? He said to me: ‘You must feel very exhausted after that, Mr. Godwin. Let me draw you a glass of beer’.” *

A few years later, it must have been in 1878 or 1879, a man leaning on the gate, which in those days separated the school premises from the part of the cloister by which people came to church, astonished me by saying: “Say, I reckon if I hang on this gate long enough I might see ‘Nooman’ pass this way?” I was very doubtful, for I had never seen the future Cardinal there.