18
PARTISAN REVIEW
appearance. He has a very emphatic manner. He has thrown himself
into the Civil Government, organizing educational activities. He has
arranged such concerts and recitals as have recently been given for
civilians in Bonn.
Like the other professors whom I had visited, I deliberately
selected him for interviewing because he had a reputation for being
opposed to the regime. He was emphatic in his defence of his students.
'The brown colour of the Nazis has spread less far than you imagine,'
he said. 'In any case, the Rhineland is a part of Germany which has
always resisted the Nazis most. I myself have always retained my
influence over my pupils because they knew I was no Nazi. It was
the Nazi professors who were not respected and who therefore lost
their influence. Some of the students passionately desired Germany's
defeat. Here in this classroom, there was a reunion of my students
to toast the allied victory when the Americans landed in North Mrica.'
He said that several medical students evaded military service,
not because they were cowards, but because they were always opposed
to the war.
As
a geographer he was able to help a few of them to
escape into Switzerland by showing them on the map the places where
it was easiest to cross the frontier. He said that academic youth had
always been a centre of resistance to the Nazis.
These were the statements of exceptional Germans, and they
certainly do not represent the views of the ordinary German. They
are the views of the few intellectuals whom Hitler always railed
against because they never had faith in German victory and they
always stood outside the German community.
Even these men had certain views which, I think, show the in–
fluence of ten years of Nazi ideology. For example, they all viewed
the outside world entirely in terms of power. They interpreted the
Zones of allied occupation strategically. The British Zone was to them
Die Bruecke,
the British bridgehead on the continent. They noted
that the decision of the British that they must occupy an area of
the continent from the mouth of the Rhine to the mouth of the Elbe,
meant an abandonment of the fonner British reliance on the bridge–
head of France. They did not think that we could afford ever to give
up
Die Bruecke,
and they therefore assumed that their fate and future
was now cast together with that of Britain. They pointed out that the
British, the Rhinelanders and the people of Hamburg had interests
and characteristics in common, amongst which was to be counted a
hatred of Prussia, and of the centralized government of Germany
from Berlin. They regretted very much that we did not firmly and
