ARGUMENTS
267
to the earlier concentration camps. I also object to her calling the German
people
en masse
"accomplices," since even those who did know would
have had to be heroes to do anything about it; and, as she herself has
observed, it is inhuman
to
demand more than a few heroes from any
population-German, Russian, Jewish, or American. And I further
object to her statement that the July, 1944 conspirators against Hitler
were "not inspired by a crisis of conscience or by what they knew
other people had been made to suffer; they were motivated exclusively
by their conviction of the coming defeat and ruin of Germany." Allen
Dulles's
Germany's Underground
states of the Kreisau Circle, led by
Count von Moltke and Count von Wartenburg, which prepared the
1944 plot: "Its economic and political program was one of Christian
Socialism," with which William L. Shirer's
Rise and
Fall
of the Third
R eich
agrees. Shirer writes of Count von Stauffenberg, who planted the
bomb: "The anti-Jewish pogroms of 1938 first cast doubts in his mind
about Hitler," while Dulles quotes an exchange from Wartenburg's
testimony before the Nazi court that condemned him:
PROSECUTOR FREISLER:
But concisely, you declare on the ques–
tion of the Jews that you disagreed with their extermination?
W
ARTENBURG:
The decisive factor which brings together all
these questions is the totalitarian claim of the state on the in–
dividual which forces him to renounce his moral and religious
obligations to God.
I also find unsatisfying her rationale for hanging Eichmann:
"
. we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can
be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason,
and the only reason, you must hang." But in fact many people still exist
who are quite willing to share the earth with an Eichmann: fascists,
Nazis, anti-Semitic fanatics like our own George Lincoln Rockwell,
and I don't see how they can be deprived of their human status-it's
not like citizenships, after all- unless by circular reasoning: if you want
to share the earth with an Eichmann, you are not human.
But all these errors,
if
such they be, don't seem to me to importantly
affect the book, nor do I feel it necessary to explain them by imputing
to
the author callousness, perversity, distorting of facts or other moral defects.
A Jewish friend complained that Miss McCarthy had "raised the
Jewish issue," another puzzlement, since I had thought that was precisely
what critics like Abel had done, and that she was objecting to this tactic.
I find it depressing to have to talk about "Jewish friends" and "Jewish
critics," after all those years when I'd thought we'd gotten beyond such
