GERMANY: Lest We Forget

“The fact of Buchenwald is [already] all but forgotten in this overforgetful world,” laments TIME Correspondent Percy Knauth in Germany in Defeat, published last week (Knopf, $2.75). As one who knew the Nazi Reich before the war as well as in its final agony, Knauth does not want such memories to lapse. For Buchenwald is not only Germany’s shame; it is every man’s.

The Germans, says Knauth, have a proverb about logic: “If you say A, you must say B.” Their concentration camps were “A … the proposition that all men are not created equal. The B was that therefore some men are superior to others. The C was that the inferior men must be subjugated. The D was Buchenwald, and all its counterparts in Germany.”

The world shared in this chain of bestiality. For years it knew about the concentration camps. “Yet we did nothing . . . until forced to fight for Buchenwald’s and Europe’s liberation. . . . And even in this year of peace and victory, we have let the concentration camp live on.”

Wages of Aggression. With such earnest and embittered reflections, Knauth portrays the last spring and summer of Hitler’s Germany—the wrecked cities and the ruined lives, the pathetic conquered and still-arrogant unconquered. He cannot forget the “terrible wages of aggressive war.”

In burning Frankfurt, he remembers,. Garrison Soldier Helmut Lotz killed himself, wife and two children rather than disobey the order to evacuate. “He saw only one way out.” In Leipzig, Knauth met a girl with whom he had played as a child. “What have I had out of life?” she asked. “I was 15 when the Nazis came. That is a happy age for girls but I don’t remember any happiness. … I can’t remember that I have ever been free of a sense of doom about this country, since the Nazis came. They ruined what they touched and they ruined us too. . . .”

The ruins of youth and the ruins of Buchenwald—who will clear them up? Answers Knauth: “Our responsibility for the Germans, like theirs and ours for all mankind, will never end. I hope that they and we will have the strength to fulfill the trust that has been imposed upon us all: the peace and welfare of our fellow men.”