Liberal Among Nazis

Oswald Garrison Villard, onetime publisher of the New York Evening Post and The Nation, is 67 years old, but when he went to Germany last October he nervily decided to answer the Nazis' "Heil Hitler!" with a "Heil Roosevelt!" Nobody gave him the chance to make such a retort. In fact, Mr. Villard reports in an 86-page booklet, Inside Germany,* just published in London, almost no one except Party members and officers in uniform now gives the "Heil Hitler!" greeting.

Despite Mr. Villard's reputation as a liberal, pacifist and anti-Nazi, German officials received him with courtesy, allowed him to go anywhere he wished, placed "cars and guides at my disposal with their compliments" and permitted him to send cables from Berlin "in which I was as critical and as free in my expression as I would have been in New York."

He reciprocated with utter frankness."You have a very poor opinion of the German people," said a Foreign Office official to him./- Answered Mr. Villard: "I have a far higher opinion of the German people than your government has. ... I am willing to believe that they can be trusted with the truth, and your government is not." When Dr. Karl Hermann Frank, Secretary of State in Bohemia-Moravia, told him that every German was behind Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, Mr. Villard promptly disagreed, said he had met many anti-Nazi Germans.

This stubborn, honest, liberal journalist pulled no punches in his book, as witness:

> "My trouble in Germany was to find men outside the Army and official circles who were 100% Nazi."

> "Workmen spoke out against Hitler and his government with a frankness that astounded me--and terrified me for their safety."

> "Most of the people I met were utterly opposed to the robbing and rotting out and driving out of the Jews."

> "My outstanding impression, after nearly a month in Germany, is of a people depressed and unhappy, facing the future with deep discouragement."

> "I have traveled on trains with hundreds of troops, and I did not see a happy or cheerful face. They seem to talk very little with one another and there is not the slightest joking or horseplay."

> "I found myself involuntarily saying again and again as I walked the streets: 'This is Russia, and not Berlin!' The shabbiness of the clothing suggests it, the drabness of life; the high boots worn by so many women; the pale, unhealthy color as well as the gloomy sombreness of the masses. . . ."

> "Berliners . . . speak of Stalin as unser neues, liebes Vetterchen ('our new, dear little cousin'). In Frankfurt there was quiet amusement that Hitler's Mein Kampf has been ordered to be withheld from circulation by the public libraries there--until a new edition, with all the scurrilous references to Russia and the Bolsheviks withdrawn, is published."

*Constable & Co. Ltd.

/- Mr. Villard's father, Henry Villard (originally Heinrich Hilgard), builder of the Northern Pacific Railway, came to the U. S. from Germany at 18. Mr. Villard himself was born in Wiesbaden, Germany.

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