"Break Up Germany!"

Anthony Eden's stanch friend Alfred Duff Cooper, M. P., who resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty in protest against appeasing Adolf Hitler at Munich, last week roused London with speeches and press interviews on a keynote long soft-pedaled by the Government. "It would be a good thing," said he, "to break Germany up into small States."

This was contrary to the vague, easygoing war aims sponsored for the past eight months by the Allies. According to these the German people are being misled by a fanatic (as Woodrow Wilson said the Kaiser misled them). Let them turn Hitler out and a generous peace along the lines of European economic federation could be made. Duff Cooper's one concession to this attitude: the pint-sized German States should be "impotent but prosperous."

Duff Cooper got his opportunity thus to sound off against the German people when he was suddenly called on to pinch-hit for Winston Churchill at a meeting of the Royal Society of St. George. First Lord Churchill had gone to sit in on the Allied Supreme War Council somewhere in France. Ex-First Lord Duff Cooper recalled the historical past of the German people "under the perjured, perverted Frederick, miscalled 'The Great'; under the mountebank, bulky Bismarck with his treble voice, his shifty diplomacy, his forged telegrams and his lust for conquest; under the vain cripple, Hohenzollern, who was, himself, the slave of the half-crazy Ludendorff, who so loathed Christianity that he worshipped Thor and Odin." After getting his breath, Orator Duff Cooper continued fortissimo: "But never did the face of Germany assume so villainous or vile an aspect as under . . . this little gang of bloodstained, money-making murderers [the Nazis]. . . . Hitler says the whole German people is behind him. I for one am prepared to take him at his word."

Duff Cooper is only an M. P., but some British opinion is trending his way. Last week even Sir John Reith, stuffy Minister of Information and onetime head of British Broadcasting Corp., intoned with his heavy boom: "Britain is fighting Germany and the British people are fighting the German people. Don't let there be any mistake about it." Nonetheless there was such stiff public criticism of Duff Cooper's attitude that two days later he hastened to amplify it: "I think it is essential to destroy [the] German armed forces and not let them have weapons again. You cannot do that without hurting many German people. We have got to defeat Germany and we cannot accept the excuse that [the war] is the fault of the Government. They have made that excuse too often."

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