One of the unusual features of British public life today is the amount
of anti-German feeling now being stirred up. Part of it is political:
Nye Bevan and his left-wing Socialists are setting up a hue and cry
about “Guns for the Huns”—not bothering, of course, to point out that
the Communists have already armed East Germany. In Lord Beaverbrook,
the maverick Tory press lord, the Socialists have an unexpected ally.
His big Daily Express is so het up that it
caricatures Chancellor Adenauer as a Mephistopheles surrounded by
Junker , and not content with whatever debatable influence his
editorials have, Beaverbrook has been buying up billboard space and ads
in rival British papers to further his campaign. The flurry has the Tories worried. Though Clement Attlee and the Labor
leadership still endorse West German rearmament, Churchill's government
fears what GUNS FOR THE HUNS might do as an opposition election slogan.
Last week the Tory government made its own bumbling contribution to the
controversy. Lord Russell of Liverpool, Britain's Assistant Judge Advocate General,
is a World War I hero who
served as senior legal adviser at the British army's war crimes trials.
Ever since, Russell has been convinced that the West is too quickly
forgetting Belsen and Buchenwald. In 1951 Russell was sacked from his
post as Deputy Judge Advocate General to the British Army of the Rhine
after he and Lady Russell tried to drive their car through a procession
of German villagers, and got manhandled in the attempt. Shortly
afterwards Lord Russell started work on The Scourge of the Swastika, a
legalistic account of the gas ovens and crematoria of the concentration
camps. As a matter of courtesy, Russell sent the completed man uscript
to his boss, 72-year-old Lord Simonds, the Lord High Chancellor.
Instead of winning the expected perfunctory approval, his book became
the subject of anxious discussion in the British Cabinet. Backed by the nervous Foreign Office, Lord Simonds told Lord Russell
that his book was opinionated, and its photographs unsettling. If he
persisted in publishing it, he would be fired from his 2,200-a-year
government job. Angrily, Lord Russell decided to go ahead,
“whatever the cost to my career,” and the air was rent with cries of
government censorship. Promptly Beaverbrook's Daily Express proclaimed
last week that it would publish daily extracts from “the Book They
Tried to Ban.”
