FROM British author Douglas Reed’s Insanity Fair (1938), a book about the state of Europe before World War II:

A few months after Hitler came to power I had gone to England on leave. Before leaving London for the country I sought out a certain important man and told him what I knew – that Germany was rearming day and night, that a fierce desire to stage a come-back was being instilled into the Germans, that the danger of a new war was looming larger and nearer, and that England should not delay a moment in rearming herself.

It was all true. In Germany the entire energy of the nation is concentrated on militarization. I should doubt whether a nation has ever been so completely and thoroughly reared to think exclusively of arms and warfare. You start when you wake up and stop when you go to sleep, provided you do not dream about these things. Your education in these matters begins in the nursery and finishes with the grave.

The child that learns to read gets as a birthday present a book, which might be called Little Adolf and The Big Bad World, describing how Little Snow White (Germany) was set upon by wicked neighbours (England and France) jealous of her beauty, prowess and possessions, how she nevertheless would have overcome them but that she was stabbed in the back by an Evil Spirit (Marxism), and how one day Prince Charming (Adolf) freed her from her abasement. Adolf (Ah, the lad was doughty!’) had been accustomed in his youth to play war games with his comrades, and the other boys played the Frenchmen and Adolf and his friends the Germans, and Adolf always won!

Then it goes on, through schooldays, when you begin your military training as a member of the Hitler Children and then of the Hitler Youth and learn from teachers who have all had to pass the test of political orthodoxy and racial purity, until the time comes when you serve your year in the Labour Corps, which makes you a complete soldier except that you carry a spade on parade instead of a rifle, and then come your two years conscription, and after that, if you want to get on in life, you probably become an SS or an SA man. If you are anybody at all you do not stop wearing uniform all your life. Even the good Baron von Neurath, after five top-hatted and tail-coated years as Hitler’s Foreign Minister, was put into SS uniform when Mussolini went to Germany in September 1937, so that he should not spoil the picture by being out of dressing.

(cont.; See Chapter 22)

Readers may be interested in author Caryl Johnston’s observations about Douglas Reed.

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