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REPORT ON THE GERMANS by W.L. White

REPORT ON THE GERMANS

By

Pub Date: July 17th, 1947
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Bill White is a superb reporter. He has a gift for getting people to talk freely, and he makes their story his own. His Report on the Germans is less controversial than its predecessor, Report on the Russians, though the same anti-Soviet slant is evident throughout, wherever the Russian occupation factor enters the picture. But in the main it is largely a reporting job- and as such informative, colorful, full of human interest, provocative, and implicitly critical of the occupation procedure. A final chapter sums up his opinions. He feels we still have a chance to do something about the Germans -- though little about the Russians. He feels that the Morgenthau policy would repeat the mistakes of the 1920's. He summarizes as our mistakes the failure to secure a pledge from Moscow on territorial claims in providing Lend-Lease; the insistence on unconditional surrender; the failure to go into the Balkans even at cost of lives and time; the breakdown of the army. But the body of the text deals with comparative views of Berlin before we entered the war- and after we entered as conquerors; with the Jews -- and their survival; with what he could as- certain of how the Germans are thinking today; with fraternization- policy and breakdown; with the survival of the Hitler virus; with peace policies, yesterday, today, tomorrow. His style is frankly colloquial, frequently glib, but always readable. Again it is the native Kansan viewing a shattered world. And it will sell.