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"I heard that cry in Leipzig last week expressed in just those words. The janitor of an apartment house which stood alone in a street of utter wreckage buttonholed me, shook his fist in my face and cried: 'You must tell your people how we've been lied to and betrayed! Every day we see it more and more! Every day we have more and more proof of how those men have ruined us! And they're still fighting, letting us be killed—they'd drag our whole country down to death with them if they could!";
We Are Lost. "And someone else in Leipzig said to me, a young girl whom I had known before the war who has a two-and-a-half-year-old son now and a husband somewhere down in Austria: they gambled everything away, everything. We are lost as a nation. If I had known when I was in school that this was going to happen, I would have committed suicide.
"It is the same picture in all parts of occupied Germany which I have seen and where I have talked to Germany's little people. When the Nazis left their towns and villages a world came to an end for them. Leaderless, helpless, they watched the Americans come in. As a mass they did not know what to do. Without newspapers, without radio, without all the thousand and one accustomed details with which the Nazis had organized their daily lives and influenced their daily thought, they slowly began to realize the full scope of the catastrophe which had befallen them, how thoroughly they had been cut off from and ostracized by the outside world which was now bursting in upon them with such cataclysmic power.
"It is what they have lost that is haunting the Germans now. As long as the Nazis were still there, exhorting them, promising them victory and restoration, most of them did not fully realize how complete their loss actually was. It is a material loss measurable in homes destroyed, industries bombed into ruins, fortunes burned up in incendiary bombs. It is a moral loss felt in the loss of national honor, independence and dignity. It is the loss of every foundation of their lives, and many Germans already and probably many more to come see only one way out: suicide.
No Sense of Guilt. "In that respect it seems that even the war has not changed the German character. It has not infused new political strength into these people who can not only be led, hypnotized, to their own destruction, but can actually be made to participate in it. In all the various emotions which the Germans are feeling now—fear, anger, hopelessness, bitterness, shame, servility and helplessness—there is one which you will rarely find and that is a sense of guilt, the sense of being responsible personally and as a nation for what has happened.
"Most Germans realize now or profess to realize that this war was unnecessary and wrong. But they still don't go beyond that to the salient realization that Naziism and everything that went with it was wrong. The main reason the war seems wrong to them is because they lost it. They place the blame on Hitler because he got them into it; if he had won the war few people in Germany today would be concerned with the question of whether the war was right or wrong.