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¶ Said a handsome, listless Jewess who had turned Protestant and married a German Catholic and now spoke as a German: "You must not hope for too much from our people. Those who have grown up under Naziism can never be the same again. The good ones have been killed in the Wehrmacht. I don't know why but that's always the way it is. The good ones get killed. There aren't any left now."
Men Without a Country? A team of U.S. civilian investigators—Author-Historian Dr. Saul K. Padover, Dr. Paul Robinson Sweet of Bates College, and Lewis F. Gittler, an OWI propagandist—went into western Germany to study German civilian attitudes. After chatting with scores of German workers, grocers, professional men, housewives, Nazis and non-Nazis, Dr. Padover reported:
"To me the most astonishing thing that came out of our talks with these Germans is their lack of nationalism. They don't want to govern themselves, and in a dozen different ways they expressed the same idea: they regard Germany's future as an Allied problem. One after another they expressed the hope that they will be treated as some sort of American colony. Instead of resisting the thought of being ruled, they welcome it with almost childlike relief."
Such Germans now feel that Naziism— the only "nationalism" they have known since Hitler came to power—was forced on them by the Nazi Party zealots, most of whom had fled when the Americans arrived. The ordinary German blames Hitler not for beginning the war, but for losing it; not for killing Jews, but for bringing the Allied world down upon the Germany where Jews were killed.