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In Europe's propaganda* war the Germans have, as might have been expected, come out second best. They often handle the art of communication clumsily. In War II, when they have not been caught stupidly lying--as when they insisted the Ark Royal had been sunk, even though a U. S. naval attache lunched aboard her and found differently--they have artlessly suppressed information which would on the whole have done their cause good rather than harm. Last week Germany had yet to admit the loss of even one submarine in seven weeks' warfare at sea.

The British do it differently. Masters of fact-presenting as well as of fiction, they have managed to convince the world, by promptly reporting disasters (and, not so promptly, victories) that whatever comes from their official spokesmen is accepted as dead on the level.

But straight truth is not the only instrument of propaganda that the British use. Their statesmen happen to possess a grade of literary finesse surpassed by no ruling group in the world today, and one in particular has contrived to bring to the Foreign Office publications the quality of the bestseller.

Last week, following up the sell-out achieved by his collected messages to his chief while Ambassador to Germany, Sir Nevile Henderson authored another White Paper. It was a 12,000-word first-hand study of Hitler, the Nazis and the Germans, written as his final report to Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. Perceptive, witty and compassionate as a Jane Austen novel or a Lytton Strachey biography, it steered hard away from the old 1914 concept of the Germans as Huns or their ruler as The Beast of Berlin. Instead, it described them as understandable dupes and Hitler as a powerful but pitiable man. Sir Nevile had further broken precedent by writing the best of his memoirs 30 days, instead of 30 years, after the events happened. Excerpts:

"My Lord:

"Events moved with such rapidity during the last fortnight of my mission to Berlin that it proved impossible at the time to give any consecutive account of them. If I have the honor to do so now ... it is with the hope that such an account may be both of immediate interest to your Lordship and serve a purpose from the point of view of historical accuracy.. . .

"Herr Hitler and National Socialism are the products of the defeat of a great nation in war and its reaction against the confusion and distress which followed that defeat. National Socialism itself is a revolution and a conception of national philosophy. Contrary to democracy, which implies the subordination of the State to the service of its citizens, Naziism prescribes the subordination of its citizens to the service of the State, an all embracing moloch, and to the individual who rules that State. . . .

"It would be idle to deny the great achievements of the man who restored to the German nation its self-respect and its disciplined orderliness. The tyrannical methods which were employed within Germany itself to obtain this result were detestable, but were Germany's own concern. Many of Herr Hitler's social reforms, in spite of their complete disregard of personal liberty of thought, word or deed, were on highly advanced democratic lines. The 'Strength through Joy' movement, the care for the physical fitness of the nation, and, above all, the organisation of the Labor Camps, an idea which Herr Hitler once told me that he had borrowed from Bulgaria, are typical examples of a benevolent dictatorship. . . .

"Nor was the unity of Great Germany in itself an ignoble ideal. ... It was not the incorporation of Austria and the Sudeten Germans in the Reich which so much shocked public opinion in the world as the unscrupulous and hateful methods which Herr Hitler employed to precipitate an incorporation which would probably have peacefully come in due course of its own volition and in accordance with the established principle of self-determination.

"Yet even those methods might have been endorsed in a world which had experienced 1914-18 and which sought peace as an end in itself, if Herr Hitler had been willing to accord to others the rights which he claimed for Germany. Revolutions are like avalanches, which once set in motion cannot stop until they crash to destruction at the appointed end of their career. History alone will determine whether Herr Hitler could have diverted Naziism into normal channels, whether he was the victim of the movement which he had initiated, or whether it was his own megalomania which drove it beyond the limits which civilisation was prepared to tolerate.

". . . On the fifteenth of March, by the ruthless suppression of the freedom of the Czechs, its captain hoisted the Skull and Crossbones of the pirate, cynically discarded his own theory of racial purity and appeared under his true colors as an unprincipled menace to European peace and liberty.

"Two of the less attractive characteristics of the German are his inability either to see any side of a question except his own, or to understand the meaning of moderation. . . . Herr Hitler could see no mean between rendering the Czechs innocuous as a potential enemy and destroying their liberty as an independent people. There is some surprising reason to believe that Herr Hitler himself was disagreeably and literally astonished at the reaction in Britain and the world generally, which was provoked by the occupation of Prague and his breach of faith with Mr. Chamberlain. But while he may have realised his tactical mistake, it did not deter him from prosecuting his further designs. . . .

"The Ides of March constituted the parting of the ways and were directly responsible for everything which happened thereafter. Thenceforward no small nation in Europe could feel itself secure from some new adaptation of Nazi racial superiority and jungle law. . . .

"The tragedy of any dictator is that as he goes on, his entourage steadily and inexorably deteriorates. For lack of freedom of utterance he loses the services of the best men. ... In my report on the events of 1938 I drew your Lordship's special attention to the far and unfortunate results of the Blomberg marriage.* I am more than ever convinced of the major disaster which that--in itself--minor incident involved, owing to the consequent elimination from Herr Hitler's entourage of the more moderate and independent of his advisers. . . . After February of last year Herr Hitler became more and more shut off from external influences and a law unto himself.

"People are apt, in my opinion, to exaggerate the malign influence of Herr von Ribbentrop, Dr. Goebbels, Herr Himmler and the rest. It was probably consistently sinister, not because of its suggestiveness (since Herr Hitler alone decided policy) . . . but because, if Herr Hitler appeared to hesitate, the extremists of the Party at once proceeded to fabricate situations calculated to drive Herr Hitler into courses which even he at times shrank from risking. The simplest method of doing this was through the medium of a controlled press. . . .

"The 1938 stories of Czech atrocities against its German minority were rehashed up almost verbatim in regard to the Poles. . . . How far Herr Hitler himself believed in the truth of these tales must be a matter for conjecture. Germans are prone in any case to convince themselves very readily of anything which they wish to believe. . . ."

Corporal Hitler. "Though he spoke of his artistic tastes and of his longing to satisfy them, I derived the impression that the corporal of the last war was even more anxious to prove what he could do as a conquering generalissimo in the next. . . .

"I should like to state here, parenthetically but emphatically, that Herr Hitler's constant repetition of his desire for good relations with Great Britain was undoubtedly a sincere conviction. He will prove in the future a fascinating study for the historian and the biographer with psychological leanings. Widely different explanations will be propounded, and it would be out of place and time to comment at any length in this dispatch on this aspect of Herr Hitler's mentality and character. But he combined, as I fancy many Germans do, admiration for the British race with envy of their achievements and hatred of their opposition to Germany's excessive aspirations. It is no exaggeration to say that he assiduously courted Great Britain, both as representing the aristocracy and most successful of the Nordic races, and as constituting the only seriously dangerous obstacle to his own far-reaching plan of German domination in Europe. This is evident in Mein Kampf, and, in spite of what he regarded as the constant rebuffs which he received from the British side, he persisted in his endeavors up to the last moment. Geniuses are strange creatures, and Herr Hitler, among other paradoxes, is a mixture of long-headed calculation and violent and arrogant impulse provoked by resentment. The former drove him to seek Britain's friendship and the latter finally into war with her."

Goring. "I think there can be no doubt that Field Marshal Goring himself would have preferred a peaceful solution, but in matters such as these it was Herr Hitler's decision which alone counted; and whatever Field Marshal Goring himself might feel, he was merely the loyal and submissive servant of his master. Moreover, he had come down definitely on the side of Peace a year before and it may have been difficult for him to adopt this course a second time. He invited me, however, to come and see him that (Aug. 30) afternoon. . . .

"He talked for the best part of two hours of the iniquities of the Poles and about Herr Hitler's and his own desire for friendship with England. ... I augured the worst from the fact that he was in a position at such a moment to give me so much of his time. . . . He could scarcely have afforded at such a moment to spare time in conversation if it did not mean that everything down to the last detail was now ready for action. . . .

"My general impression of this last talk with Field Marshal Goering was, in fact, that it constituted a final but forlorn effort on his part to detach Britain from the Poles. . . .

"There were, in fact, for Herr Hitler only two solutions: The use of force, or the achievement of his aims by the display of force. 'If you wish to obtain your objective by force, you must be strong; if you wish to obtain them by negotiation, you must be stronger still.' That was a remark which he made to a foreign statesman who visited him this year, and it expresses in the concisest possible form the Hitler technique. . . .

"If he could have secured his objectives by this display of force he might have been content for the moment, with all the additional prestige which another bloodless success would have procured for him with his own people. But it would only have been to start again once the world had recovered from the shock, and even his own people were beginning to be tired of these repeated crises. . . . Guns instead of butter were becoming more and more unpopular except with the younger generation, and Hitler may well have wondered what might happen to his Nazi revolution if its momentum were allowed to stop. Moreover the financial and economic position of Germany was such that things could scarcely continue as they were without some form of explosion, internal or external. Of the two alternatives the most attractive from the point of view of his growing personal ambitions, and those of the clique which was nearest to him, was war. . . .

"One of Herr Hitler's greatest drawbacks is that, except for two official visits to Italy, he has never traveled abroad. For his knowledge of British mentality he consequently relied on Herr von Ribbentrop as an ex-Ambassador to Britain, who spoke both French and English, and who had spent some years in Canada, and whom he regarded as a man of the world. If report be true Herr von Ribbentrop gave him consistently false counsels in regard to England, while his successes in other spheres induced Herr Hitler to regard him more and more as a second Bismarck, a conviction which Herr von Ribbentrop probably shared to the full.

"Even the most absolute dictator is susceptible to the influence of his surroundings. Nevertheless Herr Hitler's decisions, his calculations and his opportunism were his own. As Field Marshal Goering once said to me, 'When a decision has to be taken, none of us counts more than the stones on which we are standing. It is the Fuehrer alone who decides.' If anything did count, it was the opinion of his mili tary advisers. . . .

"Yet even so the advice of his soldiers was probably merely cover. For the sum mer he had been waiting on events to turn in his favour and had been making his preparations to seize the opportunity, when it was offered to him. The Russian Pact appeared to give him the advantage which he was seeking and thereafter there was no time to lose, if mud was not to be added to Poland's allies. . . .

"A small crowd collected round the Embassy before our departure, but unlike 1914 it evinced no single sign of hostility.

The streets of Berlin were practically deserted and there was nothing to indicate the beginning of a war which is to decide whether force is to be the sole arbiter in international affairs ; whether international instruments solemnly and freely entered into are to be modified, not by negotiation, but by mere unilateral repudiation; whether there is to be any faith in future in written contracts; whether the fate of a great nation and the peace of the world is to rest in the future in the hands of one man; whether small nations are to have any rights against the pretentions of States more powerful than themselves ; in a word, whether government of the people, by the people, for the people is to continue in this world, or whether it is to be replaced by the arbitrary will and ambition of single individuals regardless of the peoples' will. . . .

"We reached Rotterdam that evening, and after spending the night at The Hague and one on board the Dutch steamer Batavier V, left Rotterdam in the early hours of Thursday morning, the sixth of September. We arrived at Gravesend about six p. m. that evening.

"I have, etc."

* A scheme or plan for the propagation of a doctrine or system of principles--Webster's New International Dictionary. * When Field Marshal von Blomberg, Minister of War, married his pretty secretary in January 1938, aristocratic General von Fritsch, Army Commander in Chief, protested strongly. When both were subsequently purged, the ranks of the conservative army group were cracked.

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