Not All Devils

Benjamin J. Buttenwieser, Manhattan investment banker, onetime president of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and now Assistant U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, made a trip home to make a couple of speeches. One of them was to be given to a convention of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, a group dedicated to "promoting better group relations."

He was going to say: "Of course there are former Nazis in many public positions . . . Let us keep in mind, however, that though these people were certainly not heroes, not all of them were devils."

He doubted whether it was wise to try to keep 7,000,000 former Nazi Party members (altogether some 25 million people, counting dependents) "outside the community, or outcasts from it." He was prepared to plead for forgiveness: "We would indeed leave arid the fields in which the Germans must plant the seeds of right thinking if those fields were parched by the withering materialism of revenge."

He was prepared to admit that a rebirth of nationalism had brought about the re-emergence of some dangerous elements. But "if there were no rebirth of pride in Germany it would indeed mark a spirit of hopeless futility" that would discourage any hope for a German birth of democracy.

Buttenwieser did make his speech last week to the Foreign Policy Association, but he never got to speak to the Anti-Defamation League. Its 35-man national commission, studying a preview of his address, decided that it did not like its "general tenor," that it was "an apologia for the limited job that has been done to denazify Germany; and gives aid and encouragement to . . . vicious elements . . ." Mr. Buttenwieser was scratched off the convention program.

Last week the League issued its own report on the situation: Germany is the "real winner of the cold war." Said League Chairman Meier Steinbrink, justice of the New York Supreme Court: Anti-Semitism "is more prevalent in Western Germany than when Hitler first appeared on the scene," and "the reins have been handed back to that same caliber of German leadership which has yet to cleanse itself of the blood of two wars."

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