will and intelligence to grasp the full meaning of a powerful evil
and an evil power which beggar all historical parallels.

Many of the documents which the author cites were put into
evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Some of them were not. It
is to the author's great credit that he does not restrict himself, as
the trials largely did, to the inhumanities of the political leaders
of the Nazis. He brings the military in. He brings the men of sci-
ence in. And, above all, he pays his full respects to the role played
by men like Schacht, who got off free, and by other industrialists.

It is so terribly easy to forget what the Nazis did and were--
and still are. I hope this book will jog our memory by laying bare
the anatomy of Nazi evil, an evil which still exists in Germany
today. For while the Nazi military power has been shattered, there
has been no real effort to root out the Nazi ideas, or to destroy
the power of the cartels, or to smash the potential rebuilding
of the war machine. There has been no real effort to re-educate
the German mind and heart. Such an effort would have to be a
concerted one by the four Great Powers which today share the oc-
cupation of Germany. Yet they are too busy to make it--too busy
wooing the Germans while jockeying for position in the struggle
between East and West which darkens the horizons of the future.

The great result of Nuremberg was the creation of a new base
for international law: the proposition that mass murder is no less
murder because it is done on a vast scale; that when a state under-
takes aggressive warfare, the men who conspire to that end and
who carry it out and who commit the crimes against humanity
involved in it will be punished as individuals. This is a vast stride
forward--pitiable, perhaps, when compared with the human cost
preceding it, but still a decisive step toward a body of world law.

We have now the machinery in the United Nations to prevent
a repetition of the crimes portrayed in this book. We have the be-
ginnings of a world law ready to punish them. What is lacking is
the collective and cohesive will to use both--world law and the
machinery for its execution. The author will have performed an
immense service if this book can help to cement that will. He has
written as a soldier of peace. I hope he will be read by many
other soldiers of peace--in the schools, the colleges, the churches,
the trade unions, the homes of America.

MAX LERNER

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