MANN THOMAS: (1875-1955) ´ humanity has understood that this shameless mischief must be beaten and exterminated´

MANN THOMAS: (1875-1955) ´ humanity has understood that this shameless mischief must be beaten and exterminated´

MANN THOMAS: (1875-1955) German novelist, Nobel Prize winner for Literature, 1929. An important typescript MS, Thomas Mann, six pages (separate leaves), 4to, n.p., n.d. (1942), being the English language manuscript of Mann´s dramatic radio broadcast to Germany during World War II, entitled (in Mann´s hand) Why Hitler Cannot Win. The manuscript, with a number of corrections in the author´s hand (shown in bold italics), represents the full text of the essay as originally written by Mann and includes certain passages that do not appear in published versions. The opening paragraph states ´I will try to explain to you why Hitler cannot win. The answer is simple. He cannot win, because he must not win, because the abolition of his regime is such an obvious necessity that it must and will be accomplished at any price´, and the text continues, in part, ´Nobody in Europe, in Germany or the subjugated territories, should believe that perhaps the events in the far East, the conquests of Japan, could change the fate of the Third Reich in the slightest, or that the elimination of Hitler and his ilk is not sealed and decided. Like Germany last year and the year before that, Japan at present finds herself in the stage of easy victories. But the new order of the World will be decided by the coming peace treaty, not by the surprise attack of well prepared robbery on peaceful strength. This new order will not be determined by lust for revenge and punishment, but will give consideration, in a reasonable way, to the needs of the peoples. Everything is thinkable in this connection, even an outlet for the cramped people of Japan. But it is unthinkable that the world could agree to a continuance of the Hitler Regime. With Nazism the world cannot live, - nobody can live with it, not even its allies, and National Socialism does not omit anything, - cannot omit anything according to its nature - to hammer into humanity the necessity of its extirpation. A simple example of this is the treatment of Russian war prisoners by the Nazi High Command....described as a systematic assassination.....German Sentries have unmistakable orders to shoot as many of them as possible.....others are starved out, or the Nazis let them die of their wounds by withholding medical care. Thus it is done in the Polish war prison-camp Biala Podlaska, where......hundreds perish helplessly every day......The Polish community in which shelter is given to an escaped Russian by any of its members is massacred in its entirety, from the oldest man to the youngest infant. The tendency to cloak bestialism in legality is a familiar peculiarity of Nazism. Thus the mistreatment and murder of the Russian prisoners of war is based upon a military principle, invented especially for the justification of these crimes, and never heard before: hostile forces which are surrounded, trapped and cut off, according to German opinion, are already regarded as prisoners, and if they do not lay down arms their resistance is not considered as combat but as mutiny, by which they place themselves outside of the legal protection for prisoners of war. - What has German military honor come to? In former days an adversary who resisted bravely to the last was respected by his enemies. Today he is declared infamous. With what justification? Nobody understands that who does not understand the insane logic which National Socialism has employed from its very beginning, even before it grasped power......Crime itself establishes itself on earth as inviolable, as the power sanctified by God and History, and to lift a hand against it is a sacrilege punishable by death. The human spirit becomes still and silent in the face of such apocalyptic impudence. It will hardly yield to it, however....The United Nations knows what threatens them if Hitler wins. They know what they are in his eyes, in the eyes of Nazi Germany: vermin, human rubbish, inferior races destined for slavery, - destined to serve the lucid and chosen kingly nation of the Germans, after they have been adequately prepared for that morally and physically, their pride and manhood broken, after they have been reduced intellectually and biologically to such a degree that they can never again become a danger to the autocracy of the German barbarian nobility. The Polish example shows them how this is accomplished.....In France the means are only slightly more subtle.....Indeed, Nazism understands how to convince the world of the vital necessity for its abolishment! The free peoples....will continue to fight.....to clear the world of this pestilence of murderous arrogance.....What is called National Socialism is, historically speaking, a pernicious decay of ideas......the decay of the romantic nationalism.....which directed is special attention and careful scientific and poetic studies to the variations and refractions of humanity in the different national characters and cultures......A fateful history of corruption in Germany has made this movement which, it is true, always set liberty above equality, into a satanic religion of national arrogance and racism, into a crime aristocratism which claims the physical and spiritual world as German Lebensraum, and separates humanity into Germans and slaves. Once again: one cannot live with that. Under the domination of an idea of subjugation which has lost all moral and religious inhibition, no happiness, no liberty, no dignified human existence is possible on earth. After a long alck of understanding and an inability to believe it, humanity has understood that this shameless mischief must be beaten and exterminated if life on earth is not to become a hell of infamy.....The subjugated peoples of Europe who groan under the scourge of an indescribable scoundrelism must know that the day of their liberation will come. Man is a weak being tied to nature; but he carries in himself a divine, spiritual spark, the idea of right, of dignity, of liberty, and this spark will not be extinguished´. A document of powerful content. Some very light, extremely minor age wear, and with slight paperclip indentation marks to the upper left corners of each page, VG

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland and, upon the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he moved to America. The novelist is one of the best known exponents of Exilliteratur, the German literature written in exile by those who opposed the Hitler regime.

On the outbreak of World War II Mann was prompted to offer anti-Nazi speeches (in German) to the German people via the British Broadcasting Corporation. In October 1940 Mann began monthly broadcasts, recorded in America and flown to London, where the BBC German Service broadcast them on a longwave band. In these eight-addresses, the novelist condemned Hitler and the Nazis as crude philistines completely out of touch with European culture.

Twenty-five of Mann´s speeches, including the present example, were published under the title Listen, Germany! In 1943. The opening and closing paragraphs of the manuscript offered here were eliminated from the on-air broadcast, and similarly do not appear in the published transcriptions, Deutsche Horen (1942) and the English translation, Listen, Germany! Approximately 800 words of the essay´s 1800 total words are unpublished.