Stating that revengeful humiliation or the dismemberment of Germany should not be a part of post-war plans, Gordon W. Allport, associate professor of Psychology, denied in an interview yesterday that the German people are innately aggressive.
Their dominant characteristic, Allport said, is their subjection of the individual to institutional ideas. Any post-war plan, therefore, should be carried out with an eye toward "selling" the Germans some different institutional ideas, ideas in which a world-state and peace are substituted for the local state and "world domination."
Unnecessarily humiliating measures, Allport declared, would not only provoke greater German tendencies to want to "strike back," but although the terms of the World War II settlement should be more lenient--and therefore more possible to carry out--than were those of Versailles, they should be much more thoroughly enforced.
"The world is getting tired of German-provoked wars," Allport said, and for that reason, a 30 year "government by commission" headed by German as well as by international leaders, could solve the problem of eliminating Nazi-ism and preparing the German people for the time when they will govern themselves and take part, unaggressively, in a world federation.
According to Allport, who was in Germany at the time of the Rubr occupation, German thought is remarkably diversified, and their present state of mind is due to the fact that their thought has been temporarily polarized by Hitler, who has reinforced its intolerable aspects.
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