Letter : Judge not

Further to your article "Willing Executioners revives German angst over Holocaust" (11 August), one day while interrogating a German SS soldier in a POW camp in Scotland, I asked why he was so committed to Adolf Hitler. "At the end of the 1914 war," he said, "my father was a cripple, having lost his leg. My father and mother, with me in her arms, were walking the roads of Germany with no money or food and nowhere to live. Then came Adolf Hitler. Hitler gave my father a pension because of his lost leg. Hitler gave him a job he could do sitting down. Hitler gave my parents a house. That's what Hitler did for my parents." The Intelligence Corps staff sergeant, himself a Jew, turned to me and said: "What are we going to say to him?" and I thought, yes, I might just have been that baby, and where would I have been on that day? I might have been on the other side of that table.

N H Raven

Stroud, Gloucestershire