Word: defenselessness
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Nazi Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, 63, whose death sentence for war crimes (he supervised the bombing of defenseless Warsaw and supine Rotterdam) was commuted in 1947 to life imprisonment, returned to his prison after a ten-day leave, spent with his wife at a Bavarian lakeside resort. It was all "in accordance with normal penal regulations," his British keepers announced; before he went, unguarded, "Smiling Albert" had given his word that he would be back...
...Nazi camps to save them from the gas chambers [TIME, Sept. 20], you omitted [a point] of great importance. Many of these women became pregnant because they were raped by the prison guards, who then had to conceal their violation of their own "racial purity" laws by killing the defenseless women. It is easy for shocked moralists, safe in this country, to condemn Dr. Perl. One wonders how nobly moral they would be if their own wives & daughters were in a similar situation...
Great Gate. The day of the funeral, it rained. With admirable restraint, nobody wrote that "Even the skies wept for the Babe"-except the New York Times's Sport Columnist Arthur Daley, who passed off the remark on a defenseless taxi driver. In St. Patrick's Cathedral, Francis Cardinal Spellman presided at a Requiem Mass (attended by 6,000), with Governor Dewey, New York's Mayor O'Dwyer and Boston's Mayor Curley as pallbearers. The press reported that 75,000 people were "in the area," which could be said of Rockefeller Center any weekday...
...general uprising in the Warsaw ghetto; 50,000 Jews, all that remained of half a million originally herded behind the ghetto walls, had decided that, since they were to die, they would not die tamely. The Germans brought re-enforcements from Galicia; waves of bombers swept over the defenseless ghetto, raining incendiaries and high explosive. It took them 42 days to level every building. A few hundred Jews-all that were left of the 50,000 in the ghetto six weeks before-escaped through the sewers to join the guerrillas...
...minority note. But the report itself gave short shrift to his view: "There are those who say that the solution is to counter aggression by love. Ultimately that may be true. But is it applicable to the problem that confronts us? ... A nation that by disarmament rendered itself defenseless would not be assisting in the prevention of aggression, which is the only way to preserve justice in the world...