ABSTRACT
Political re-education was the alternative put forward by Britain during the common wartime search for a policy which would prevent the resurgence of Germany for a third time as a hostile military power. The Germans were to be re-educated to embrace the ‘rule of law’; ‘rechstat’ instead of ‘real-politik’; philosophical pragmatism instead of idealism in the Hegelian sense; constitutionalism instead of etatism. Adolf Hitler might have been able to preserve his own hold on his beliefs by ordering that he was never again to be given intelligence figures showing that the Russians were outbuilding Germany in tanks in a ratio of ten to one. The culmination of it all was ‘re-education’; a conscious euphemism for the adaptation to post-victory conditions and needs of concepts, techniques and personnel of what British called ‘Political Warfare’ and the Americans called ‘Psychological Warfare’. The roots of basic idea behind ‘re-education’ went deep indeed into the culture and political experiences of the English speaking peoples.
