 a lot of Germany is dead. Our last bombing was directed against their communications, against convoys, trains, road, and rail bridges, against good yards, stations, fire ducts. We not only smashed up the towns but smashed up the links between the towns. And at the finish life in Germany just ran down like a clock. Place and time meant nothing because the people, the links between the people were smashed too. They were just left wandering, searching, looking for food, looking for their homes, looking for each other. There are 70 million people in Germany and about 30 million of them are looking for someone or are lost and lie looking without seeing like the eyes of a dead rabbit. They are still stunned by what hit them, stunned by the war they started. But in the search for food and the urge to get home the life force is beginning to stir again. Today our power is a destruction of terrifying. But the will to live is still stronger. That's why we can't wash our hands of the Germans because we can't afford to let that new life flow in any direction it wants. Our military government, that is, your husbands and sons, have to prod the Germans into putting their house in order. Why? We have an interest in Germany that is purely selfish. We cannot live next to a disease-ridden neighbour and we must prevent not only starvation and epidemics but also diseases of the mind. New brands of fascism from springing up. What is more, we have to persuade the Germans to do this themselves. First of all, the material patching up is lifeless. But underneath the rubble there are people living, living in the cellars. The smoke from the cooking stoves drips up from the ruins to the open third story where people are living too. Many in the big towns living without light, without coal, without water, without soap, living in the stench of corpses and sewage, but still with the will to live. The one thing on which all reconstruction depends is coal. Without coal there can be no power and no transport. In Essen our coal control has taken over the Krupp family mansion as its headquarters. And from here we organise the output and distribution from the whole Ruhr coal fields. Last summer what was called Operation Coal Scuttle brought 30,000 miners back from the Wehrmacht. But today the great problem is moving the coal from the pithead to the liberated countries, to the German power plants and to the Allied military dumps. For the Germans themselves there is no coal. They must go out in the woods and parks to cut wood, to strip the bark off the trees, to collect brushwood and carry it home in hand carts and prams. We say the great problem. But in Germany today for military government offices there is no such thing as a single problem. For example, the liberated countries won't get this coal unless there is transport to carry it. The transport cannot move any distance unless the tracks and the bridges have been repaired. They can't be repaired without steel and the steel cannot be made without coal. 17 newspapers published in the British Zone. They all carry advertisements asking for the whereabouts of relatives. At Hamburg there is a British run postal search station indexing enquiries coming in at the rate of 50,000 a day. But when someone contacts their relatives they must get a permit before they can travel by train. Ords of cyclists and pedestrians and horse drawn trucks wait to cross the pontoon and Bailey bridges built by our engineers. Wait to cross after military government traffic. And all this has to be supervised by our sergeants and our MPs. We have to safeguard ourselves. First of all from crime and disorder. So military government courts are set up with British judges. These courts are public. There is an interpreter, a German defence council and a British prosecutor. Then the German police force is being remade. The policeman has to understand that he is the servant of the public and not its master. Then we have to safeguard ourselves and disease. The Germans are getting 1,000 to 1,200 calories a day according to type of work. About half are rations. But we have a survey team in the field staffed by the Red Cross and the RAMC checking the effect of these rations on the population. Tests are made of blood content, of blood pressure, of height and weight and reports sent to the control commission for them to judge whether the food is just sufficient to keep Germany at work. But the greatest headache is education. You will never get Nazi ideas out of the heads of some of the adults. Particularly those living away from the devastated areas. What about the children? For them, the desolated landscape provides a dream playground. The derelict weapons of war might have been specially designed to have games with. There are Germans who know this can't go on. The teachers must be found and themselves taught to teach the children that there are other things in life beyond Nazism and war. But again, the complexity of problems. The schools are in ruins, the teachers too few, the children too many. And as the months go by, the children are growing up and getting more like their fathers. We just cannot afford to leave them to stew in their own juice. Today Berlin has still the aspect of a battlefield. The Reichstag, the seat of past German governments, has been gutted. The Krupp family, who were the other German industrialists, first backed Hitler and then produced the weapons for world domination, have been scattered and arrested. This family armed Germany in the Franco-Prussian war. They made big birtherin the first submarine for the Kaiser in World War I. They are just as responsible for killing Allied soldiers as Hitler and Göring. And by killing, they grew rich. This time, their war plants have been left a mass of twisted girders. Look. This time, the Wehrmacht are really beaten. To the wire cages all over Germany, the master race of men are slubbering along. They are stripped of their insignia, delight, numbered. But this mass of humanity has to be sorted out into something like order. Not only their bodies, but also their minds. What about the ideas in their heads? They have to be demobilized and got back to work. With let one man or woman who still believes in a Nazi regime or the destiny of the German people to rule the world, take office and you have the beginnings of another war. So they are put through a screen. To begin with, a selected Germans interrogate them and fill in their demobilization papers. Note this meek little man who looks like a clerk or a grocer. Here is his portrait in Luftwaffe uniform. Then all their thumb prints are taken for record and they are stripped and examined for the SS Mark Tattooed under the left armpit. Then their past history and characters examined by our intelligence officers. Germans speaking ex-commandos and parachutists. The majority of Germans get through this close examination and are demobilized. But every so often there appears one who is suspect or who is wanted, whose papers are too good or whose answers are not good enough. As night falls in Germany, the people must remember the curfew. Those without homes or caught on the street disappear into the air raid shelters. Then the air raid siren wails again to remind them that they lost a war of their own making. To remind them that it is up to them to regain their self respect as a nation and to learn to live in a friendly manner with their neighbors. To remind them that much as we hate it, we shall stay in Germany until we have real guarantees that the next generation will grow up a sane and Christian people. A Germany of light and life and freedom. A Germany that respects truth and tolerance and justice. Now gentlemen, if you'll raise your right hands and take the earth with me. I swear by Almighty God that I will at all times apply and administer the law without fear or favor and with justice and equity to all persons of whatever creed, race, color or political opinion they may be to justice under the law. So help me God.