I do not know why I should boggle at the lopped-off Belgian baby’s hands, except that nobody could ever find an authentic example, and I cannot imagine what good it would do the Germans, nor believe that even Nazi Germans like to torture babies. The machine-gunning of the roads in Europe had a military object, to cause panic and to clog the movements of the Allied troops. But I have seen enough purposeless acts of brutality committed by the Nazis to know what they are capable of doing. I wish Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose sensitivity as a poet I sincerely admire, could have been with me one day in the women’s ward of a Berlin hospital as I listened to a woman explain to me why she lay there bandaged from head to foot, with the blood still oozing through. It was in the spring of 1933, and the Brown Terror was getting into its stride, but the Nazis had not yet learned to bar correspondents from hospitals. After this story they were all barred. The woman was Frau Marie Jankowsky, forty-eight years old, mother of five sons. She was a Social Democratic welfare worker. “Night before last,” she related to me, pausing only when pain made her gasp, “a group of Storm Troopers came to our flat. One of them backed my husband and sons into the kitchen and held them at the point of his revolver. The others took me away to a Storm Troop barracks on the second floor of a building not far from my house. There they stripped me naked. In the middle of the room was a table, and covering the table a flag. They asked me what the flag was. “I answered it was the Black Red Gold flag of the Republic. They said ‘No,’ and commanded me to repeat that it was Black Red Ordure. I refused and four Storm Troopers pulled me face down over the table, the fifth pushed my face into a bundle of rags to stop me screaming, and a sixth began beating me across the back with a light steel rod. “It cut the skin and made blood come with every blow. The Storm Troop Captain said, ‘Give her twenty blows, the Jewish sow.’ I am not Jewish but that did not make any difference. Then they jerked me off the table and said, ‘You stole shoes from your welfare section, didn’t you?’ I said, ‘No,’ and the Captain said, ‘Give her another twenty.’ I was bleeding badly when they pulled me off the table again and yelled at me, ‘What’s this?’ and showed me our flag of the Iron Front with three arrows. I told them, but they demanded that I say it was a manure fork. I refused and the Captain ordered another twenty blows.