I spent an uncomfortable morning standing over the city room teletypes and watching the Holy Season dispatches pour out of Germany.

    I read the bulletin from Cologne about the synagogue that had been desecrated on Christmas Eve.  I saw copy that the Berlin police had found the slogan "Juden Raus" (Jews Get Out) in letters a foot high painted over commercial billboards.  The cold, mechanical machinery typed out the grim news that Berlin cops had also broken up a demonstration of neo-Nazi students who met in a park, raised the swastika and sang the songs that hadn't been sung since 1945. 

    Or, at least, hadn't been publicly sung.

    I read about smashed windows, threatening letters and the report — maybe just a report — from a London newspaper that 50,000 teen-age Germans are undergoing training in secret Nazi camps of West Germany to prepare for a fanatical purge of Jews. 

    It depressed me to read it.  But it didn't come as too much of a surprise. 
 
     All it did was refresh my memory of two years ago, when I visited the post-Hitler Germany.  The new Germany that we were told was riddled with guilt feelings for the horror it had allowed to happen to the world.

    The Germany I saw was a remarkable place.

    There was no indication, anywhere, that this was the same nation that had wreaked the greatest, most sadistic havoc in the history of the world.  The people were smiling, well-dressed,Germanically plump and exceptionally considerate of American tourists.  Their stores, restaurants and night clubs were jammed.  We Americans were having a recession.  But our very recent enemy was, with the benefit of our financing, enjoying a fantastic economic boom.

    And nowhere was there a sign, a plaque, anything to recall that this wealthy, happy, vanquished country, had once supported the paranoidal whims of a madman dedicated to committing genocide on a whole race of people.  A dedication he damn near fulfilled with what, realistically, had to be their silent approval, and, in most cases, their outright assistance.

    There were, however, no Nazi sympathizers in this post-war Germany.  It was almost as if they wanted you to believe that Hitler was at the head of an invading horde who occupied them against their will. 

    But if you looked closely, you couldn't quite believe that.

    The latest outrages teletyped from Germany have refreshed my memories of other things I saw and heard.

    I remember the blond young man who goes to college at night and works as a tourist guide during the day.  He walked with a limp and his right arm hung uselessly from the effects of five years in a Russian prison camp.  "Nazis?"  he told me.  "They will never come back.  We know that Hitler was wrong. Besides, we like Americans too much.

    "But," he added, "someday we could have trouble with the English.  They're not like you Americans.  They're too arrogant."

    And I remember the U.S. Army major in intelligence who told me:  "Nazis? Sure!  They're starting up again.  You'd have to be a fool not to see it.  What are we doing about it?  Nothing, pal.  Not a thing."

    And the Jewish waiter who said, "I was a purser on ocean liners before the war.  Now I'm a waiter.  When I go for a job here, there are none.  I came back because, even though I'm a Jew, I'm a German first.  But for the Jew, nothing is different.  Nothing has changed.  There is still no place for us in Germany."

    That was two years ago.  And, I'm afraid, they were prophetic words.

    There were 175,000 Jews in Berlin before World War II.  There are only 7,000 there today.  And most of them are the elderly.  The "Germans" who came back to die in the fatherland that Hitler had denied them.

    But the paint smearings, the street gangs and the smashed windows have started again.  The smoldering, insane hate is bursting into flame again. 

    And again, I'm afraid we'll just sit by for a few years, and let it happen.