Editorial: ‘The cry of blood’
The Nazis threaten that if the war “spills over our holy German land,” they will “turn this continent into a maelstrom of destruction where only one cry is heard – the cry of blood.”
As if their bloodlust needed advertising!
Do they think the survivors of five years of the Nazi “maelstrom of destruction” can be frightened now? Do they that German land is more “holy” to Germans than the desecrated homes of Poles, Russians, Frenchmen, Dutch, Belgians, Norwegians, Yugoslavs and others are dear to those victims of German invaders? Do they think the British have forgotten the blitz or the present wanton robot slaughter? Do they think the Czechs, or any of the Allies, have forgotten Lidice?
Have the Germans not just reminded the world of their savagery by deeds more terrible than their words of blood?
In the Greek village of Distomo near the foot of Mount Parnassus, seat of Apollo and the Muses, neighbor to the birthplace of Hesiod and of Plutarch, the supermen of German kultur last month slaughtered more than 1,000 unarmed civilians. According to the report by the Nazis’ own puppet regime:
The villagers were rounded up within a square, facing machine-gun posts and troops with submachine guns. When over 1,000 of the villagers were assembled, the Nazis opened up point-blank fire. When all the victims had fallen, the troopers went among them, pistoling those who were still alive, and stamping the life from babies whom mothers and others had protected with their own bodies. The Germans then fired the village.
And now the Germans warn us that if “holy German land” is touched, they will cause “destruction” everywhere and “the cry of blood.”
And not long ago, incidentally, a group of American churchmen signed a petition opposing continuation of air raids against German war industries without the effects of which the present successful invasion of France would have been impossible.
When the Allies have closed in further on Germany – when invading armies are actually fighting on German soil and the Nazis are working desperately for a negotiated peace, it may be expected that pleas of “mercy for a defeated enemy” will arise. The same sort of impractical idealists who wanted to stop the bombing of Germany will then find excuses for the “misled” German people, and will plead that we do not continue a hopelessly one-sided war merely to punish the defeated foe.
There will be pleas not to march on Berlin; to stop the bloodbath with a merciful peace – in short, to let the Germans off short of complete defeat, as we did so disastrously the last time.
There will be many well-intentioned people who will join in this cry solely because they want to get their loved ones home, and see in a negotiated peace the surest means of shortening the war.
If we are saps again, there will come another war after the Nazi-trained youth of Germany has had a chance to recover from this war.
If the atrocities of today are forgotten and forgiven, Germany will surely turn on the world again. Only by complete, savage, final defeat on the bloody fields of Germany can this war be won with the probability that it won’t break out again in an even more ghastly form.