In collapsing Reich –
Mere robots cower under Nazi terror
Germans goaded into choosing death
By Nat A. Barrows
This is the second of a series portraying conditions in a country near collapse – Germany.
Stockholm, Sweden –
Across the Rhine, inside Germany, awaits a nation of suicidal fanatics.
Goaded by the most insidiously cunning propaganda campaign any country has ever known, these home front Germans are prepared to make every sacrifice before accepting defeat.
Himmler, Goebbels, Ley, Bormann and all the rest of the mad Nazi gang have administered their stimulants cleverly… so cleverly that the average citizen’s fear of Nazi terrorism against pro-Allied sympathizers or partisans overshadows everything. The Nazis have tried to inculcate into every home front brain their ghastly version of the consequences following German defeat.
Would rather die
From all the evidence I have been able to appraise as provided by deserters, war prisoners, impartial travelers and other eyewitnesses, they have succeeded only too well.
Today, most Germans think that they would rather die fighting with clubs than submit to what Goebbels tells them will be a fate worse than death.
They have swallowed such Nazi terror talk as Gauleiter Koch fed the East Prussian Volkssturm, or People’s Army, recently:
German men may be buried under the ruins of their towns, and their villages, but this soil, this Heimat of ours, cannot be evacuated… Every village will now become a stronghold, every town a fortress… We’ll stand to the last round against our subhuman enemies… Don’t believe in the enemy a single second before you see him, and when you see him, just shoot him down.
In such an atmosphere, civilians drag themselves along and prepare for greater sacrifices.
Scarcity, more scarcity
Scarcity, and more scarcity, conditions every home front German. A year ago, the Germans thought they had touched rock-bottom in privations and restrictions, but as they look back now, out from their daze of claustrophobia, they realize that they were having incredible luxuries then.
Life could hardly be more regimented; no man can call his soul his own – or anything else. Everything must be sacrificed in the interests of what Dr. Robert Ley, Labor Front leader, calls the “Holy German national war.”
Food gets scarcer and black market prices soar astronomically, despite brutal punishment or death for both buyers and operators.
No one can travel more than 12 miles without written permission. No one can change the use or ownership of motor vehicles without written permission. No one can utter the slightest anti-Nazi criticism or hint about defeat without risking execution.
As never before, Himmler’s Gestapo and SS spies are trying to catch listeners to the BBC, ABSIE (American Broadcasting Station in Europe) and other Allied radio stations. Nazi terror psychology tactics spread the rumor of a new device enabling the Gestapo to identify such listeners in a few seconds. The usual penalty awaits those arrested for tuning in non-German stations – death.
Himmler’s fears that a semblance of truth would penetrate inside Germany have been reduced, however, by the number of radios destroyed by bombings.
Millions uprooted
The impact of saturation bombings touches every phase of life inside Germany, to say nothing of the millions who have been uprooted and obliged to take improvised shelter in barracks and half-repaired houses, or to lodge with strangers.
It is going to be a bitterly cold winter for the Germans. If present predictions of the coldest winter in a century are anywhere near correct, the growing shortage of all kinds of fuel portends a taste of some of the misery the Germans have inflicted upon so many innocent millions in other winters.
“We cope with difficulties never experienced before,” accurately says Dr. Ley.
He doesn’t have to tell that to the people of the Heimat, compressed behind the 400-mile West Front, behind a vast trench system to the east, behind unfinished defenses to the south. Every move they make tells them the gnawing, bitter truth of what total war really means.
Sugar ration reduced
The sugar ration has just been reduced again; sugar is needed for industry. Women can select new hats from only seven standardized types; cloth is needed for uniforms.
The Hitler Youth, those fanatical, frenzied teenage Nazis, now beyond all hope of redemption, must practice fencing with canes instead of rapiers; all swords have been thrown in the maw of the steel mills.
“Ausverkauft” greets weary housewives at store after store – sold out. Shortages and sacrifices… shortages and sacrifices. And the more sacrifices they make, the more they are called upon to make.
Philosophy summed up
Dr. Ley, writing in Der Angriff a few days ago, summed up the National Socialist philosophy of sacrifice thus:
The Germans are willing to make all further sacrifices and not to omit anything to mobilize their last resources.
If there is justice and a Lord in Heaven, then this sacrifice, which is the greatest any nation ever made, will be placed on the scales of justice. Victory is linked with sacrifices, hence, victory must be ours, because Germany has made the greatest sacrifices.
Just what the average, mature German beyond, say, 30 years of age, thinks of such rubbish – is not on the record. Himmler’s brutish, unmerciful reign of terror and Goebbels’ unending propaganda hypodermics have reduced the average German to a mere robot, overstrained, undernourished, unable to think clearly for himself.
Each new Allied advance only intensifies the cleverly directed fanaticism boiling inside Germany today.