Fear Blitzkrieg hits German home front with full Nazi force
Leaders try to arouse people to deadly sacrifices by stressing consequences
By Nat A. Barrows
Third of a series
Stockholm, Sweden –
Day and night, matching its tempo with the thunder of Allied guns across the Rhine, Nazi home front propaganda struggles desperately to arouse every last shred of hatred, fear, and sacrifice.
Like the penetrating effects of bomb-blast concussion, this outcry of the doomed National Socialist gangsters is reaching, with stunning influence, throughout the Germany. The pace quickens in ratio to the Allied advances.
Over 39 radio wavelengths, in every Nazi newspaper, and on every Nazi platform, the stooges echo their masters’ cry: “Struggle and sacrifice… Struggle and sacrifice.”
Fear is the keynote of this nationwide barrage: Fear of defeat, fear of what the Allies will do, fear, fear, and more fear. Just under the surface of all these cleverly devised psychological tricks lies what Winston Churchill has called, “the dull whining note of fear” among the Nazi bosses themselves.
Worry about own necks
They are not worried about the people; they are worried about their own necks. No longer can they dangle luring conquests as the prize for successful resistance against our armies. So now, driven back into their own limited home front, from the control over 325 million persons, they have only one alternative.
That alternative is to arouse home front Germans to the utmost sacrifices by mesmerizing them with deadly fear of the consequences of defeat.
Here are some typical examples culled from Nazi papers reaching Stockholm:
Deputy Gauleiter Holz, in trying to bolster the morale of the Volkssturm boys and old men in Franconia, told that unit of the People’s Army that they must never surrender, never bend their proud German necks under the feet of the Mongols and Jews, never cry for mercy.
Asks fight to finish
He said:
The word capture does not exist for the Volkssturm man. There is only the fight to the finish. And when the last round has been fired, there is still the bayonet and the rifle butt, and finally, you have got your two hands to strangle the enemy.
In Dresden, Prof. Boerger told a mass meeting that the Germans are not going to lament in times of distress… “No, we want revenge, revenge, and we have but one will: To use the cruelest means ever invented by German brains.”
Dr. Robert Ley, the Labor Front leader, appears to be making speeches every day to spread the Nazi doctrine of “sacrifice and more sacrifice.” It was he who recently shouted: The “military people’s war today has become the holy German national war,” treason caused the disasters in the Caucasus and Africa, and by the Channel, “but treason inside the home front cannot live – as we saw on July 20.”
‘Never capitulate’
He also has said:
I firmly believe that we will again change the courses of fate… Should setbacks occur, we will take and manage them but we will never capitulate. Whoever wants to annihilate us must descend into the grave with us.
The Völkischer Beobachter, Nazi Party organ in Berlin, certainly has never failed in its task of reflecting and espousing Nazi policies. Now it is outdoing earlier breathless efforts. It has one basic note in its editorials, which the readers find under one guise or another in every edition:
History demands of every individual a decision, which cannot be evaded. This decision is struggle and sacrifice until victory.
Quote Hitler
Then there is that question, reportedly from Hitler – the now strangely silent Hitler – which Joseph Goebbels is busily spreading among the Herrenvolk: “May God forgive me for what it have to do in the last week of war.”
Goebbels’ ward heelers do not attempt to interpret the meaning behind this beyond implying that it signifies a new terror weapon. Obviously, it can be interpreted in several ways, not the least of which strikes close to the German civilian.
And so, the tirades blare forth incessantly, and always around the corner lurk Himmler’s Gestapo brutes ready to wipe out the merest sign of internal defection.
In his 1944 New Year’s speech, Hitler called it, “a hard and heavy year ahead for Germany.” For once Adolf permitted himself an understatement.