The Pittsburgh Press (February 13, 1945)
GERMANS DENOUNCE ‘SATANIC’ PACT
Yalta program catches Nazis by surprise
‘Political murder,’ Goebbels’ boys cry
LONDON, England (UP) – German propagandists today called the Crimean declaration the “Program of the haters of Yalta.”
Germany “will smash this Satanic plan,” DNB promised.
After a lengthy delay in informing the German public of the nature of the Crimean communiqué, an official DNB News Agency dispatch was issued with instructions to German editors that it be headlined: “Germany Has to Be Exterminated.”
Caught off base
The DNB dispatch charged that President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Marshal Joseph Stalin had decided upon “new crimes against humanity.” It charged that the Crimean conferees were imbued “with the Spirit of Old Testament Jewish Hatred” and were attempting the “greatest political murder of all time.”
Apparently, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was caught off base as he had been busily warning the Reich to beware of a Wilsonian peace plea.
Even since the Big Three conference had been rumored, Goebbels had turned loose the full propaganda facilities inside Germany to warn the Reich against a Big Three appeal to the German people.
Expected honeyed plea
The Goebbels line was that the Big Three would issue a honeyed plea to Germany which would make the “unconditional surrender” doctrine sound more palatable. Goebbels warned the Nazis to beware of any such new “Wilsonian” tactics.
But when the Big Three communiqué failed to bear out this buildup, the Nazi propagandists were apparently at a loss how to present the grim news to the Nazi public. For hours after the news had been announced and Allied radios were blaring it into Germany on all available wavelengths the domestic Nazi radio made no mention of the Crimea conference.
The flat Big Three assertion that Germany is doomed appeared to have thrown a monkey-wretch into the usually well-oiled Nazi propaganda machinery.
Give gist of communiqué
For foreign consumption the Nazi propaganda displayed equal uncertainty.
Initial broadcasts merely gave the gist of the Crimea communiqué.
Later, Nazi commentators said the Big Three had confirmed their policy of “hate and destruction” toward Germany. Broadcasts beamed to the United States said that the Big Three had adopted the “Morgenthau plan for enslavement and destruction” of the Reich.
Other comments said the Big Three committed “the greatest political crime of all times.” They said it was “a super-Versailles that surpasses the old Versailles by 100 percent.”
Attack Polish solution
Broadcasts to Europe attacked the Polish solution and made sarcastic references to Allied plans for relief of liberated countries.
Berlin spokesmen railed at the Big Three plan to transfer German territory to Poland and declared jeeringly that “the bear’s skin is being divided before the bear is caught.”
“The arrogant authors of the communiqué must have realized themselves that the German answer to these songs of hate cannot be anything but fight,” one broadcaster said.
Allied transmitters in London, Moscow and elsewhere in and around the continent told Germany the story of the Big Three meeting in the official words of the communiqué, without elaborating on that announcement.
Japs give news
At intervals of an hour or less, German-speaking announcers broadcast the official statement by shortwave to Germany and Austria, interspersed by similar transmissions to other parts of the continent.
FCC monitors in New York said the Tokyo radio broadcast a factual summary of the communiqué late last night to Japs living in the Americas, but there was no indication that the Jap home public had yet been informed of the meeting.
Stockholm dispatches, meanwhile, said a flood of fantastic rumors had come out of Germany in the wake of the Big Three proclamation, most of them from dubious anti-Nazi sources.
Explosion in Berlin
Among the most lurid of these were reports that Adolf Hitler had resigned as Reich Chancellor in favor of Baron Franz von Papen; that Hitler and von Papen had received a peace delegate from the Vatican; that Gestapo agents were searching Berlin’s graveyards for secret arms caches after a series of mysterious explosions in the capital, and that the Fuehrer was preparing to launch gas warfare with a new “wonder gas."
More reliable reports circulating in Zurich said the Swiss minister to Berlin had left the German capital and that other neutral delegations were expected to follow very shortly, presumably because of the Red Army advance from the east. The Papal Nuncio in Berlin was also said to have left the city for an undisclosed destination.
Sweden’s legation was reported to have been ordered to remain in Berlin as long as possible to assist the fairly large number of Swedes remaining in Germany.