ROME, Italy (UP) – The German announcement of Adolf Hitler’s death caused remarkably little excitement in Italy, once a co-partner in the Axis.
Newspapers were not printing because of the May Day holiday and publishers told the United Press that “Hitler’s death is not worth an extra or publication on an off-day.”
“We are waiting for the German surrender, nothing else,” one publisher said.
U.S. diplomatic quarters were skeptical of the report.
Strong Jap defenses pierced on Okinawa
GUAM (UP) – U.S. armored forces punched through strong Jap defenders on Southern Okinawa today to within a mile and a half of Naha, capital of the island.
The drive southward along the west coast by the 27th Infantry Division paced a general advance of American troops on a five-mile front across the island.
On the east coast, troops of the 7th Infantry Division pushed to the northern end of strategic Yonabaru Airfield and other elements of the same division stormed into Kuhazu village on a hill overlooking the coastal side of the airfield.
Near Shuri
At the same time, tank units of the 96th Infantry Division, moving down the center of the island, approached Shuri, Okinawa’s second largest city three miles northeast of Naha.
Adm. Chester W. Nimitz’s aerial forces raided enemy installations in the Sakishima Islands, southwest of Okinawa, and in the Northern Ryukyus.
The Sakishimas were hit both Sunday and Monday by carrier planes which exploded ammunition dumps, wrecked radio facilities and destroyed several Jap aircraft on the ground.
Blast four ships
Four Jap cargo vessels were sunk or damaged in shipping attacks through the East China Sea, along the Ryukyus to Miyake Island south of Tokyo.
Adm. Nimitz also disclosed that Army Mustang fighters had escorted Superfortresses in a previously announced attack on Tokyo Monday. The Mustangs probably shot down one Jap plane and set fire to three picket boats off the coast.
A Tokyo broadcast claimed that a Jap “submarine unit” sank two unidentified Allied warships yesterday south of Oki-no-Daito, about 125 miles southeast of Okinawa.
Americans not kept in horror camps, but underfeeding, neglect are systematic
By Henry J. Taylor
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Egoist Fuehrer raised double-cross art to its highest pitch of all history
By S. Burton Heath
In 20 years, to the exact day, Adolf Hitler talked and double-crossed his way from the Austro-Hungarian lent of a Bowery bum to dictator over one of the world’s great nations.
On August 2, 1914, when World War I started, Hitler was existing in the squalor and degradation to which laziness, egotism and the complete lack of any constructive talent had brought him.
On August 2, 1934, he declared himself complete dictator of the Reich, and made good his presumption.
Hitler has boasted that history will remember him long after it has forgotten all his predecessors. Probably that is true.
It will recall him as an egotist who raised the double-cross to an art which nobody else in the world’s history ever achieved.
Alois Hitler, illegitimately born Schickelgruber, but legitimized by one George Hiedler, described his son, Adolf, as “good for nothing.” The description was apt from the day of his birth, April 20, 1889, to the outbreak of the First World War.
Adolf Hitler lived in Vienna, in a sort of flophouse, from 1907 to 1913. His fellow roomers gave him crusts of bread and bits of horse sausage, which he supplemented at a free soup kitchen.
In 1913, he went to Munich, where he continued his low life until the Germans marched on France.
His war service was ordinary. He won the Iron Cross twice, was wounded twice and gassed once.
He got into politics by double-crossing the German Army. In July 1919, he was assigned by the Propaganda and Espionage Division, which used him as a snooper, to observe a “meeting” of the German Workers Party, consisting of six men devoted to pan-Germanism and certain quasi-socialistic dogma. He joined them, on the spot, and thereafter combined politics with his “military” duties.
Hitler’s platform of pan-Germanism, anti-Versailles, anti-Semitism appealed to enough persons to convince him that politics was his forte.
Then came the foundation for another piece of double-crossing. A pervert named Ernest Roehm had raised a large secret army. Hitler was made public spokesman. When the Allies forced that army underground, Hitler adopted it as the Gymnastics and Sports Division of the Nazi Party.
An ex-military flier named Hermann Goering lent Hitler money and joined the party. A year later, he was put in command of Roehm’s army, the brown-shirted SA.
Beer hall putsch put down
Nor was that all that Roehm contributed to Hitler’s rise. In 1923, the Nazis and other strongarm groups held a Congress of some 100,000 persons in Nuremberg and formed a German Combat Union. Roehm maneuvered so that within a month Hitler, who had wangled dictatorship over the numerically small Nazi Party because political head of the whole combat union.
On May Day, 1923, Hitler’s SA men stole weapons from the Reichswehr barracks, undeterred because Roehm had arranged that the guards would not resist. And in November, 600 SA men kidnapped the entire government of Bavaria in the celebrated beer hall putsch.
Here, again, double-crossing was the order of the occasion. Wilhelm Frick had ordered his police to close their eyes to Hitler’s gangster’s activities. The ample guard at the beer hall did nothing, though it outnumbered the SA contingent. It was only Gen. von Seekt’s orders to the Reichswehr, after the conspirators thought they had won, that put an end to the coup and sent Hitler to prison.
Throughout this turbulent period, Gen. Ludendorff was used as a tool by the rising Austrian gang chief. Hitler used him on the theory that, when the time came for violence, the Army never would fire on its hero.
From 1923 to 1933 was a period of growth in Hitler’s fortunes and those of his party. Both were supported by contributions from big industrialists who approved Hitler’s opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, his desire to gather all Germans of the world into a greater Germany, his anti-Communism.
And finally, there was the military caste. The Junkers thought they were using Hitler to promote their own ends and woke up, much too late, to discover that Hitler had done the using.
Then, in 1932, the conservative von Papen felt obliged to offer him a cabinet seat, which he left Munich to take, only to be brought back by Goering and Goebbels.
The day after he became chancellor. Hitler dissolved the Reichstag and set March 5 for new elections. On February 27, the Reichstag building burned. It is commonly believed that the fire was set by the Nazis. but the arson was blamed on Communists and was used by Hitler to get from old man Hindenburg a decree suspending all the basic freedoms.
Storm troopers arrested political opponents. Hitler swept the elections. On March 23, a rubber-stamp Reichstag made Hitler dictator over Germany.
In June 1934, he persuaded Roehm to give the SA a month’s furlough, after which he promised to incorporate the SA into the Reichswehr as soon as sick President Hindenburg should die.
Roehm killed in blood purge
Then Hitler and Goebbels, with a picked SS group, killed Roehm and most of his closest friends while Goering, back in Berlin, purged other enemies and settled a few personal grudges with the pistol and the headsman’s help.
By 1938, Hitler felt strong enough to violate the Locarno Pact by marching into the demilitarized Rhineland. Commanding officers carried sealed orders which, if the French had objected with show of force, would have directed the Nazis to match back home again. But the French did nothing.
Hitler and Mussolini created the Rome-Berlin Axis on January 13, 1937.
Japan joined in November.
German troops marched into Austria in March – and that nation was annexed to the Reich.
Neither France nor England liked the way Hitler was stepping out. But he got Chamberlain and Daladier together with Mussolini and himself at Munich, and on September 30, the Anglo-French negotiators signed a pact authorizing Hitler to take the Sudetenland.
In each of these steps for new territory, Hitler double-crossed the nation concerned, the Anglo-French allies and the world at large. In each he used the fifth-column technique.
Hitler had signed a 10-year non-aggression pact with Poland in 1934, and the sanctity and importance of this he had reaffirmed publicly January 30, 1939.
On August 25, 1939, he signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin of Russia. Two days later, Poland concluded a defensive alliance with Great Britain, one week thereafter, German planes began bombing Polish cities and German troops crossed the frontier.
Everything went according to plan. Russia stepped in the back door September 17. Hitler and Stalin divided Poland between them the next day, and by September 29, Poland as a nation no longer existed.
But Hitler had driven England and France too far. They had declared war. Too weak really to help Poland, they stalled along behind the Maginot Line.
In April, he took over Denmark and Norway – again with fifth-column assistance. In May, he invaded Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg.
On June 14, Paris fell. On June 17, Petain asked for an armistice for France, and on June 25, hostilities ceased. The British evacuated their men from Dunkirk and left their armament.
Mussolini, who came into the war just as France was ready to capitulate, polished off much of North Africa for the Axis, but came to grief when he tried to sneak-attack little Greece near the end of 1940.
In April 1941, Hitler forces knocked off Yugoslavia, drove the British from Greece and subjugated that brave little nation, took Crete from the air in a completely novel type of campaign, and regained in North Africa much of what the Italians had lost to the British.
Then Hitler made a second great mistake. (The first, by general consensus, was putting off too long the invasion of Great Britain.) He pulled another double-cross – this time on Stalin.
At 3 a.m. of June 22, German troops crossed the dividing line in Poland and attacked Russia.
By December 14, Moscow had been under siege for two months, and only optimists even hoped that the Reds could survive. On December 15, the German invaders began to withdraw.
From then on, Hitler’s star began to fade.
Technically the United States did not enter the war until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941. Actually, her entire weight except for actual shooting was on the side of the Allies at least from September 3, 1940, when President Roosevelt and Premier Churchill agreed that, in return for leases on certain defensive bases, this country should turn 50 overage destroyers over to the British for use against submarines.
On March 11, 1941, Mr. Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Bill.
He escapes bomb plot
Then, in December, the United States entered the war.
Hitler began fading even faster from official gatherings as his armies began withdrawing from the stolen reaches of his “European Fortress.”
A bomb planted by German officers on July 20, 1944, hastened his withdrawal from the spotlight. This attempt on Hitler’s life left him bruised and burned, killed one of his aides and wounded 12 others.
Wrathfully, Hitler converted the plot into a purge of the German Army. Eight Junker officers were hanged August 8, 1944.
Then, on January 1, 1945, in a New Year’s message, he promised the German nation new weapons, new troops and a bright future. None materialized.
On February 16, Hitler decreed martial law in German areas threatened by advancing Allied armies. He threatened Germans who shirked their duty with court martial and death.
On March 9, when U.S. troops were expanding their Remagen bridgehead on Germany’s side of the Rhine, Hitler was reported to have visited the Oder River front facing the Russians.
Two days later, Hitler spoke by proxy to his people in observance of “Heroes Day” ceremonies at the War Memorial in Berlin.
On March 16, official British quarters confirmed rumors that an emissary of the German government had made peace overtures in Stockholm.
The gist of these feelers was that Hitler would quit if the Allies would recognize him as Germany’s post-war ruler.
Early in April, Hitler was reported again in complete command of the German armies.
Unsubstantiated reports on April 11 quoted some circles as saying that Hitler was dying, that Nazi Party leaders were split and that, Heinrich Himmler had succeeded Hitler as Germany’s dictator.
Yesterday came the final report: Hitler died in Berlin even as it was being cleared of all German troops by triumphant Russian invading forces.
The Nazi radio says Hitler is dead.
Strong evidence that this is true is provided by Gen. Eisenhower’s statement today telling of a conference between the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte and two German representatives, Heinrich Himmler and Gen. Schellenberg, on April 24.
The two Germans told the Swedish Red Cross head at that time that Hitler had had a brain hemorrhage and might not live 48 hours.
We hope these reports are accurate. But it would not be difficult for the Nazis to fake the story. Hitler had several doubles good enough to deceive the Germans in public appearances. The Nazis might make a corpse of one of these.
According to Adm. Doenitz’s radio announcement, on April 30 the Fuehrer appointed him successor and on May 1 was killed: “Adolf Hitler this afternoon at his command post in the Reich Chancellery fighting till his last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany.”
That, of course, is precisely what the Nazi propaganda line would be in any event. If true, it would be the perfect cap for the Hitler myth, particularly to the German mind. If untrue, it would serve the same purpose – and also pave the way for a fadeout, escape, and future underground operation as leader or front for the real one.
There can be no doubt that the Nazis plan an underground movement. The Allies already have ample evidence that it is in operation even now. Though the Allies are forewarned and forearmed against this strategy, it will be exceedingly difficult to combat.
Certainly some, and probably many, of the “political prisoners” and alleged victims of Nazi terror now being rescued from concentration camps by the Allies, are in fact Nazi plants. Some will get away with it, and live to do their dirty work again when they think the time is ripe.
Whether or not Hitler would be an asset to such a movement is a question. But we are inclined to believe that “a martyr who died a hero’s death” would be worth much more to them than a defeated leader, who had led Germany to its doom – especially if he were a mental and physical wreck.
The Allies will have to be very careful when it comes to checking on Hitler’s death. This is no case for wishful thinking.
By Bertram Benedict
The impending surrender of Germany will be unlike any other after a war of modern times. “Unconditional surrender” was the demand on Lee by Grant but, as is noted below, the peace of the Civil War came after negotiations. Moreover, the war had been fought on the right of the secession; when the South was defeated, that issue was automatically settled.
Napoleon twice was offered peace before French soil was invaded, peace which would have left him in power. The peace with Germany in 1918 was a negotiated one.
The Italian war against Ethiopia ended without negotiation after the capture of Addis Ababa, and in the Spanish Civil War, there was no negotiation after the capture of Madrid in 1939. But in the first case, the war was fought solely for complete annexation, about which there could obviously be no negotiation, and in the second case, the rebels fought to capture the government, and their victory obviously precluded the need of negotiating.
How wars end
The methods by which great modern wars, beginning with the American Revolution, came to an end might be thus summarized:
1783, American Revolution: The peace negotiations covered almost two years. The American negotiators, at first instructed not to consider a separate peace (that is, one without the participation of America’s ally, France), disregarded the instructions. England was making peace so as to concentrate on her war against France and Spain.
1814, the War of 1812: The peace was negotiated.
1814-1815, the Napoleonic Wars: Late in 1813, the Allies had offered Napoleon peace which did not involve his abdication and which gave France the Rhine as a boundary. Early in 1814, before Paris was taken, the Allies again negotiated with the French dictator, offering to let France have the boundaries of 1792. Each time Napoleon was obdurate.
1847, the Mexican War: The peace was negotiated, although for a time after the capture of Mexico City it seemed that no Mexican government would exist with which to treat, and a strong movement developed in the United States for annexing all of Mexico.
End of the Civil War
1865, the American Civil War: In 1864, President Lincoln had empowered Horace Greeley, at the latter’s insistence, to meet with Confederate envoys at Niagara Falls, to see if they would agree to restoration of the Union and the abolition of slavery. In February 1865, two months prior to Appomattox, Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward met three Confederate envoys on a ship in Hampton Roads to explore peace possibilities. After Lee surrendered, Johnston surrendered his force only after 14 days of negotiation.
1871, the Franco-German War: After the capture of Napoleon III and the capitulation of Paris, the peace was negotiated with the new French Republic.
1898, the Spanish-American War: The peace was negotiated.
1905, the Russo-Japanese War: The peace was negotiated in the United States, under the mediation of President Theodore Roosevelt.
1918, World War I: Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey surrendered unconditionally, but Germany only after almost two months of negotiations. It was agreed that the peace terms would follow President Wilson’s peace principles, with two exceptions. The separate German-Russian peace of March 1918 had also been negotiated.
WMC permits 8-hour slash to avert layoff of 16,000 – Willow Run not affected
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Seizure of mines move delayed
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Wednesday, May 2, 1945
LONDON, England (UP) – A rollcall of the old Nazi gang today would read like this:
Adolf Hitler: Germans say he is dead.
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels: Believed to be in Berlin where, if he is not dead as some London circles report, his fate certainly is sealed.
Reich Marshal Hermann Goering: Germans said he was pushed out because of bad health, but he is probably dead, too.
Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop: Ousted today by Adm. Doenitz. He had been unheard of for some time.
Rudolf Hess: Still captive in Britain.
Deputy Fuehrer Martin Bormann: Unheard of recently.
Gestapo Chief Henrich Himmler: Last seen in Luebeck. Significantly not mentioned in reports of Hitler’s death and Doenitz’s succession. Believed he may die in Berlin also.