The Pittsburgh Press (May 13, 1944)
What’s going on behind the German defenses?
Tired and forlorn German people are kept gagged by Gestapo
Defeatism or bitterness talk brings hangings
By Nat A. Barrows
How tough an opposition will our invading forces encounter when they land in Western Europe? What is really going on behind Hitler’s Atlantic Wall? From his observation post in neighboring Sweden, Nat Barrows has been collecting closely guarded information about Germany’s ability and willingness to cope with the titanic forces assembled in England for Allied victory. In a most important series of articles, of which the following is the sixth, Mr. Barrows reveals many hitherto unknown facts about the men directing the German war effort, Germany’s heavy industry, and other hitherto undisclosed information about the German war machine.
Stockholm, Sweden –
A nation of sleepwalkers, apathetically groping through the darkness of the Gestapo inquisition, bleakly concerned with such basic facts of life as food, clothing, shelter and self-preservation; determined to fight the Allies to death rather than face what the Nazis have made them believe will be the terrible consequences of defeat – that is how Germany’s 80 million people today await the Allied invasion.
They are a people tired and overworked and haunted always by the fear of more Allied bombing raids.
They dare not even whisper of their discouragement and their bitterness. For defeatist talk, 10,000 Germans have perished before Gestapo firing squads or on Gestapo nooses in the past 12 months.
They hardly talk anymore, at least in public, about the war on the Russian front. And the Balkan campaign is in another world. They only shrug their shoulders when the retreat from Leningrad toward the Baltic States is mentioned.
‘Sword of Damocles’
It is the Allied blitz that the average German carries before him day and night. It hangs over every German like “The Sword of Damocles.” No one factor stabs more deeply into the consciousness of the German citizen unless it is Goebbels’ fiendishly successful propaganda campaign that defeat means extermination for every German.
The bomb warfare, in one way or another, is affecting the life of every single German. If he remains in Berlin or in other cities, he is never able to enjoy his sleep unbroken by the fear of another attack. Half of his life after dark is spent in crowded shelters.
If he lives in the country, he must share his quarters with evacuees from the cities.
Earlier in the raids evacuation from the cities brought many quarrels between hosts and evacuees, but such outbursts of torn nerves now are overshadowed by nationwide appreciation of the calamity.
Live in nightmare
Every report reaching Sweden from non-German sources relates how the Germans today seem to be in a nightmare, apathetic and hardly energetic enough for hatred.
What hatred they do express openly these days is directly largely against the Americans.
I have heard repeatedly how German crowds vent their anti-American spit against captured airmen by throwing stones at them, spitting at them and calling them vulgar names. One American airman, parachuting away from his wrecked Flying Fortress is reported to have escaped mob violence by quickly announcing that he was British, not American.
A partial explanation for this anti-American feeling is psychological: Germans often see American bombing raids. Forts and Liberators and their fighter escorts are there in the sky above them, visible and tangible. RAF night raids are shrouded in darkness.
Part of this explanation is an old story – Goebbels’ insidious propaganda against America.
Germans expect worst
Two outstanding characteristics of the German people must be appreciated by the Allies if we are going to understand the Nazi home front today. One is their sentiment, the other their toughness.
The Germans can take about as much suffering and hardship as any people in the world, and what is more, they are so constructed mentally that they always expect the worst.
This combination of sentiment and toughness, which often overflows into brutality, is enabling the Germans to withstand Allied bombing raids.
Thus, it is a fair deduction, viewing the picture factually and not wishfully, that it is practically impossible to bomb the German nation into moral collapse, at least on the present raiding scale. More to the point is the fact that RAF and USAAF raids are gradually destroying the Nazi administrative system. That is having an infinitely more serious action on the Nazi war effort than the effect of raids on civilian nerves.
TOMORROW: Germans exchange grim jokes but they cannot hide the fact that they’re suffering from irritation, overstrain and lack of nourishing food.