Editorial: How long can Hitler last?
How long can Hitler hold out? Government experts, military and political, are asking the same question as the man in the street – and not coming up with any more definite answer.
But there are differences in emphasis between the official and the curbstone opinions. Officials are less optimistic. They got caught far out on the limb of prophecy last fall, and want no more of the same. Another difference is that the cracker-barrel strategists figure the Russians will take Berlin soon and end the war, while the professionals doubt that the capital will fall quickly or that Hitler will surrender when it does.
On the military side, Germany is still much stronger than the 20-mile-a-day sweep of the Red armies across the Polish plain indicates. The Germans withdrew from a large and sprawling flat area, which offered no strong natural defenses, to a long-prepared line on the Oder River. This withdrawal, which apparently began before the Russian attack, was not unexpected. At any rate, Germany still has a vast and well-trained army, with magnificent weapons and shorter supply lines.
More military importance is attached to the Russian breakthrough on the northern and southern flanks, in East Prussia and Silesia, than to the spectacular leap across central Poland. On its face, the speed with which the Russians cracked the great natural defenses of the East Prussian lakes looks like an all-time military miracle.
But why didn’t the Germans try to stand on that “perfect line”? Did some Junker generals cooperate with their old friends, Marshal von Paulus and Gen. von Seydlitz, of Stalin’s “Free Germany Committee”?
If the Junker generals – who hoped to use Hitler but were used by him, and who tried to have him assassinated last summer – are making deals with the Russians in any large numbers in response to Paulus’ pleas, part of Germany may fall soon. Reports of another Nazi purge of Junker commanders suggest Hitler fears this.
Civilian disorders, of course, would help. Hitler’s warning last week, and the fact that two trusted mayors of Breslau had to be purged in rapid succession, plus reports of German unrest by neutral travelers, all are promising – particularly because of millions of foreign slave laborers there, waiting to rebel. But the Nazis have foreseen and prepared against revolt for a long time, and their capacity to carry out fast mass murder of their opponents is only too well demonstrated. So, the Allies can make no definite plans on the basis of a probable successful German revolution.
Even if the Russians – with or without the aid of Junker generals and popular revolt in some industrial centers – are able to take Berlin quickly, and Gen. Eisenhower plunges through from the west, the Nazis may go on fighting from central and southern German bases. Prolonged destruction and chaos in Germany seem more probable than a quick and clean-cut peace for the whole country while the Nazis survive.