FEAR OF DEFEAT

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 28, 13 March 1942, Page 5

FEAR OF DEFEAT

PUSHES THE NAZIS ALONG

"One of the prime springs which push the German people along in full support of-a war for which they have no enthusiasm, and which thev would end to-morrow if they could, is their growing fear of the consequences of defeat. Slowly, but surely, they are beginning to realise, the frightful magnitude of the seeds of wrath which their high-booted troops and Gestapo men have sown in Europe since the conquest of Austria. ... If Germany loses, they see the embittered peoples of Europe whom they have brutally enslaved, whose cities they have ruthlessly destroyed, whose women and children, many of them . . . they have coldbloodedly slain, storming in angry, revengeful hordes ever their beautiful, orderly land, dynamiting it to destruction, and leaving those whom they do not butcher to starve and die in an utter wasteland. No, these people, ground down and cheated though they maj* be by the most unscrupulous gang of rulers modern Europe has yet seen, will go a long, long way in this war. Only a dawning realisation some day that they can't Avin, coupled Avith Allied assurances that to give up the struggle will not mean their destruction, will make them falter before one side nr the other is destroyed."—From ''Berlin Diary," W. L. Shircr.