THE BATTLE OF GERMANY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 8, Issue 8, 15 September 1944, Page 4

THE BATTLE OF GERMANY

THE great and final phase of the epic four-year struggle in which a German paperhanger sought to dominate the world, is now about to take place. Like a well fraught and highly tempered spring, the armies of England and America stand in readiness to deliver their final knockout blow to the vaunted citadel of Hitler's vaunted Third Reich. Already they have a foothold on German soil, but before them frown the massive defences of the Seigfried Line, manned by the Fuehrer's last fanatical supporters—the frenzied Hitler youth. Poor misguided lads whose youth and healthy vigour has been deliberately warped by the fiendish intolerance of the Nazi doctrines of race. The ideals of 'herrinvolk' the fierce zest for power which has been preached to them as assuredly theirs by right; these things must seem cheap and empty in the face of the irresistible Allied advance and the hatred manifested so. freely by the emancipated peoples of France and Belgium. Palefaced youths whose fanatical zeal has succeeded in halting momentarily the invader's forward thrust, these German boys are in themselves the greatest tragedy in the whole of the present war. Never given an opportunity to formulate their own ideas, they have been fed upon Nazi propaganda from the earliest time they can remember. Taught to regard the Fuehrer as a demi-God, who could not commit a crime, their distorted minds now conceive themselves to be the last bastion between the sacred soil of Germany and, her overwhelming invaders. They have been exhorted to die at their posts and thereby reap the glory which becomes the heroes of the Fatherland. Understand-: ing of the democratic ideals of toleration and individual freedom, they have none. Our armies are as far as they are concerned the hated enemies of their Homeland, and there can be no escaping the fact that in the forcing of the Seigfried Line, tens of thousands must perish in the brutal and unfair fight for which one man alone is to blame. Germany's last calls upon her diminishing manpower have been made. The Line is manned, and the battle of Hitler's Germany has begun. On the main old men and youths predominate its garrison with the remnants of the once proud and arrogant divisions who lorded it over v the enslaved peoples of France and the lowlands. Our only hope is that the battle will be quickly ended and that the path to Berlin will be opened with a minimum of sacrifice by the desperation of Germany's misguided youth.