The Press WEDNESDAY, JUNE 16, 1943. German Home Front

Press, Volume LXXIX, Issue 23975, 16 June 1943, Page 2

The Press WEDNESDAY, JUNE 16, 1943. German Home Front

Goebbels, it was reported a day or so ago by the Berlin radio, has contributed to “ Das Reich ” an article denouncing the “ semi-intellectuals ” who form Germany’s “small circle “of dissatisfied people.” At the risk of suggesting that their opposition to the Nazi regime and the war is “ considerable ” —whereas “ everybody knows that suck opposition “ does not exist ” —he did so for one reason only. The dissidents are otherwise “completely without importance”; but their complaints may encourage the Allies to believe that they “ can break German “ morale by the air terror.” This is excellent reasoning. A negligible minority, gagged by the censorship, watched by the Gestapo, gripped by the S.S., is yet able to make a noise like the cracking of a nation’s morale and loud enough to be heard in London and Washington. But the particular object of this attack matters very little. What is significant is that it is one of many such. Today those whose nerve has been shaken by the air offensive constitute a danger which the Nazi leaders “ must oppose.” At other times the attack has been turned against defeatists (especially during and after the Russian campaigns of 1942), against saboteurs, against peasants withholding food supplies, against those showing kindness to prisoners or to Jews, against those listening to foreign broadcasts, and so on; and always it has been implied, or plainly stated, that the criminals were few. “ Always the “same few,” Goering himself said a year ago. Towards the end of last year he, Goebbels, and Hitler all devoted speeches in part to this theme. The Germans must not be misled by grumblers and doubters. Saboteurs must be mercilessly destroyed. Those who talked of defeat while th£ German armies were winning victory after victory were traitors. There was no room in Germany for wastrels who only harmed the nation. It was silly and cowardly to try to set Bavarian against Prussian, Saxon against Wurt.emburger. The home front must never let the soldiers down. In no circumstances could Germans think of capitulation. Such fury is not spent on a negligible few. Nor is it a negligible few that survive executions at the known rate of 10 a day and remain at large while thousands are flung into prison or concentration camp under the defence laws. The Waffen S.S. was reorganised as an independent armed force—an army formation independent of army command—not entirely to quell civil disturbance in occupied territory. Large units of it remain at home. The steady growth of the ordinary S.S. establishment in Germany itself caused widespread discontent; the Nazi party was obliged to appease it. Most of these men, 40 per cent, of the whole, were unfit for active service, it was announced; but there was a better reason, and it explains, also, the steady expansion of the Gestapo. There has been serious sabotage in German factories: there has been persistent and cunning resistance to Baucke’s agricultural measures; there have been food riots. Beyond any question, warweariness, disillusion, hopelessness, and hostility to the Nazi regime are rising in Germany. But they will not win the war for the United Nations. They are not—not yet, at least—the forces of an anti-Nazi revolution. There is no sign of organisation or leadership. Nazism has seen to that. But when its military front is decisively broken, popular support, weakening now, will dissolve behind it. It may be , a long way yet to the last stage of the long battle: but that stage will be short and swift, and Goebbels, in i effect, has told the Allies that he knows it.