A BACKGROUND OF THE WAR

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 99, 21 January 1943, Page 4

A BACKGROUND OF THE WAR

Goebbels’s Problems TO CATCH UP TO AND SOFTEN BAD NEWS

Dr. Goebbels’s problems must be worrying him badly just now. Must how to catch up with the bad news he has ultimately to break to the German people without making too big and too abrupt releases of the events of the past few weeks will be giving him a headache. It was not till this week that he caught up with the bad news about Velikiye Luki, bad news that has been in one of his pigeonholes for some weeks. He still has to tell them of the sad fate of the army before Stalingrad—the army that General von Hoth was commanding till it became worth commanding no longer. He still has to fell them of happenings in the northern Caucasus, at Millerovo, at Rosoch, on the Manych River, on the upper Donetz, and, last but iu no way least, of Shlusselburg and Leningrad. He certainly has a long leeway to make up in Russia, and lie is all behind in North Africa, too. The last the German people heard of Marshal Rommel was that he was fighting off strong attacks at Wadi Zamzam. If Dr. Goebbels doesn’t start out soon, he will get as far behind as he is iu Russia.

And this bouquet of glad tidings has to be eased out on the people of Berlin, who are just in the stage of learning what real bombing is. Truly Dr. Goebbels must be worried.

General Dietmar Butts In It would appear that General Dietmar is a little impatient that Dr. Goebbels cannot move back as fast as the Reichswehr, for he gave the German people a shock iu his weekly talk by letting the cat out of the bag about the sad state of General von Hoth’s former army at Stalingrad. Thinking Germans must be pondering deeply the purport of General Dietmar’s revelations. Talk of stripping decisive sectors, holding out at "isolated keypoints,” and the co-opera-tion of "encircled troops” with others outside, must sound very strange to those who may have believed Dr. Goebbels’s earlier stories of the breaking of the Red Army and its reduction to impotence. Dr. Dietmar dispels that myth once and for all when he talks of Russian "superiority in numbers and material.” To add to the gloom which must enshroud Berlin’s citizens in addition to the dust raised by 3i-ton bombs, the Italian radio has a commentator who goes a little farther than Dietmar. If it had happened to be "Woe, Woe” Ansaldo, perhaps the Berliners might not take much notice. But it was not he. "It would be a child’s trick,” said the commentator from Rome, “to shut our eyes to the danger of this Russian offensive. There is nothing to indicate that the edge of the Red Army attack has yet been blunted. Indeed, the strength of the attack is still increasing and the Axis troops are fighting with the odds against -them. We must steel ourselves for heavier losses,” moaned the new prophet of gloom. "The High Command have the situation firmly in hand,” he added, perhaps in the fear that he had gone too far for one session. It may be remarked, that he did not mention North Africa. He was too full of the woes of the Russian front to make even a brief attempt to paint the picture of Tripolitania.

Goebbels’s Counter-Irritant Till things got so bad for the Reichswehr on the eastern fiout that he really had to do something about telling the German people some of the truth about which they had been ru-mour-mongering for some time, Dr. Goebbels sought to cheer them up bylong tales of the immense successes ot the U-boat campaign against Allied transport. So far the Axis radio has sunk the whole of the combined prewar tonnage of Britain and the United States combined, with the merchant fleets of several other Allied countries thrown in for good measure. If Dr. Goebbels has much more cheering-up to do his figures will grow to so large a total that his German listeners will have their already shaky belief in him totally broken. The task of German, propagandists so far has been to convince the people, without mentioning the loss of towns the capture of which was lauded as decisive in German advances, that the present trend of events in Russia is a “shortening of the line” and a "retreat Recording to plan.” Paul Wintcrtou, the London “News Chronicle” reporter in Moscow, sums up this policy very aptly It is a "defeat according to plan,” he says—"the plan.”