ABANDONED HOPE OF VICTORY

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 10, 7 October 1943, Page 5

ABANDONED HOPE OF VICTORY

Grim Picture Of Germany

NEW YORK. October 5.

“Wherever I went I found the people nervous and worn out," said a business man who has just completed a -our of Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in an interview with the Stockholm correspondent of the “New York Timos.” "Strangely enough, they only recovered in the shelters, where probably, the common danger gave theln a fellow feeling. “In Berlin I lived in the most fashionable hotel, the Kaiserhof, where the food was incomparably worse than six months ago. Indeed, it was almost uneatable. In many parts of the city there was scaffolding round bombed buildings, but no work was proceeding. The southern suburbs offered a picture of destruction such'as I have never before seen. In certain localities not a single house remained. ' . “Berliners live in constant fear of the resumption of raids, and dread going to bed lest the sirens, not the alarm clocks, break their slumber. There is literally' nothing to lie bought in Berlin or any other city, including Prague, Vienna, or the smallest village. “Everybody in Germany seems to have abandoned hope of victory. One even hears camouflaged criticism of Herr Hitler. Berlin is swarming with foreign workers; the language, least heard is German. “Even more illuminating were my travels in the provinces. I found Mannheim a shaptbles after the latest R.A.F. raids in which not only the city hut also the large bridge across the Rhine was destroyed’. Vienna nnd Prague abound with an intense feeling of hatred of the Nazis. The hotels almost without exception have been converted into hospitals, and the streets are crowded with war invalids.”