PLIGHT OF GERMANS

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 192, 12 May 1944, Page 5

PLIGHT OF GERMANS

Worn Out By Ceaseless Air Raids LONDON, May 10. What effect is the Allied bombing having on the German people? The "Daily Telegraph’s” Stockholm correspondent says it is the greatest factor in their lives today, compared with which interest in the great battles on the eastern front is negligible. “The Carpathians are still at the other end of the world for the average German, but every citizen is affected directly or indirectly by the bomb warfare,” he adds A week’s study of enemy newspapers and talks with men and women who have recently arrived from Germany, the correspondent says, indicate that “the bitter quarrels between those evacuated from the towns and their hosts have died down before the realization of nation-wide catastrophe. Complaints have been forgotten in the peculiar apathy which has turned the German people into a race of sleep-walkers. They seem hardly even to have the energy for hate either of Mr. Churehiil or Hitler or of the Allied airmen or their Nazi masters.” He. adds that overstrain, irritation and shortage of nourishing foods show themselves in hundreds of little incidents daily and in a greatly increased number of petty breaches of discipline as well as of major crimes. An increase in fatal accidents and breakdowns of machinery in factories, due to carelessness traceable directly to tiredness,- has led to the installation of engineers in charge of safety in over 4000 big industrial plants. Public health has suffered, too, and influenza and diphtheria have been rife during the winter. Above all, food today is the problem nearest the German heart. There are literally no unrationed goods to be bought in the German shops. There is always' enough to meet the ration cards, but the food is of miserable quality, lacking in both fats and albumen. “Thus, with the food situation steadily deteriorating, with the threat of invasion in the west and defeat in the east hemming them in, and their heads bowed beneath the storm of Allied bombs, the German people face the last phase of tnc war. The German people, tired and worn out, are in their hearts defeatist and more concerned with their own problems of what to eat and where to buy' clothes than with the progress of the war. “The German people will continue the war to the hitter end because their leaders have got them to believe that stir render means annihilation, because they still believe in the invincibility of then army,-and because of the regimented .might of the Gestapo, against which their ill-organized petty discontent can have no chance of success.”