NERVES IN GERMANY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 October 1942, Page 4

NERVES IN GERMANY

FEARS OF IMPENDING DISASTER. BETRAYED EVEN IN ARTICLES BY GOEBBELS. “The Caucasus rush is a desperate effort to escape inevitable fate,” says “France”’(the French daily published in London) in an editorial on the war situation.

“Goebbels’ weekly articles in *Das Reich,’ broadcast throughout Germaiiy the clay they appear, are more sincere than might be supposed,” says the writer, “and betray more than he realises himself the spirit of the German people, such as twelve months of campaigning in Russia have fashioned it. Thanks to Goebbels, one discovers a Germany in effect that one thought for ever buried beneath the hard cement of Nazism. This is a Germany henceforth disunited, doubting itself and, graver still, doubting its leaders and its Fuehrer, a Germany going over its accounts, contemplating with an eye of sadness its conquests and their cost and measuring their fragility. It is a Germany questioning the future, not the distant future, but that of the coming months and coming weeks, and asking itself in agony what tomorrow will bring. For how much longer are the trumpets and the roll of the drum accompanying the triumphant communiques to work on the exasperated nerves and the critical faculties of the awakened Germans?

“To judge from accounts of travellers recently in Germany, and business men and bankers who are in contact with Germans in Bern, in Zurich, and in Stockholm, no account of the state

of extreme wear of the German machine in all its parts, of the progress of corruption and demoralisation could be over-stated —the widening abyss between the front line and the interior, the extraordinary lassitude, the scepticism and discouragement on every rung of the ladder of hierarchy, in all social classes and in all professions.”