IN CONSTANT FEAR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 October 1943, Page 5

IN CONSTANT FEAR

PEOPLE IN BOMBED BERLIN AND OTHER PARTS OF GERMANY, ALL HOPE OF VICTORY ABANDONED. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright; NEW YORK,. October 5. “Wherever I went I found the people nervous and worn out,” said a business man vzho has just completed a tour of Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in an interview with the Stockholm correspondent of the “New York Times.” “Strangely enough, they only recovered in the shelters, where probably the common danger gave them 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 be 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 shambles after the latest R.A.F. raids in which not only the city but also the large bridge across the Rhine was destroyed Vienna and Prague abound with an intense feeling of hatred of tne Nazis. The hotels almost without exception have been converted into hospitals, and the streets arc crowded with war invalids.”