NAZI LAST CARD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 October 1943, Page 4

NAZI LAST CARD

WHAT TOTAL MOBILISATION MEANS LUDENDORFF’S WARNING RECALLED. DRACONIC GRIP ON GERMAN PEOPLE. (By Vasily Bredin in “Soviet War News.”) Total mobilisation is now turning everything topsy-turvy in Hitler Germany. All the small businesses have been closed and their owners forced into uniform or workers’ overalls. Housewives have been driven by hundreds of thousands into the war industries. School children have been delivered over to the big peasant Junkers as unpaid beasts of burden. “We can have no compassion; we are forced to resort to this most radical of measures,” exclaim the Nazi leaders. And, indeed, total mobilisation is the last card Nazism has to play. Hitler, who patched together his National Socialist “Weltanschauung” (from all sorts of rags and tatters, and 'who never had an original idea of his own, also found the idea of total mobilisation ready-made, and took it over lock, stock and barrel. When the great vanquished ones of the first World War retired to live in comfort on pensions granted by the Weimar Republic, they immediately began to occupy themselves with plans for revenge, and worked out a complete system of war preparations in which all the blunders they had committed in the first World War would be avoided. One of the most zealous of these revenge-planners was the greatest war-loser of all, Ludendorff. It was he who invented total mobilisation.

In 1936 Ludendorff published a book called “Total War,” which was banned by the Gestapo as Hitler did not want to reveal his war plans prematurely. In this book Ludendorff wrote: “The tasks of war leaders will be more difficult than in the first World War, if people are drawn into it in the course of hostilities, and not only by starvation, blockade and enemy propaganda.” On the outbreak of war Goering gave his notorious pledge to the German people that no British aeroplane would ever fly over German territory. Ludendorff had a more realistic view of the coming war. He was aware that this time the people would be directly embroiled in hostilities. He prophesied: “Total war is unmerciful. It demands the utmost of women and men. It affects not only the man, but the woman, who sees her children threatened, her husband endangered.” Goebbels said much the same thing on February 18 this year: We won’t shrink from the most radical measures and, if necessary, from draconic penalties. False compassion is out of place. Doctor’s certificates won't be taken into consideration.” The defeated Ludendorff had learned at least one big lesson from the first World War, namely, that in every war, and especially in total war, everything depends on the behaviour of the people; and he warned Germany’s new warmongers to reckon with this factor. He wrote: “The centre of gravity of total war lies in the people.” (The phase “in the people” is italicised.) “The Army Command must take the people into account.” Yes, the Hitler bandits are taking the German people into account. They are taking them into account in their own characteristic way. They threaten draconic measures, point to the concentration camps and the hangman standing ready. The “Volkischer Beobachter” stated, in reference to the alarm evoked among, the Germans by total mobilisation: “Should it transpire that ruthless brutality gives us a better chance, we must not continue to wear our white cuffs from a sense of decent restraint. A tough log requires a tough wedge.”

In his book, Ludendorff declared that total mobilisation was the war leader’s last resort. Once it was employed there could be no withdrawing: it would be a question of to be or not to be. History has already answered this question for Nazi Germany.