Germany Mourns

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 190, 12 February 1943, Page 3

Germany Mourns

O one in New Zealand will rejoice because Germany mourns, but everybody will rejoice that Germany has been given reason to mourn. To pretend anything else would be humbug. The harder the United Nations can hit Germany now the sooner all nations will return to the ways of peace. And Stalingrad is a blow almost without precedent in military history. We should not like to join those reckless commentators who are calling it the greatest defeat in all history, which is a little longer than any correspondent’s memory or knowledge. But if the victory at Stalingrad had not been greater than any victory German has so far inflicted on the United Nations Hitler would not have ordered three days of mourning. Our own greatest defeat to date was Dunkirk, and from Dunkirk we brought back four-fifths of our army. In other words, we lost all our equipment and, say. (0,000 men. Germany has lost all her equipment in the Stalingrad sector, and 300,000 men. And although it is true that losing all the equipment we had at Dunkirk was very near to losing all we had anywhere (on the ground, and ready for use), Germany is no longer in a position to afford such losses, actually or relatively. We may in fact say that what has happened to their army at Stalingrad is something that the Germany people will remember for centuries; nor will they forget that it was done to them by a nation that they attacked treacherously and set out to crush in a few weeks. But it is one thing to mourn and another thing to surrender. Hitler, who knows his own people, may have achieved something by ordering them into sackcloth and ashes that he could not have achieved in any other way. He may have shaken their morale; but he is just as likely to have united and rallied them, and made them temporarily more formidable. Far more likely. We must not credit them with less courage, physical or moral, than we take. for granted ourselves. Above all we must not disgrace ourselves by gloating-or endanger ourselves.