Hitler's Last Words

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 294, 9 February 1945, Page 5

Hitler's Last Words

UR title is rash, but we are () not afraid of it. Though Hitler may speak again, he is not likely to say anything that he did not say last week. Nor should what he said be dismissed as airily as most of his speeches have been since the war started. It was not a great speech, but it must have roused millions of Germans to more desperate efforts. That was its primary purpose, and the answer has no doubt been the death of thousands of Allied soldiers who might otherwise have been alive. It is childish, and even indecent, to sneer at words which load and discharge guns-and blast bodies and lives. But when we do take Hitler seriously it is not easy to separate the rational from the irrational, or to decide at what point his fanaticism passes over into lunacy. The chief feature of his last speech is the emphasis on his Divine call, God summoned him, an "unheralded and unknown soldier," to save his people, and only God can say when it is time to rest. God saved him when traitors attempted to kill him. God, Who knows his singleness of purpose, will not fail him now. But it is not just blasphemy, and it falls a good deal short of certifiable lunacy. There is craft in him, of course, a cruel and relentless cunning, as there is in so many fanatics. They have to be wise as serpents or they perish untimely. But now when we see him caught in his own trap, blasted from his hiding-places, spiritual and physical, and fighting his last fight in full view of a hostile world, it is time to drop the mountebank story and call him what he is. History will forget him when it has forgotten Attila and Barbarossa and Philip the Second of Spain; but it will not forget him much sooner than that, and it is a poor tribute to ourselves to argue that it took us six years to conquer a clown,