All Quiet on the Home Front

Great Britain's general fear and distress last week could be accurately gauged from Winston Churchill's words (see p. 34). In Germany, where dancing in the streets might have been expected, there was none --Nazi Police Chief Heinrich Himmler forbade any dancing anywhere, as is usual when the Nazi armies march. Despite blasting visits from the R.A.F., Germany was a quiet nation among the painful clamors that filled most of Europe. The German populace is a rigidly disciplined civilian army and its officers intend to keep it so until their country's final triumph is assured.

On the Sunday when Field Marshal Siegmund Wilhelm Walther List's troops rolled into Greece and Yugoslavia, Berliners spent a normal wartime Sabbath. They strolled the streets, attended the cinema, watched Germany defeat Hungary at soccer, went to the races at Karlshorst. They bought extras, read the headlines, glanced at the official Nazi pronouncements, threw the papers away.

Monday they rose and went to work again, wondering whether the campaign would be Blitz or a steady advance. But the Nazi censorship had decided that the people should have no news. The radio trumpets blasted patriotic airs, but the newscasts, like the newspaper columns, were trivial. For three days the German people were ignorant. Then they learned that it had been Blitz. The troops were in Salonika. In the newsreels the people saw not only practice maneuvers in Bulgaria, but Stukas screaming down on the Greeks, dusty Nazi soldiers napping in the grass beside Yugoslav roads.

That night some Berliners gave parties. But most of them stayed home quietly until the R.A.F. arrived, then went to the cellars.

"Thin and pale people walking listlessly in the streets . . . absolute lack of vitamins in the diet of the masses of the people." These words describing the German populace were spoken last week by thin-lipped Dr. Herbert Alonzo Spencer, Senior Surgeon of the U.S. Public Health Service, just returned from Germany. The German civilian army has paid and is paying for the military might of the Reich. Last week German Sculptor Jean Sauer of Mainz announced that he had invented an ersatz coffin made of resin, which the Nazi authorities "will permit to be used instead of wood coffins."

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