Last Chance

In London last week Winston Churchill declared: "A river of blood has flowed and is flowing between the German race and the peoples of all Europe. It is not the hot blood of battle, where good blows are given and returned. It is the cold blood of the execution yard and scaffold, which leaves a stain indelible for generations and for centuries."

For months it has been reported that many Hitler-weary Germans continue to support Hitler only because of their fear of what might happen to them, at the hands of a vengeful Europe, if Hitler lost. Last week Adolf Hitler and his mouthpiece tacitly confirmed these reports by using that fear for propaganda purposes. Two days before Hitler's warning to his Nazi veterans, Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels called on the whole German people to keep fighting for the most negative--and perhaps the strongest --of reasons: fear of defeat and revenge. Said he:

"You are all involved in this struggle whether you want to be or not. Having begun to march, we must march on. There is no longer a chance of withdrawing for any one of us. We cannot postpone it. We cannot shelve it. ...

"If we win, all is won: raw materials, freedom, nourishment, Lebensraum, the basis for social reform of our state and the opportunity of full development for the Axis powers. If we lose, all this, this and still more, will be lost--namely, our whole national existence. . . .

"[Our enemies] are at one in this: in a steadfast will and resolution that if they succeed in overcoming us Germany will be destroyed, exterminated and extinguished.

". . . The Axis powers actually are fighting for the most elemental existence and the cares and burdens that must be laid on all our shoulders in this war would pale before the inferno that awaits us, should we lose the war. . . .

"The chance that the German nation possesses today is its greatest, also its last. . . ."

During World War I one great factor in breaking the fighting morale of the German people was the enlightened Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson. At Versailles the Fourteen Points--and German faith in them--were made a mockery. If the Allies of World War II hope to break down a German morale bolstered by both fear and memory of Versailles, they need somehow to convince the German people that vengeance is not the Allied principle, that the enlightened Atlantic Charter of Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt means what it says.

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