Totaler Krieg

An atmosphere of disaster blanketed the Reich last week. The Nazis decreed three days of mourning for the 330,000 German soldiers who had fought and lost at Stalingrad. Through press and radio the Germans were barraged with exhortations to put forth their greatest effort to hold back the danger from the east. In London and Washington Allied leaders cautioned their people against taking the signs from the Reich as too hopeful indications of an early collapse. But signs were there.

Manpower. To raise more than 1,000,000 workers and soldiers for war jobs and replacements at the front, Reich Economic Minister Walther Funk issued decrees of total mobilization. Retail tradesmen, restaurants and hotels were required to release every possible man. Theaters, bars, nightclubs and other places of amusement were closed down.

Men from 16 to 65, women between 17 and 45 were ordered to register for compulsory labor service. Civilian consumer goods were cut down to the barest necessary minimum. Community kitchens were planned to replace domestic help. Said the SS newspaper Schwarze Korps: "The homeland is to live only in order to work for the war."

Allied Intelligence experts thought they knew the reasons for the drastic German decrees. The sands of German manpower were running out: at least 4,000,000 men had been killed, permanently wounded or captured in Hitler's war. This estimate equaled almost the entire German force which invaded Russia in June 1941; it approximated the full strength of the German armies which had laid down their weapons on the Armistice Day of World War I. Of the Reich's total population, 13% were estimated to be under arms, dead, or permanently disabled--3% more than the "normal mobilization" which is the generally considered maximum that any nation can spare, if its battlefronts are to be properly supplied by home-front production. On this basis, the U.S. could maintain 13,000,000 men under arms.

The best Allied experts figured that the German army, navy and air force absorbed between nine and ten million men --roughly a third of the total working population. Two age groups in 1941 and 1942 provided 1,000,000 new soldiers. Now another 1,000,000 are needed for replacement of casualties. But the present age group called up for normal military conscription totals only some 500,000. To get the other half million needed to keep the army at its fighting strength, Hitler was stripping his home front of the last available man who could carry arms.

Morale. "Something strange is happening to German morale," Correspondent Alan Moorehead cabled from North Africa to the London Daily Express. "I refrained for a fortnight from writing this story because it is dangerous to suggest that Nazi morale is breaking unless there is overwhelming evidence. . . . It is a poor type of man we are capturing. Many have been wounded in Russia and then rushed haphazardly over to Tunisia to be formed into new units on the spot and sent straight into battle."

This and other British reports in the same vein did not entirely check with the experience of U.S. observers, who found tough, well-equipped German units in central Tunisia, and advised Washington to prepare for a prolonged and difficult African campaign. But, whoever was right, a parallel with the German position in 1918 was discernible. Until the last months of World War I, the German armies at the fronts were formidably strong. Yet the seeds of German defeat were working in their ranks and at home in the Reich, and the outward signs in 1918 were much the same as those which are visible in 1943.

Mourning. At home, German citizens tore the newspapers from the vendors' hands. In the black type they read the unbelievable story: "Fighting at Stalingrad has ceased." With bowed heads they heard it read over the radio, not to the blare of the Nazi Horst Wessel march, but to the strains of the tragic old German folk song: Ich Hatt' Einen Kameraden (I Had A Comrade). They did not know that some 115,000 officers and men had laid down their arms. But they knew that Stalingrad had been lost, and that it was one of the worst defeats suffered by any German army in history; they knew also that other strongholds would have to be given up before their armies reached the line on which they would defend the "Fortress Europe."

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