Catastrophe by Christmas?

Britons got a vivid, close-up description of Adolf Hitler as he appeared to a recent visitor--nervous as a thwarted cat, biting his fingernails, drinking quantities of sweet champagne. Cedric Salter, Istanbul correspondent of the London Daily Express, wrote that he got the description from an unnamed participant in recent conferences to which the Fuehrer had summoned four satellites (King Boris of Bulgaria, Admiral Nicholas Horthy of Hungary, Marshal Ion Antonescu of Rumania and Croat Puppet Ante Pavelich). The dispatch added:

"[Hitler's] sleepwalking manner is greatly accentuated and now gives place only rarely to the old flashes of violent energy. It is disconcerting to talk with him as his eyes wander away. . . . [His] preoccupation as to 'what the English think' has grown into something like an obsession. . . ."

Actually, this part of the account did not indicate any great change. Hitler has been chewing his fingernails for years. In a photograph published recently in a German magazine, he looked fit and happier than the wounded soldiers with whom he was shaking hands (see cut). Of more significance was Salter's report on Hitler's plans and promises. According to this account, he gave the Balkan leaders these assurances:

"1) . . . The German total offensive against Russia this year will constitute a supreme effort at the final destruction of Russian military power . . . gas from the two great factories outside Vienna that have been working at high pressure for the last six months will be used where

Russian resistance seems capable of endangering a decisive victory.

"2) In the event of Russian military power not being decisively broken by the end of November he will be prepared to offer terms of peace to Russia which would be acceptable to the Soviet Union. As an additional inducement there would be an offer of a ten-year, non-aggression pact from Japan as well as Germany.

"3) He promised that any Allied invasion of the Continent this year would be confined to the outer circle of the European fortress. With either victory or peace with Russia before Christmas, he argued that the German forces would be sufficient to keep the Continent inviolable indefinitely. Britain and America would, therefore, be forced to compromise."

On its face, Salter's dispatch was one more item in the flood of secondhand reports from Ankara and Istanbul, where anything can be heard and very little can be believed. But for whatever it was worth, it simply recited a series of untenable hopes. It constituted one more bit of evidence that Adolf Hitler cannot avoid catastrophe. He can only strive to postpone it.

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