Last Train From Berlin

HAD the author managed to repress a youthful and ubiquitous first person singular, or at least to broaden the pronoun when recording impressions which must have been shared by most of his reportorial colleagues in Berlin, this would have been an even better book. As he himself seems to suspect, the autobiography in the first two chapters is of less than general interest. From Chapter III on, the book becomes spright’y, vivid, and, so long as Mr. Smith sticks to reporting, convincing.

Mr. Smith has written a sort of sequel to such reports as those of William L. Shirer and Joseph Harsch — a very useful sequel. It helps fill in the void which appeared in Berlin dispatches as the Nazis carried out the intent of their non-aggression pact with Russia. After the first few months of war on the eastern front, German living standards went into a precipitate decline and, Mr. Smith reports, German morale followed fast. Rationing that began as a reflection of official foresightedness is now not only a stark necessity but often a cruel joke. Apparently the Germans, already faced with money inflation that must hint to them of World War I, are experiencing an inflation of the ration books: the coupons are there but they do not necessarily command the goods.

The author’s conclusion about the German home front is that things are now so bad there that a wellthought-out campaign of political warfare on the part of the United States and Britain could shorten the war considerably. He points out what many know who have not been in Berlin recently: that the German people are ridden by two fears. They fear their own Nazi masters, but they fear even more a world that promises to deal harshly with them should their Nazi state be smashed. Mr. Smith has a program of sorts to take advantage of the situation he found in Germany. He does not sufficiently stress, however, that the problem of assuring the German people of sympathetic treatment after the war involves more than offering them a comfortable place in a beautiful new world.

Among other things, Mr. Smith wants the Welsh coal mines and the munitions industry in the United States nationalized. But such reforms at this moment are by no means certain to affect the German people as Mr. Smith expects them to. Their accomplishment might even be interpreted in Germany as proof that the American and British governments were being forced to throw sops to their peoples to prevent revolt. We can well imagine Hitler himself urging such immediate aims upon us in the hope of increasing dissension within our ranks. The opening of a politicalwarfare front is obviously desirable but not quite so easily charted as this author seems to suppose.

The object of this book, however, is not to advocate but to report, and any news editor would headline the substance of the report in tall type. But let the author write his own headlines. As a result of the war in Russia, he declares, “something has happened to the German people. A change of almost revolutionary proportions has occurred.” C. W. M.