European Front

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE sweeping success of Russia’s counter-offensive is by all odds the greatest achievement on the Allied side as the leaves fall. Taken together with the surrender of Italy, it threatens to bring the war in Europe to full crisis within a very few months.

Italy’s exit not only severs most of the Italian peninsula from the Axis, opening new air bases: its effect on the Balkans is already explosive. A crack-up of Hitler’s famous “ Fortress” before spring is predicted by some of the shrewdest observers in Sweden and Turkey. The suspiciously convenient death of King Boris in Bulgaria, and the abrupt consolidation of Nazi power which has followed there, increase the chances of Turkey’s entry into the conflict. The expanding ruination of German cities under Allied air attack, and the conviction of the Nazis that invasion of the Continent from the West is on the books for this autumn, add to the distraction of the German High Command.

Russia has scored the first major defeat suffered by the main German forces on land under conditions hitherto considered ideal for the Wehrmacht. Two bitter campaigns in the East have taught Germany that General Winter is the ally of their opponent. They know now that Summer is no longer a Nazi collaborator.

Into their initial offensive in the Kursk salient the Nazis threw approximately 500,000 of their best troops, including more than half the entire armored strength of the German Army and a large force of the Luftwaffe. The smashing of this formidable effort not only wrecked the whole design of the German summer campaign: it provided the Russians with opportunity to mount offensive after offensive, ripping to pieces the 700-mile front from Smolensk to the Sea of Azov. The mighty support bases which the Germans have had at their back since the autumn of 1941 are now in Russian hands. More than 80,000 square miles of Russian territory has been reclaimed from the invaders. Nazi assertions that their great retreat is “ according to plan ” are correct. But the plan is Russian. It has been imposed upon the Nazis.

German admissions

This is attested by the ferocity of German efforts to mount a counter-offensive behind and below Kharkov, where thousands of precious Nazi reserves were squandered. It is emphasized by the rout at Taganrog, which the Russians suddenly flanked, slaughtering or capturing 41,000 German troops and routing 120,000 more. Further confirmation of the involuntary nature of the German retreat comes from captured German army orders, from incautious admissions by the Berlin radio, from testimony of captured prisoners, from the wholesale destruction of supplies and equipment by the Herrenvolk themselves. Given the present plight of war production in the Reich, such losses in materiel are serious.

It is true that by moving into the Dnieper line Germany may shorten her front. Military experts in Berlin explain that this will permit a shift of some fifty divisions to the Balkans and the West, to contest invasion there. Time will test the validity of this claim.

Observe, meanwhile, that the Russian Army will be considerably more formidable as an assailant on a short line than it is on a long one. Like the Don and the Volga, the Dnieper also freezes. Once more General Winter is moving slowly south from the Arctic.

Shadows darken over the German home front. Seven hundred thousand are driven from Hamburg. Half of Berlin’s 4,000,000 population are refugees. Stettin, Bremen, Cologne, Emden, Niirnberg, Mainz, Kassel, the cities of the Ruhr — even Vienna far to the south — pour their panic-stricken communities into the countryside.

This means not merely disruption of the essential supply services in great metropolitan areas, ruined industries, disease and hunger in the bombed areas themselves: it means also fearful overloads imposed upon the supply and distribution services of hundreds of villages, towns, and cities into which the wanderers pour.

Thousands are being housed in sheds and barns, in cellars and tents and shacks hastily thrown together in the open fields. What will happen to them as winter closes down over Germany?

What alternative?

Yet the bleak prospect offers Germany little hope. Month by month, as these raids cut into war production in the Reich, the production efforts of Britain and the United States steadily widen the lead of the Allies. Mr. Oliver Lyttelton, Britain’s Minister of Production, notes that the output of these two nations alone now exceeds the total of all Axis production — including the Japanese — by more than 300 per cent. It is still rising.

Talk of a possible Russian peace deal with the German government under the circumstances is idle. No nation in Europe is less open to accusation of political frivolity than the Soviet Union, which, as President Roosevelt correctly states, has never broken an alliance.

Consider what the Russians would forfeit were they so foolish as to “do a deal” with the Nazis: —

1. They would abandon a twenty-year alliance with Great Britain which promises not only cooperation against the Axis but assistance in rehabilitation of devastated areas in Russia.

2. They would disrupt an association with the United States which, however rocky and uneasy it may be at times like the present, promises similar aid during reconstruction as real as the vital benefits at present flowing from Lend-Lease assistance. Russia is now receiving huge shipments of food from America. They are badly needed. Russia will be hungrier this coming winter than at any time since the war began.

3. Peace with the German government now would mean that Russia would desert her historic friends and racial kin, the Southern Slavs, who predominate in the Balkans and detest the Germans with a fervor born of long experience of exploitation and cruelty. The growth of Russian nationalism since this war began is one of the notable facts of contemporary history. The increasing influence of the Russian army officers under Stalin forbids any deal. With the Army, these men embody the emerging nationalism. The fact that the Germans occupy Russian soil blocks a peace move. The unspeakable atrocities committed by the Germans in countless villages, towns, and cities of European Russia since the invasion began, the defiling of Russian cultural symbols, the peddling of Russian prisoners as slaves in the marts of the Third Reich, all make the suggestion fantastic.

Terror for Hitler

Could the Germans execute a coup, get rid of Hitler and his Party hierarchy, and then strike a peace bargain with Russia through efforts of the landed Junkers, the industrialists, and what remains of the old Officers Corps? It is precisely to prevent such a turn of affairs that Hitler has elevated Heinrich Himmler to the post of Terrorist-in-Chief for the Third Reich.

Appointing Himmler to the role of super-spy and ruthless warder for the Nazi Party higher-ups, Hitler strikes directly at the quarters where a plot might be expected to hatch among emulators of the Italian precedent: Party weaklings and the Junker-Army combination. He removes Party hacks from direction of Interior Affairs — which means control of the police in every city and town in Germany. He takes over control of the vast Labor Front system — through which the Party dictate is imposed throughout the whole structure of German politics. Simultaneously, he vests these powers in the notorious head of the Gestapo, who also rules the Elite Guard — the Party’s army. All Germany must now live under its enormous net of espionage and terror.

Supposing, despite these precautions, the great industrialists, landed Junkers, and professional militarists managed nevertheless to seize power and rid themselves of the Nazis. Would they then seek peace with Russia? Agents of these gentry are increasingly numerous now in Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and Spain. They are obviously feeling out possibilities for peace.

Peace and the Red bogey

But the peace they seek is not with Russia. It is with the British and Americans; and the bogey they are flourishing to further their purposes is the old familiar “Red peril.” The German industrial-agrarianmilitary interests embody old Pan-German aspirations. They are working furiously, even now, to build and populate with deported labor from Europe the new industrial and agricultural baronies in the Russian Ukraine. The gigantic “East Company,” in which most of them are interested, is receiving tremendous attention in the industrial press of the Reich regardless of the darkening prospect for Germany.

So they continue their stratagems, seeking always to isolate Russia from her Western war partners. To negotiate a peace with Russia, German Junkerdom would have to cjuit Russian soil and return to a Germany certain to be defeated and diminished below pre-war dimensions. This spells their ruin.

Russia’s idea of peace

The only peace now possible between Russia and Germany would have to be one negotiated after revolution had demolished the Nazi Party and those who sustain it. That is the kind of peace envisaged by the Committee for German Freedom lately sponsored by Russia and made up of German war prisoners and German refugees of varying points of view, from the social and political Right to the extreme Left. The manifesto of this committee is being employed skillfully by Russia to break dowm German morale, much as Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points wrere used in the last war. Though it continues to provoke uneasy speculation in America, this document calls for a new Germany pledged to evacuate all conquests, to hold its neighbors’ territories inviolate, to institute a government on genuinely democratic principles, and to cooperate honorably in the reconstruction of Europe under the express provisions of the Atlantic Charter.

As the war wears toward climax, military and political problems tend to mingle. If it is harmful to the unity of the United Nations to misconceive the foundations of Russian policy and to ignore the fact that Josef Stalin himself has incorporated the provision for “unconditional surrender” in his speech of May Day, 1943, it is equally dangerous to assume that the difficulties ahead are not serious.

What are the differences indicated by the change of Russian envoys at Washington and London, by the wide divergence of recognition accorded the French National Committee of Liberation, by the frank admissions of Mr. Churchill after the Quebec Conference, by the unrealistic fumbling wffiieh followed Mussolini’s dowuifall?

The misunderstandings arise, basically, from opposition of views between Russia and her war partners over the question of revolutionary ferments in Europe, not about ultimate goals. Russia believes that widespread revolt will follow German collapse. Apparently Washington and — to a lesser degree — London think otherwise.

History is on Russia’s side. The real question, and the practical one, should be not whether the pent-up fury of the tortured peoples of Europe can be throttled, but how it can be guided to constructive ends. Military coercion will not solve the riddle. It will merely postpone the explosion and make it worse.

Allies underground

In the European underground formations, the Allies possess an instrument suited to these constructive needs; but until it is better understood, especially in the United States, that the European underground fighters against the Axis are not predominantly, or even importantly, Communist extremists, this instrument may lie useless.

Who are the men and women composing these hidden and deadly foes of the German tyranny? They comprise social and political elements gathered from all walks of European life. Many of the most able of them in Belgium, for instance, are clergymen. Thousands of them in Poland are boys in their teens. They number in France persons wffio, before the war, represented a diversity of political and social status, ranging from professional men and women to workmen and peasants, from extreme conservatism to extreme radicalism.

Those already executed by the Nazis include craftsmen, teachers, fishermen, priests, farmers, printers, university students, fugitive army officers, domestic police, sailors, businessmen, and day laborers. The purveyors of the underground press in Holland and Belgium and Norway represent every variety of profession, trade, and political opinion of pre-war times.

If there is to be revolution in Europe when Germany collapses, these men and women, banded together by fierce patriotism and hatred of their murderous foe and his collaborators, will make it. Dismissed, outlawed, or thwarted by failure of the Allies to understand their aims and purposes, they will be the more bound to make it.

That eventuality need not happen. The eight agencies set up in London under the governments in exile can enable the Allies to collaborate w’ith and guide the forces of revolt into constructive channels toward constructive goals. It is high time to recognize this fact.

WHAT TO WATCH

1. Russian operations around Smolensk and the headwaters of the Dnieper — which may indicate a drive to Poland.

2. Turkey’s reaction to German seizure of Bulgaria.

3. Sweden’s teetering on the rim of the war in the North.

4. Expansion of the Allied front in the Balkans.

5. England.