European Front

ON THE WORLD TODAY

ON EVERY front the Allies are moving in for the kill. In France the Anglo-American armies have desperately needed more ports and more room to deploy their front, so that they can use the millions of men and the mountains of material waiting in England. In Cherbourg peninsula they have been like men “trying to deliver a punch in a telephone booth.” But Brittany, with Cherbourg, will provide all the ports required to supply a broad offensive across France to Switzerland. The Provence invasion will compel the Nazis to evacuate Southern and Southwestern France or to risk having their defense forces in Western Europe caught in a vise.

In Italy the American Fifth and the British Eighth Armies approach the plains of the Po, the coastal road to Southern France on the west, the valley gateway to Vienna on the east. As the Italian peninsula widens before them, Kesselring is hard put to it to cover his lengthening front. Hitler continues to deny him reinforcement. More than half the army which faced the Allies in Italy below Rome this spring has been chewed to bits.

Disaster piles upon disaster for Germany also in the East, where, in the words of Churchill, “it is the Russian Army which has done the main work of tearing the guts out of the German Army.” From the north, the center, and the south as far as the Carpathians, the most formidable concentration of war power and equipment mustered in this campaign grinds its way toward German Silesia and Berlin, supported by a huge Russian air armada and American fighter squadrons from Italy.

The evident hope of the German High Command to repeat the battle of Tannenberg of World War I — to spring a last desperate trap and thus save themselves — is doomed in advance. The opponent they now face in the East is not the half-armed, poorly led rabble of the Romanoff regime.

The inescapable

There is no mystery about the causes speeding the Third Reich toward collapse. Most of them, including the enormous margin of strength possessed by the United Nations, are beyond Nazi control.

1. German casualties in dead, missing, wounded, and prisoners approximate 20,000 men a day on the combined Russian, Balkan, Aegean, Italian, and French fronts. An additional 1000 a week are being put out of action by guerrillas, by partisans in the occupied countries, and by the French Army of the Interior. Casualties of the Wehrmacht since the opening of the preliminary Allied offensive at Cassino have averaged about 10,000 a day. This means that within the past sixteen weeks one third of the entire German combat strength, as it existed in late spring, has been destroyed.

2. The fuel shortage grows more stringent. Persistent blasting at the synthetic oil plants in the Reich and in the Balkans, obliteration of the small Albanian oil production center in June, capture by the Russians of the one important oil area in Poland, west of Przemysl, in early August, disruption of the pipe line rigged as an emergency device in Rumania, all reduce the flow to a trickle.

Effects of this shortage on the mobility of German forces in the West were noted in Brittany during August. Capture of thousands of self-propelled guns, tanks, and motor vehicles of all types on the Russian front dramatizes it in the East. The most spectacular testimony comes from the Nazis themselves. Two divisions shifted from Poland to France had to walk. The Luftwaffe is being concentrated more and more in defense of the remaining synthetic oil plants. Air support for the Wehrmacht at the fronts is diminishing. New weapons will not reverse this serious shortage.

3. German war industries are falling off steeply in production. One reason is a tremendous slowdown strike all over the Reich by the slave laborers since D Day. Another is that materials are running out. Loss of the Baltic States is more than a gigantic military disaster for the Germans. It is also an industrial disaster. It cripples the flow of nickel from Petsamo by giving Russia complete control over the whole Eastern Baltic.

New eruptions of war in the Mediterranean, where Sir Henry Maitland Wilson’s American, British, and French forces are striking swiftly, clip the availability of nickel supplies from Greece. The scramble of Germany’s Balkan satellites, following Turkey’s eleventh-hour switch to the Allies, disrupts supplies of timber, bauxite, chrome, zinc, and lead, which Germany has been drawing from that quarter. The great concentration of German war industries in Silesia is in jeopardy.

4. Russia’s westward surge rolls up food problems for Germany. In addition to cutting off enormous acreages of cereal grains, vegetables, and fodder crops in the Baltic States and Poland, the advance of the Red Army sends thousands of refugees swarming back into the Reich. Since June hundreds of thousands of would-be exploiters of conquered Lebensraum have been piling back into Germany from Poland, Eastern Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and East Prussia.

To the numbers of refugee workers from the land must be added other thousands of service-connected civilians and fugitive workmen from industries lately planted in the East. As the Allied offensive rolls in the West, other swarms of Germans, resettled there after destruction of their home cities by air bombardment, are struggling to get home. They beat in vain against the frontiers of the Reich. Hitler has ordered them kept out.

The Nazis have also abandoned efforts to evacuate populations from bombed German cities. In May, reports received by the OWI indicate that approximately 26,000,000 persons were being fed from field kitchens in Germany. The number rises. So does pressure on the food supply.

5. Other home front problems multiply. The official industrial accident roster in the Reich reveals increases aggregating 50 per cent in one year and an annual death toll equivalent to full strength of three Wehrmacht divisions. Spread of war psychoses is so marked that the German press is forced to discuss them freely. Loss of confidence in the Reichsmark paces deterioration of the money system and distortion of the short-term debt.

A fabulous expansion of fiduciary circulation carries it today close to 500 per cent above 1939 pre-war figures. Mounting property destruction through bombardment and fire, and the cumulative loss of conquered territories and their industrial assets, are shrinking the economic pledges that sustain the debt structure. These are some of the reasons for the crack-up of morale on the German home front, especially in the sanctums of the Junkers, whence the professional army officers derive.

The generals of Corporal Hitler

The generals on the eastern front have found a way out despite political masters at home who invoke full revolutionary terror against them. For the first time since the present war began, many have had recourse to the practice of “token fighting,” followed by surrender to the Russians. No other explanation will cover the fact that close to thirty Wehrmacht generals, some of them corps commanders, have been captured on the eastern front since June 22.

There is other evidence as to the frame of mind of the old line officers of the German Army. More than a score have been killed in battle in this same period. That is something new. Up to last summer, the Wehrmacht carefully rescued most of its generals by air when their positions became hopeless. There have been more suicides during the past three and one-half months among higher officers of the Wehrmacht than during the whole previous span of this war.

This testimony emphasizes that competent military quarters in Germany consider the war lost beyond recovery and that Junkerdom believes Hitler is plunging Germany into hopeless ruin. From fifteen captured German generals in Russia, precisely that accusation was made in July, when they appealed for an Army rising against the Nazi dictatorship.

This manifesto touched off Hitler’s most ambitious coup since the burning of the Reichstag and the sanguinary purge of Nazi Storm Troops in June, 1934. The “plot” against his life, the purge which followed, and the sudden spate of speeches from himself, Goebbels, Goring, and their stooges in the Party and Party Army, fit perfectly into the familiar Hitlerian technique.

Hitler is evidently trying to change a dangerous trend against himself into a new opportunity. That the bomb “plot” was engineered by those who claimed to be its intended victims, that they are striving through prolongation of the putsch to fortify their own safety, is suggested by even the most cursory review of the chronology of events prior to, and following, the “bomb” episode.

What von Papen discovered

Dissatisfaction among the professional generals with Hitler’s strategy has been evident since Stalingrad. During the Russian winter offensive several highly competent commanders were cashiered for criticism. Some were executed for “cowardice” after the collapse of the Leningrad front.

Spokesmen for the Officers Corps publicly criticized Hitler’s mistakes on the radio — General Dittmar among them. Late in April, the German commander in the Peloponnesus plotted surrender with his divisions, was caught, and was executed. His complaint was that Hitler was carrying Germany to ruin.

Late this spring Franz von Papen, diplomat of the Nazis, visited Madrid to put out peace feelers. His mission failed, as did Ribbentrop’s similar attempt to negotiate with Moscow somewhat earlier. Neither could obtain a hearing. These peace moves were clearly sponsored by the Nazi hierarchy, on Hitler’s calculation that a final effort to split the Allies might prove successful. Time, Berlin knew, was running out.

While in Spain, von Papen is reported by French underground intelligence agents to have uncovered evidence that the German Junkers, operating through the older Army officers, were also attempting to sue for peace terms by way of the Vatican.

The large number of German heavy industrialists in Spain made it evident that the Junkers were trying to work both sides of the street on the peace issue. Ostensibly supporting German solidarity with Hitler and the Nazis, they were also shopping around to see what could be had if the Nazis were dumped overboard.

Thus, in June, Nazi leaders were confronted by two immutable facts: (1) disaffection, tending toward an Army coup, among generals of the old school and their supporters, the industrial Junkers; (2) the impossibility of a negotiated peace. Hitler and his cronies proceeded with a last desperate expedient.

In mid-June, several weeks before the famous “plot,” Göring’s paper in Essen demanded that Nazi commissars be assigned to every unit in the Army “to bolster morale among the fighting men.” An order to this effect followed. It was accompanied by another order — directing Himmler to post commissars selected from the Gestapo in every Army unit to watch the officers.

Preparations for galvanizing popular emotion at home to support Hitler and the Nazi dynasty were next tackled. The German Commissioner of Labor warned the nation that a new, final, and total mobilization of all men and women within reach of the government must be made at once to save Germany. Party hacks, up and down the Reich, were given special instructions and ordered to check on their districts. Hitler appeared from solitude to emphasize the gravity of the peril facing “the whole German people.” Preparations for a purge were complete.

Then Hitler suddenly announced the “plot” against his life, engineered, according to Party orators, by a clique in the Army and the nobility. Himmler assumed a virtual dictatorship over the Army. Goebbels rediscovered “Providence” and delivered his address on “miracles.” The drive to stir up revolutionary frenzy against the Junkers and refractory members of the Officers Corps was on. The rallying point was the sanctity of Hitler’s person.

Accompanying this hullabaloo, however, came the real coup. Hitler elevated himself, Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring to the role of Nazi Quadrumvirate wdth new prerogatives of power which sweep aside all restraining Nazi laws and rules. A mass levy of all man power and woman power in the Reich and the occupied countries was ordered immediately. A purge of all professional officers suspected of dissatisfaction with Hitler and the Party policy in the war was instituted with the full force of the Gestapo and the Elite Guard under Himmler’s direction. Its first victims were in the High Command itself.

Rats or revolution

What does Hitler hope to achieve through this dramatic reversion to his famous tricks? Apparently, a modern version of the French and Russian revolutionary techniques, when people in arms conducted successful wars of revolutionary defense against foes at home and enemy invaders. The plan has fatal flaws, however. Neither by purge nor by a commissar system can the Nazi leaders eradicate the threat from their generals. And as for cooking up any surge of enthusiasm among the German people to revolutionary ardor, the stratagem is equally unconvincing.

One of von Papen’s threats if peace was refused (according to French underground intelligence] was the invocation of poison gas. Another was a stupendous slaughter of slave laborers and war prisoners in the Reich. A third was to send key leaders of the Elite Guard, Gestapo, and Party directorate underground to protract the war after Germany’s downfall, by guerrilla fighting and by fifth column infiltration of all the victorious states. The desperate plight of the Nazis and their Junker allies presages a grim finish to the war.