The Evening Post.

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 95, 19 October 1944, Page 6

The Evening Post.

NAZI PLAN: CONQUER OR DESTROY

! The latest Hitler-Himmler decree is based on the theory that Germany's enemies may put the German regular army out of the war, and may terminate its power to resist as a regular army, but that Germany's enemies will still fail to hold Germany down, and that their military occupation of her w3l fail to impose any kind of order, being foiled by various forms of resistance that are of the guerrilla character, or "underground," or at any rate irregular. Whether the Nazi resistance repertoire will include an equivalent of Gandhi's . civil disobedience is not clear; for a violent Nazi, that weapon might be classed as the last but not the least. If Hitler and Himmler should succeed, by this means, in making it impossible for a foreign military occupation to hold down Germany, their efforts might be construed as implying even more than successful "underground" resistance to a foreign foe. A technique *of resistance that could paralyse a foreign army might also be able to paralyse a native Government. To put it in other words: if, the regular war being over, Hitler and Himmler can find an irregular method of making military administration impossible, will they not be in danger of suggesting a method of making all administration impossible? Civilisation as a whole is interested, therefore, in the Hitler decree of undying resistance, or perpetual anarchy. Nothing could be more menacing to civilised peace than the possibility of a never-ending war sustained by or through a recalcitrant minority. This Nazi-effort/to forbid finality to a lost war is therefore of universal concern. It is at least worthy of more than passing notice.

Ordinary human, beings, after more than five years of modern war, in which civilian populations are placed by bombing in the front line, .are generally content to cry enough.' And probably this is the case in Germany. But often there are individuals, a minority of the whole, who will not cry enough. Moreover, there may be cases where the irreconcilable minority attempt to terrorise the majority into continued desperate resistance; and Germany, and the Nazi Party within Germany seem to provide such a case. The issue, then, is not merely whether a militarily defeated population, exercising its own free will, decides collectively to continue resistance, but whether such a population can be dragooned willy-nilly, by irreconcilables, into prolonging the futile agony. Further, as indicated above, if a whole population can be dragooned by a minority into an unending fight for a lost cause like Nazism, cannot any other " lost cause—not necessarily a military cause—^be used to -ggUt civil populations ; into indeterminnts1 paralysing strife? There is every indication that the have thought along these lines; that if they cannot be the architects of a Nazi Europe, they are willing, in despite, to be Europe's wreckers; and that when Hitler told Sumner Welles that if he (Hitler) failed he would pull down all the others with him, he was not uttering merely a general threat, but was in a position to pull out of a pigeon-iiole a blueprint for Nazi architecture and another blueprint for Nazi wrecking, part of which is now being promulgated in Hitler's latest "all-in" resistance decree, and another part is dramatised in the wrecking of Greece's Piraeus, of great French ports, and of other vast important implements of modern civilisation.

The spirit of the Hitler-Himmler | utterances is that the Nazi party,; which has been a State within the State of Germany, and also Jft armyj within the army, will contih.^ to be' an army when the German regular army fights no more, and will be the core of German resistance. The chief question arising now is whether this resistance will be all core, and nothing else; or whether it will take the form of what Himmler calls "the German people's mass rising." Himmler admits that, however excellent the Nazi technique of resistance may be, the decisive point is still the attitude of the mass, far more important than new techniques or even new weapons of war. Speaking of "the new V weapon," Himmler tells the Germans that "all these weapons will be successful only if they are used by Germany's strongest wonder weapon— the German people's mass rising." He also makes it clear that these German masses—among whom "women will be enrolled if necessity arises"—will have

•the privilege of making war with pitchforks and pikes, like Germans who fought Napoleon's armies in 1814, or with scythes fastened to poles, which some of Prince Charles Edward's Highlanders used at <■ the . Battle of Pre'stonpans. To this continued conflict with "every available weapon, and all methods known to them," Hitler now invites all Germans between the ages -of 16 and 60, and possibly their women. If the invit'a-

tion be not accepted, there will still remain the Nazi military formations, with gauleiters as officers, and Himmler as commander-in-chief. In this picture the great regular army of Bismarck and Moltke becomes superfluous. Who can better claim to have .had his feet on the eaVth— Bismarck or Hitler? And if civilisation is to take the form that Hitler and Himmler design, what is to distinguish it from anarchy?

WELLINGTON, THURSDAY, 'OCTOBER 19, 1944,