GERMAN CIVILIAN MORALE.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 61, Issue 45, 3 December 1940, Page 4

GERMAN CIVILIAN MORALE.

There is strong reason to believe that the nerves of a people so enslaved as the Germans will never stand up co intensive bombing, Writes a correspondent of the “Times.” For the first time in 127 years, except for the brief interlude of the Russian invasion of East Prussia in 191.4, which collapsed at Tannenberg, the German people arc confronted with war upon their own soil/ A well-known German general, von dor Goltz, writing in 1920, and long before his fellow-countrymen had been reduced to a state of abject neurasthenia by the Nazi tyranny, committed himself to the opinion that they could never endure for long without flinching the impact of warlike operations upon German territory. He wrote as follows: “I should like think- that our civil population could learn a lesson from the. French people how to endure suffering for their fatherland. For I am convinced that the German people would never have stood the annihilation of towns and villages for four years as the French have stood it. The hysterical outcry of our people, at the invasion by the Russians of East Prussia, which compelled our G.H.Q. to dispatch immediately an Army Corps thither and therebv lost us the war, is a case in point.’