The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 1945. THE GERMANS IN DEFEAT

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 99, 28 April 1945, Page 4

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 1945. THE GERMANS IN DEFEAT

THROUGH the long years when the prospect of Germany's defeat remained* remote Allied peoples were told much about conditions as they were believed to be in the Reich. The reports varied, and sometimes were conflicting-—inevitably so, for no one man, however skilful he may be in observation and deduction, can hope to draw a complete and clear picture of conditions in any country, especially the country of a belligerent enemy. Only now is it possible to form substantial opinions about the reliability of the speculations, official and other, by which Allied peoples were encouraged in the years before their armies came to grips with the enemy. Perhaps the commonest of all these speculations was that concerning Germany's oil supplies. Almost from the beginning of the war, according to Allied surmise (usually supported by impressive statistical analyses), these have been low, and frequently approaching complete exhaustion. In fact, Germany has been able to maintain the struggle for five and a half years, and to-day there is little to suggest that shortage of oil has had more to do with her impending defeat than any other shortage. In this matter, as in others, Allied speculations have perhaps come near to representing the truth as it would have been if the Germans had not taken extraordinary action to meet the dangers which threatened them. No doubt both determination and ingenuity were needed in full measure, but there has been no shortage of these in Germany.

The speculations about German food supplies, heard earlier in the war, were also wide of the mark. Gradually it came to be recognised that the Germans, having organised the labour of a continent, and being able to make the first demand on its production, would be the last people in Europe to go hungry. So it has proved. In general, the German middle class (which, according to many reports, was under the Nazi regime disappearing) has been found prosperous and well fed, and the rations of the masses have compared well with those of the British people. For a few short years the Germans, in fact, have enjoyed the position of the "master race" of Europe, which they forced to work for them and which they plundered with great thoroughness.

In the earlier war years, and again recently, there was controversy about whether a distinction could be drawn between Nazis and other Germans. There were those who said no distinction could be usefully drawn, and there were others who declared that the distinction was so real that the Allies could depend, when they invaded Germany, on the help of the German "underground." That expectation, if it was ever well founded, seems to have been completely falsified by events. There has been no report of the Germans having given the Allies substantial help. There have been reports only that, when it is clear that the Allied troops have mastered a city or a region, plenty of people are found who profess to hate the Nazis. More than that, wealthy and middle class Germans have the effrontery to make it plain that the Allies' first duty is to protect them and their property (some of it looted from conquered countries) from their foreign slaves. ■ They not only expect protection; they try to demand it. "Young Nazi fanatics," wrote one correspondent, "are more immediately dangerous than these German burghers, but one fears them less. We have troops to kill the criminals in uniform, but who is going to deal with these smirking, simpering accomplices in plain clothes?" Such reports underline the fa,ct, which Allied peoples have been slow to recognise, that the Germans after a decade of Nazi domination, in which they acquiesced, have no sense of guilt. If «they are terrified now, and in their terror some are obsequious, it is merely because they do not know what is going to happen to them. For them, the fault of the Nazi regime is only that it has failed. Well may it be asked, as Allied soldiers are asking to-day, "What are we going to do with these people?" I,■