A Changing Note

Press, Volume LXXIX, Issue 23947, 14 May 1943, Page 4

A Changing Note

When Hitler some months ago announced that Germany was turning to a defensive strategy he launched a spate of propaganda by which, if some of the German people were reassured, others must have been shaken and bewildered. There was no talk of defence when the German armies were conducting their victorious sweeps through Europe and into Russia, nor when Rommel was leading the Afrika Korps, as he promised and believed, on to Egypt. To-day, the Germans’ high summer expectations in Russia last year have been reduced to Hitler’s chill assurance that desperate exertions have made the Russian front more stable than seemed possible; the triumph in Tunisia is the prelude to new attacks on Axis Europe; and the wheel has turned full circle. They were told, as they were told when this war started, that they were ringed by aggressive enemies. The rightful “ place “ in the sun ” they were to win was Hitler’s Lebensraum in another phrase. The wide prospects of victory have been narrowed, for the German and Italian peoples, to those of staving off defeat and surrender. Bad days lie ahead; but, Goebbels tells them, they will “ never capitulate.” This ominous word has crept in and now haunts the German leaders’ speeches. It must also haunt the German memory. Thirty years ago another generation of politicians and military leaders was instructing Germans in the creed of their invincible might and the mission before them. The pattern of what followed is the pattern of what is following to-day. Thus, when the German armies swept through Belgium and into France, defence was far from their minds. Not till the sombre days of late in 1918 were the German j people able to detect the new note in their propaganda. The first to j strike it was the German Crown| Prince: “We must never forget one! “ thing—we are waging a war of “ defence. It is our enemies, not “we, who think of it as a war of j “annihilation. What we intend to' “ do is to hold om' own and not io

“be defeated.” Those words are echoed to-day in the utterances of Goebbels and Hitler, who, only a year ago, were uplifted by the vision of a drive through southern Russia to a junction with the Japanese on the Persian Gulf. “ This “ war is for our very lives, and we “all know it-”: this has been the ; theme of Nazi propaganda for home consumption since Stalingrad; it has been stressed increasingly through the subsequent Russian victories; it will be accentuated as Germans measure the calamity that has befallen them in Tunisia. It can be concealed froih them no more and no longer than the truth about Stalingrad was. They have been told that Britain was crumbling under the Luftwaffe’s attack, that the Russian armies had been dealt blows from which it could never recover, that Egypt was a certain prize, that the Americans could make every sort of machine but a military machine. They have been deceived in every belief. Today they are invited to cling to a new one, that their Festungs Europa is unassailable, and that disaster is in store for those who will try the assault. “ The High “ Command will now show its “ teeth and make the enemy under- “ stand that the people’s and the “ army’s determination to hold out “is unshakable.” That was said, 25 years ago, by Captain von Salzmann. It might have been said yesterday by Captain Sertorius. He will say it, or another propagandist will, and mark in saying it a stage in the process of history’s repeating itself. The process can be no easy one for the United Nations, for Nazi strength is far from broken; but they may take a genuine encouragement from the change in the voice of Goebbels.