Evening Post SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 1941. HITLER'S HEEL: CREDITS AND DEBITS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 77, 27 September 1941, Page 8

Evening Post SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 1941. HITLER'S HEEL: CREDITS AND DEBITS

A great obstacle to popular understanding of the progress of the war lies in the two-sidedness- of nearly all the relevant factors. Consider, for

instance, the German-occupied and German-controlled countries. They bring to Germany great factory power, and that is an item on the credit side, which Mr. Coates. among others, has emphasised; but the resistance of the population is to Germany a debit item," and that resistance—passive or active—naturally finds a prominent place in our war news. But who can, with any accuracy, assess these credits and these debits, and strike a balance? The oppressed peoples, it is stated, oppose the Germans with guerrilla fighting, or with wrecking tactics, or with sabotage; and, as factory operatives or as forced labourers, do not work their best. Yet Germany does derive some advantage from these machines—human and other — that war has thrown into German hands. It is unpleasant to reflect that when Hitler collected the Czech Skoda and the French SchneiderCreusot works, he could claim to control %y far the largest aggregation iof artillery production facilities in 'the world." It is more pleasant to hear that Germany-hating workers are ! sending out "dud" shells, that the ! Serbs (somewhat tardily) are staging lone of the biggest guerrilla wars on record, and that the moral as well as the physical forces of revolt in occupied Europe are a rising tide, in which Hitler will be engulfed—some day. Max Werner (in "Battle for the World") points out that Hitler quickly turns against his enemy all industrial production in an occupied zone as far as lies in his power. Last year "even the arms industries in the unoccupied French zone (in St. jEtienne and Toulouse) began workling for Germany"—and it is fairly certain that M. Laval and his friends shed no tears over this sudden turnround of the armament industries in Vichy France. But, on the other side of the account, France (occupied and unoccupied) has many thousands' of Frenchmen who are British sympathisers, and who are not idle. Werner, who is a balanced authority and does not merely write for effect, discounts any idea that Hitler receives anything like one hundred per cent, from these conquered industries. It is true, he writes, that "conquests have added strong new industrial units Jo the German economy," but he goes on to observe: The productivity of Continental European economy under German leadership cannot be arrived at by simply adding German production to the former production of the occupied territories. It will not be easy to place the economies of the conquered territories in. the service of German war I economy. In part they have been d<sI stroyed, in part disorganised. French, j Belgian, Netherlands, and even Italian ! industry, moreover, have been cut off from raw material sources. . . . The ; economies of the conquered territories must be lifted out' of their old connections and integrated into a new system of supplementing German economy. This, however, will be no real organisation of European economy. Hitler as an organiser in the face of European hatred, and Churchill as an organiser faced with British bureaucratic muddle, both have their troubles, and no light troubles. Werner invents an illuminating phrase when he writes that the countries possessing "the greatest national explosive force" are France, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Rumania, and Bulgaria. Why he includes the Rumanians and not the Serbs and the Greeks may cause some wonder, and may be due to the probability that he wrote the paragraph referred to before he knew the issue of Hitler's drive against Yugoslavia and Greece. Some races seem to be more receptive than are other races to the ingratiating methods which the German conqueror sometimes employs towards the conquered. Zola's . "Debacle" contains some sidelights on the clumsy efforts of Germans to use the kid glove in occupied France seventy years ago (Franco-Prussian war), and today the Greek ■ Prime Minister,. M. Tsouderos, points out that an -conquered Greece "the Italians are trying to ingratiate themselves" with the Greek people, but the Italians "need fourteen divisions of troops to back up any social success they may have." The whole quisling idea is based on ingratiating, the conquered peoples, and its failure bodes ill for Germany's "New Order in Europe." But the "national explosive force" of conquered peoples, though it is an invaluable long-term factor, must not be regarded in wartime as a substitute for organised armies in the field. Serb guerrillas will never liberate Europe. That burden lies fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the belligerent nations, the British Empire and Russia, and American shoulders also may be needed before sufficient direct explosive force is generated to blow Hitler from the planet.