BERLIN'S ORDEAL.

Evening Star, Issue 25068, 8 January 1944, Page 4

BERLIN'S ORDEAL.

It seems doubtful'if the Allies' bonubing of Germany has reduced Goering or Goobbels to more complete discomfiture. It would be a bold German who would remind the former of his earlier 'boasts, that the Reich's air force controlled the air over London and would carry its orders to full execution, and again, that no bomibs would ever be dropped on Berlin; while the Propaganda Minister cuts a more and more abject figure. The air raids, says Goebbels, arc teaching the kind Germans to ha.to. They did that during tho last war, when a special litany was composed for them which greatly amused their incredible British opponents. They will be amused now by the claims that " wherever in this war we have defeated foreign enemies we have shown them mercy," and that " German soldiers have fed starving French refugees, and there is nothing for which the German people have given greater credit to the Fuhrer than for his chivalrous treatment of France at Compiegne " —where no circumstance was omitted that could bo effective for rubbins it in.

A question remains, however, of how much the German people know of all this. They will know much-more about many things before the war is much older. The 'bombing of Berlin will go on, with more consequences ihan Goebhels cares to enlarge upon. Allied bombings of Berlin, it has been said, •triko Reich prestige where it hurts the most. And the mass evacuations that are now, very belatedly, being permitted, ' will inform millions of Germans, who till now may have heard very little of it, how completely it is being bonibefl. Wireless departments may permit one sort of news to be sent abroad and only the most diluted versions of it to bo broadcast for home consumption, but they cannot prevent hundreds of thousands of dispersed civilians # from talking. It will be a shock to Germans to realise, not only the dislocation to the war effort which must result from such sustained assaults upon administrative centres, but also that their Luftwaffe has lost control of the air even above its own territory. Earlier there had . been evacuations from other large bombedout cities, like Hamburg, and the resettling of their thousands of fugitives had,been one of the most difficult tasks. Propaganda to cheer Germans may be admitted now to call for some invention. •