HEADS BLOODY AND BOWED

Evening Star, Issue 25172, 11 May 1944, Page 5

HEADS BLOODY AND BOWED

ALLIED BOMBS CRUSH GERMAN SPIRIT REDUCED TO RACE OF SLEEP-WALKERS (N.Z.P.A. Special Correspondent.) (ißec. 9 a.m.) LONDON, May 10. What effect is the Allied bombnig having on the German i people ? The ' Daily Telegraph's ' Stockholm correspondent says that it is the greatest factor in their lives to-day, compared with which interest in the great battles on the eastern front is negligible. " The Carpathians are still at the 1 other end of the world for the average German, but every citizen is affected directly or indirectly by bomb warfare."

The correspondent adds that a week's study of enemy newspapers and of talks by men and women recently arrived from Germany indicate that the " bitter' quarrels between those evacuated from the towns and their hosts have died down in the realisation of a nationwide catastrophe. Complaints have been forgotten in a peculiar apathy which has turned the German people into a race of sleep-walkers. They seem hardly to have even the energy to find hate either of Mr Churchill or Hitler, or of the Allied airmen or their own Nazi masters.

He continues, saying that overstrain, irritation, and the shortage, of nourishing (foods show themselves in hundreds of little incidents daily, in a greatlyincreased numlber of petty breaches of discipline, as well as. major crimes. An increase- in fatal accidents and of breakdowns of machinery in factories due to carelessness traceable directly to tiredness has led to the installation of engineers in charge of safety in over 4,000 Dig industrial plants/ Publio health has suffered, ioo, and influenza and diphtheria were rife during the winter. ' Above all, food to-day is a problem nearest the German heart. ( There are literally no'unrationed goods to be bought in German shops. There is always enough to meet the ration cards, but the food is of miserable quality, lacking hoth fats and aljbumen. " Thus, with the food situation steadily deteriorating, with the threat of invasion in the west and defeat in the east' hemming them in, with heads bowed .beneath a storm of Allied bombs, the German people face the last phase of the war. .'.'■' " They are tired and worn out, in their hearts defeatists, concerned more with their own problems of what to eat and where to buy clothes than with the progress of the war. " The German people will continue the war to the bitter end, because their leaders have led them tp believe that surrender means their annihilation,, because they still believe in'the invincibility of their army, and because of the regimented might of the Gestapo, against which their ill-organised petty discontent can have no chance of success."