The Gisborne Herald. WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED "THE TIMES" GISBORNE, THURSDAY, JAN. 4, 1945. CAPITULATION THEME

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 21603, 4 January 1945, Page 4

The Gisborne Herald. WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED "THE TIMES" GISBORNE, THURSDAY, JAN. 4, 1945. CAPITULATION THEME

"It. is only the turn of the year that causer, mo to speak to-night . . . Our enemies have prophesied our collapse yearly. Never did they believe that their victory was so near as in August, 1944, but again we contrived to bend fate to our will. . . . German capitulation will never come.” These short excerpts from the recorded New Year speech of Adolf Hitler to the German people are the important parts of an address signalising the beginning ol another year of trials for the Nazis and their followers. The rest of the speech was merely words, the words of a man seeking to convince himself as much as his audience.

The mention of capitulation struck the keynote of the latest Hitlerian expression of defiance. Surrender is the last topic the Nazis want to consider; but there can be no doubt that it haunts their thoughts. ft is a constant pro-occupation with those whose task it now is to find means of continuing Nazism as an underground force, in the event of Germany going down to the wave of Allied strength now being massed upon her frontiers. The elation of the German people over Field-Marshal von Rundstedt’s early success in the Ardennes counterattack was not the sober jubilation of victory, but the ecstacy of the condemned and temporarily reprieved. Hitler’s defiant words on the subject of capitulation do not jibe with his admission that the Allies were nearer than they knew to victory, in August last. No-one outside the Nazi heirarchy can put a precise value upon that admission; but it is obvious that Allied success was almost within the grasp of the columns which swept across France and Belgium to the western gates of Germany.

By what means other than their own capitulation did the Nazis envisage the victory of the Allies? Could they have ended the war by any other means? The wholesale disappearance of the top-ranking. - Nazis to some sanctuary far’ from Germany could have ended the war; but that would have been a surrender as complete as the Allies could have wished. Whatever might have been their plans in August, the Germans did not bend fate to their will. Already the Allies have told the world that their flying columns halted on the German frontiers simply because they had outrun their supplies, and could not continue their pursuit of the broken German armies of the West. Hitler’s claim on this score comes too late to be convincing.

Equally lacking in conviction is Hitler’s declaration that only the turn of the year induced him to leave his immense labours to speak to his people. Without giving full credit to the recent story of Himmler’s coup d’etat, by which he was reported to have made himself the Fuehrer in fact, if not in name, it is quite clear that Hitler is no longer the executive head of the German nation. His speech is perfectly in keeping with the action of a man whose actual usefulness has declined, but whose following in the country makes his appearance from time to time imperative. Hitler’s hold on the German imagination is still a trump card in the Nazi hand. By gathering power into his own hands, Himmler may have become the real bulwark between the Allies and Germany. But Hitler, whether voluntarily retired from executive power or held merely as the puppet of puppets, still stands between Himmler and the German people.