BOMBING GERMANY

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXIII, 9 December 1940, Page 3

BOMBING GERMANY

HOW DO PEOPLE TAKE IT ? INSIGHT INTO NAZI MIND t Air-terror, however prolonged and however intensified, will not break the moral of the British people. Will the Germans stand up to the R.A.F. bombing equally well? asks Sebastian Haffner, until two years ago a resident in Germany, in the London “Evening Standard.” Berlin, until a few nights ago, had only had a foretaste of the real thing. Now Berlin’s turn is beginning. How will the Germans like a taste of their own medicine? Goebbels has made a bad mistake in describing the British as weaklings. Let us not fall into the same error about the German civilians. In many respects they are better protected against air raids than the British. In spite of the bombing most of them feel they are winning the war. And fear of the Gestapo agents in their midst is certainly greater than their fear of the British bombs over their heads. Let us make no mistake about it. For a time at least, the Germans would face concentrated air attacks —not indeed with the defiant courage of the British people, but with their German qualities of discipline and stoicism. DIFFERENCE IN PSYCHOLOGY But there is a profound difference between the two countries. The Germans do not possess the British quality of bringing out their best in an emergency. Their power of resistance is at its highest at the beginning of a struggle, not at the end. The British may seem outwardly soft, but the core of Britain becomes harder the more one pushes against it. The Germans, on the contrary, are like oysters: They have a hard armoured shell, but this shell has its joints. Within they are extremely sensitive and malleable. It is just a matter of getting at the weak joints. The German cities in some respects afford more protection against air attacks than British cities. They do not consist of streets of little houses without deep foundations, but of big blocks of tenements possessing a roomy cellar fairly deep under the ground. These cellars form natural air-raid shelters for the inhabitants, and the Germans have been trained with great thoroughness to use them as such. A.R.P. training has been given in Germany since 1933. Berlin had its first black-out as early as March, 1935. In 1937, the whole eastern half of Germany was the scene of highly realistic aerial war manoeuvres which lasted seven days, with black-outs, the sirens, and compulsory sheltering during ‘raids by night and day. Each tenement has its air raid warden, who is responsible for seeing that all tenants go down as told and keep strict order in the shelter. As a result there is no panic. And the destruction of their personal belongings above their heads does not mean too much to the Germans, since they are accustomed anyhow to losing them in one way or another. IN A NAZI SHELTER There will be other discomforts however. In these cellars all the tenants, from a score to a hundred, are crowded together, Nazis with their more or less secret enemies. There is nothing of that spirit of a happy community, the teal ‘ Volks gemeinschaft” which reigns n the London subways and public shelters. Nazi Germany has the word for this spirit, but utterly lacks it in reality; people dislike each other, and distrust 2ach other even more. There is not only the harmless air raid warden in the shelter to marshal them, there is also the “Block Warden,” the man in whose hands lies the “political education” of each tenement, a dreadful official spy. And in the more ‘unreliable” districts—the workers’ quarters on the one hand, the upper middle-class ones on the other—there are, as people know, Gestapo agents. It is impossible to know whether your neighbour is not secretly making a note of everything you say. It is better you keep your mouth shut. That is why Berlin shelters are quiet compared with those of London. In every house the two political groups—the Nazis and the others—are accustomed to ignore each other with some passion. Now they are all crowded into the same narrow room. The good Nazis challenge the others with loud “Heil Hitlers,” leaving them the choice between the humiliation of saluting back and the peril of omitting the salute. The Block Warden sits somewhere in the dark, peering around and watching for every careless word, in case he himself gets into trouble; a sharp look at one family who used to be Social Democrats and still hang out only small flags on flag days; he keeps an eye on a second family which has a son in a concentration camp; and on a third which he knows (he knows everything!) still has furtive intercourse with those Jews on the fourth floor. . . And some Germans still try to bring Jewish children into the shelter. Quite a few sordid little tragedies and tragi-comedies, quite a lot of hatreds smouldering like incendiary bombs in the well-organised Berlin air raid cells. But bombs above will scarcely fan them into a flame. NO TECHNIQUE OF GIVING IN Those who anticipate that “the Huns will understand the language of bombs” may be disappointed, as the Nazis have been. The German masses to-day have as yet no mechanism for giving in, even if they should feel like surrendering. Their imagination has been vividly stimulated by the great victories of the summer, and they still see an irresistible Germany, an infallible Fuhrer, a Britain with her back to the wall, able to do nothing but send out bombers as a last futile gesture of spite. Even those who would like to pin their hopes on those British bombs do not as yet dare to do so. The British airmen come and are gone again, but the Ges-' tapo stands there by day and night. To give the bombs moral effect beyond their immediate military value, one has first to tackle that image that sticks in German heads to-day. One has to bring it home to them that the, tide has turned, that the days of the Blitzkrieg are numbered, that the world is rallying round Britain, and that the bombs which come to Berlin are not an end but a beginning.* Fitted into this picture, these same bombs will assume quite another meaning. As soon as this picture dominates German minds, they will no longer see any point in “taking it” and dying for a cause they feel to be doomed. At any moment dejection and uncertainty will pass over to the Nazis, and hope and self-con fidence to their German enemies. There will no longer be strict order and dis- ; cipline in the cellars of Berlin and j Hamburg, Leipzig and Cologne. There will be a rallying of fronts. I revolt. The German morale, artificially strengthened by terror, will stanti an offensive of . mere bombs. It will not stand the combined offensive of the bombs and growing despair.