Hitler’s Speech

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVII, Issue 23115, 1 February 1945, Page 4

Hitler’s Speech

JN celebration of the 12th anniversary of his seizure of power, Hitler has made a speech which does not hold one lighting shaft of hope for the German people. He has promised them a Nazi version of Mr Churchill’s “blood, sweat and tears,” but there is no confident defiance at the end of it. Hitler shrieks his ■belief that victory will come, but he is speaking automatically and without the stimulating conviction which could bring his people to still higher endeavour and the courageous acceptance of sacrifice. As any lunatic, who has set himself an impossible task, Hitler has now fallen back on a wholly irrational faith in the God Whose divinity he has so often flouted by brutalities and murders assuring him an abiding place in the malodorous chronicles of national

One charm about Hitler’s most fervent declarations is that they can be so easily turned against him. For example, when he said: “I shall continue undiverted by misery and peril, and imbued with a sacred conviction that finally the Almighty will not let down a man who wanted nothing throughout life but to save his people from a fate they have not deserved.” It can be said unhesitatingly that the German people, in spite of their susceptibility to a usurper’s discipline and tyranny, have not deserved the fate now overtaking them. Their only hope of salvation lies in the rapid overthrow of the Nazi regime. Hitler himself can see that, for he is trying to persuade the Germans that the misery they would have to endure in defeat must be worse than they are undergoing now. It would require a greater gift of persuasion than Hitler has to make them believe that. The war is now being fought on German soil and Hitler invites the sympathy of his people and the world for the wretched ones who are taking to the roads as refugees. This terrible experience of war at firsthand should prove that the way of peace, followed on any terms, is better than continuing to accept the leadership of a defeated warmonger and tyrant.

How bad the situation has become for Germany is proved by Hitler’s references to the “grave” crisis and “this calamity.” He has not made an admission of this kind before. Hysteria and belated dependence upon the Almighty Who has been treated with contempt by the Nazi philosophers and leaders cannot be a stable buttress against the plainly recognisable fact that Germany cannot win a war on two fronts. Greater German strategists than Hitler have admitted that. It is still probable that the fanaticism of Hitler is shared by a large body of his followers, particularly Nazi

youth. As the time for German defeat in the field draws so much nearer, it is well to recognise that the defeat of Germany will not necessarily end the Nazi peril. As a writer in the Observer said recently: “The mental fight for the preservation of Western civilisation will go on after the fall of the last German town; indeed, it will only then enter its decisive stage.”