GERMANY’S TERROR BEGINS

Waikato Times, Volume 195, Issue 22457, 19 September 1944, Page 2

GERMANY’S TERROR BEGINS

The terror of the panic-stricken hordes of people in Europe who fled in vain from the Nazi warmakers only filled the Germans with pride in their mastery. Today German civilians are fleeing from the Rhine in equal terror of the forces of liberation, and articulate Germans are crying a different tune. “The future looks horrible,” says one German newspaper. Another says, “The civilian population must face the hard fact that modern war, with its artillery and air raids, creates new deep battle zones.” The horrors of victory and retreat are leaving the soil of the first victims of the war of aggression and entering upon the phase when those who made war will become the last and greatest sufferers. Plowever repugnant it may be to the men of the United Nations, this is inevitable if the war is to be won and the Nazi terror wiped out. Honourable soldiers take no pleasure in the spectacle of women and children fleeing in terror and being overwhelmed in the suffering of war, but Hitler condemned his own people inescapably to such a fate when he drove the world into war. Germany is a tragic country. War has been its trade for centuries. Its people have been taught to regard war as the pathway to a full expression of the national life; that triumph for the “herrenvolk ” and subjection for the rest of mankind were the destiny and the right of the German people. It mattered not how the “inferior” people were to suffer in the process. For them flight, torture and slavery were good enough. All this Hitler guaranteed for a thousand years through the agency of his invincible army. All the terrors and the tortures imaginable were in fact inflicted and for four or five years almost the whole •of Europe has groaned under a regime of shocking savagery. Suddenly the whole scene has changed. The slaves are being freed and already the “herrenvolk” are scuttling from the western and eastern borders in terror of the forces of liberation. How shall the Allies approach the defeated tyrant—how inflict an appropriate punishment to teach the lesson? At least the war must take its awful course until the Germans surrender and beg for the mercy which they themselves would never extend.