South Yorkshire Times, September 16th 1944

The Nazi Struggle for Survival

Hitler’s boasts that he had thrust the war six hundred miles from the frontiers of the Reich appear in a more ludicrous light than ever to-day.  Small wonder that the Fuehrer is becoming super-sensitive about his past sayings to the extent even of having executed a girl typist found (perhaps too ingenuously) copying out some of the more ill-advised of them.  Germany is at last face-to-face with the dreaded prospect of war on the “inviolable” soil of the Reich.

This is a nightmare which every good German has studiously thrust away from him for generations. The national flair for making war has hitherto been exercised purely and simply at the expense of others.  In the Great War, apart from the brief incursion of the Russians into East Prussia, the Germans skillfully managed to do all their fighting in other countries.  In this, until a few days ago, German cities were scourged by the British and American Air Forces, but no hostile army had infringed the jealously guarded borders.  And even now when the invasion of the Fatherland has begun, the Nazis were screaming defiance, swagger about turning the tables within a few months, and lash their long-suffering countrymen into an eleventh-hour panic of trench digging which they fondly hope will stem the Allied advance.

What is the significance of this fanatical rodomontade?  Surely it is that the Nazis, having burned their boats, having forfeited all claim to mercy from the stern forces of retribution that are closing in on them, are bent on securing a subterranean survival for National Socialism in a defeated Germany. For years they have had a clear field.   They have bludgeoned adult opposition into silence by a sadistic use of cold-blooded murder and the concentration camp.  They have warped the minds and souls of the young generation into unquestioning adherence to their own abominable principles.  Germany is a nation contaminated almost past redemption by this bestial ideology.  At all costs Hitler and his co-criminals want to keep alive this Nazi spirit in the Germany body politic.  Whether Hitler and his associates plan to make their escape when the inevitable crash comes is beyond conjecture.  If they do it will be in the hope of a stealthy resurgence of National Socialism (under no matter what name) making their return possible.  If they do not, their fanatical aspirations will still be directed towards perpetuation of the creed which they have fostered with such inhuman energy and thoroughness.  On all battle fronts the first concern of Hitler has been to wave his S.S. formations; to get them back to the Reich.  The reliable Party men have been withdrawn into the inner citadel of the fortress of Europe. There they can not only ensure the most desperate final stand, but when  coordinated resistance becomes impossible, they will predominate, sullen and obdurate in the conquered Reich, a treacherous, savage core for a nation seeking to elude the just reward of its crimes and to exploit the minutest opportunities to rebuild its strength for a third attempt at world domination.  From inside Germany comes news of dispositions which suggest that a campaign of guerilla warfare is envisaged by the Nazis.  Such a campaign can have but poor prospects of success in the face of the overwhelming superiority in man-power and armaments of the Allies. But the future of the ideological resistance movement which the Nazis are striving to implant in the hour of defeat can be disposed of with much less certainty.