GERMANY: Gott mit Uns

Gauleiter Otto Hellmuth sounded a practical note. “We all know that God is with us,” he told the people of Würzburg, “but let’s not rely on God alone. Let’s work so hard and fight so fiercely that God cannot refuse to hand the victory palm to Germany.”

Gauleiter Franz Hofer of Tirol was brushed by the wings of victory. “You must stand faithfully and unflinchingly before, behind and beside the Führer,” he told the Hitler Maidens. “Victory is nearer than you think.”

Goebbels’ legman Helmut Sündermann echoed Winston Churchill, with a German accent. He cried: “The German nation is to be wiped off the map. German men are to be enslaved and deported to all corners of the earth. . . . When enemy divisions reach German soil, they must be attacked from every house, every village, every field, every hill. We must not leave a single blade of German grass which might feed the invaders.”

All over the Reich desperate variations sounded on this single frantic theme: work and fight. Goebbels ordered eighth-grade pupils out of school into war plants. Battalions of German women formed pick & shovel brigades to strengthen the West Wall. A Swiss traveler reported that the first German women troops were already manning parts of the West Wall. The German nightmare—Einkreisung, encirclement—was coming true at last. And behind the frightened Germans stood a vast potential fifth column. Scattered throughout the Reich were some eight million foreign workers. To them last week went two calls from General Eisenhower’s headquarters: ”Begin now to leave the factories . . . [but] do not be provoked by the Gestapo into unorganized action.” In Eisenach and Dessau, French, Belgian and Dutch slave labor gangs barricaded themselves in their barracks, sang their national anthems. The SS apparently lacked the men to stop them. Elsewhere foreign workers were stepping up sabotage by slowing down production.

Nervous German women besieged the police for permission to carry revolvers. More farsighted Germans were doing little favors for the foreign helots.