GERMANY: Finality

The last vision of victory was fading, and in the German mind sounded the brassy strains of a Götterdämmerung, the twilight of a nation.

Nazi Newsman Rudolf Sparing reported in an unprecedented, probably exaggerated and almost masochistic vein: “Allied air raids on Dresden . . . caused the greatest destruction a big urban area has ever suffered. . . . Catastrophe without parallel. Not a single . . . building remains intact or even capable of reconstruction. The town area is devoid of human life . . . wiped from the map of Europe. . . .”

And from the Siegfriedian fastnesses of the Rhineland, a German officer wrote to his wife: “A storm is shaking the German tree and all the weak leaves are falling. . . . But . . . look every day at our picture by Dürer of Ritter, Tod und Teufel [“The Knight, Death and the Devil”—see cut]. . . . Go fearlessly along that small bit of road which still separates us from finality.”