GERMANY: Suffering Fiihrer

Last week Germany’s official D.N.B. agency began a coded radio dispatch to provincial newspapers: “The Führer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. . . .” later ordered editors to delete the words “Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.” Allied monitors concluded that Adolf Hitler had at last relinquished the supreme command.

Colonel Walther Scherff of Hitler’s General Staff provided a further commentary on the Führer’s status and on recent unverified reports that Hitler had been gravely ill during the period of bad news from Russia. Wrote the Colonel in Das Reich: “While the Führer’s faith was unshakable … he was not entirely a person of icy calm, for he suffered too much with his soldiers. . . . There is no genius without passion, and it would therefore have been unnatural if the Führer’s will to master the crisis had not been here & there passionately expressed. …”