The Waterbury Democrat., 1943-01-07

soldier had become involved with g. Russian shell and his various members were flying in all direc- tions. Below him in the trench a very PrusSian lieutenant, who had been>looking across through a peril scope, had turned to Quizzical general behind him and was say- ing: ~Stupid, these Russians; they apparently don't understand a word of Germanl"
 THREE CLTMAXES
 OF HITLER"
 Less funny, but more incisive was the little observation which might be called the Three Climaxes of Hitler," which circulated at the same time. It has no particular punch-line, but belongs to the same category of expression for, like them, 1t was always introduced with the traditional preface: Do you know what people are saying? :" According to this, the first climax was the climax of Diplomacy - Munich. After that diplomacy never again played an important part in Hitler's policies; the rest was guns. The second was the military cli- max: the campaign in France, the perfect application of BIitzkrieg with the perfect ending; the total destruction of a great army. The third was the climax of propa- ganda: the Dietrich speech. After Hitler's little press chief had raised the spirits of his people to the skies and then let them fall again down into the abyss of despair German propaganda could never again in- fluence to any important degree the morale of the German people.
 This was more than a cogent little analysis suitable for table talk. The evidence for its truth is over- whelming. The first sign was the decline in newspaper sales. To test word-of-mouth reports that a de- cline had occurred, I asked my newspaper vendor in a large kiosk on Wittenberg Platz, and was told that sales of newspapers had fallen off in all the kiosks operated by her particular concession-holder. In her kiosk the drop had been greater than forty per cent. As Berliners will, they invented joke about the German press after that. It con- cerns a Berlin paper called the BE-" meaning Berliner Zietung. You were supposed to ask, to make the joke click, why it was that the only newspaper people read any more was the "B.Z." The answer was: because it lies only from B 70 2, while all the others lie from A to 2.
 FOREIGN BROADCASTs
 SPREAD RAPIDLY
 More important still, because it was positive sign people were seeking news elsewhere, rather than the negative one that they were teasing to look for information from NaN sources, was the rapid increase in listening to news broad casts from foreign capitals es- pecially London and Moscow. An official of the Propaganda Ministry told me arrests for this "crime" in Germany tripled after the Dietrich speech. In the newspapers it was announced that two individuals were punished with the extreme penalty, death, for listening to Lon- don! On October 30, 1941, Dr. ioebbels confirmed the increase by publishing in every newspaper in iermany a list of stations to which 'sople might listen. stations in Ger many and occupied countries; and le coupled with it warning not to )yerstep these limits, which were dearly drawn exactly for this pur- 'ose. In November. every citizen Il Germany received, with his
 ation-tickets for the month, little
 ed card with a hole punched in he middle of 1t so that 1t might be
 ung on the station-dial of a radio ct, and on the card was the leg.
 nd: Racial Comrades! You are iermansl It is your duty not to listen to foreign stations Those who do so will be mercilessly pun. ishedl' A week later in my neigh oorhood houses were visited by To- :al Nazi chiefs to make sure that the cards had been fastened to radios and were still there. People who had no radio sets were told to keep the cards anyhow, and to let them be reminder not to listen 10 the conversation of people who did have radios and tuned in on fore eign stations. So far as I could dis- cover, the main effect of the new wave of propaganda and threats against listening was to make those who had been afraid to do so curi- ollS, and to convert them into regu-