The Waterbury Democrat., 1943-01-14

To the left of Potsdamer Strasse and parallel with 1t lie the railway tracks from the Potsdamer station. Across them is huge, long via duct for the electric, and from it, evenings, you get the best picture If industry and activity in all Ber- lin, locking down on a maze of riss-crossing railway tracks and a forest of semaphores with engines md trains putting up and down. It is very smoky and looks good from that height. The reason l mention 1t is that the three easternmost lines are always filled with long trains and each coach is clearly marked with red cross on white circle; hospital trains unloading maimed Germans from the Eastern front to be taken to hospitals in Berlin. One night late, when was going home on the electric and the train passed over these coaches, a
 wizened old buerger, drunk as a coot, nudged Sne and pointed to them and said: From France we got silk stockings. From Rus sia we got this. Dauin Rus sians must not have any silk kings, what?" He was lucky he picked on me to say this to, or he would have had his hang over in Alexander Platz prison the next morning. There are other cynical Berliners who say, however, that the coaches are not unloading anybody; that they're just left there
 on the sidings to discourage the British from dropping bombs on
 the Potsdamer station. But I've seen them unloading.
 DANCING STRICTLY
 FORBIDDEN BY LAW
 Dancing is strictly forbidden by law everywhere for the duration of the Russian war. Nevertheless, a few joints maintain "hostesses" who sit and drink with Tired Party Men. The hostesses are bit on the seedy side. For enc thing, gowns are be- ing worn shorter this season; it is impossible to buy new gowns and so the girls simply had to chop of the worn edges of their old ones and put in new hems, higher up.
 Theaters and show-houses out in the West End are packed overfull every night. People haven't any thing else to spend their money on. so even the worst show in town is a sell-out every night. The big variety houses, the Scala and the Kindergarten, are having a hard time finding enough talent to fill their bills, as narrowed by whole sheaf of Nazi decrees since the be- ginning of the war. Fortune -tellers, crystal gazers and all kinds of stage soothsayers used to be popular with German audiences, but when Hess flew to Scotland, Goebbels banned them all forever from German showhouses because it was said that one of these affected Hess decision to go. Another big favorite were funny men who specialized in shady political jokes, but these too were forbidden by Goebbels after a while. Favorite music was Amer ican jazz and blues songs, but the dictator of German Kultur unof- hcially informed producers this well also was poisoned. Just about all that is left is acrobatics and jug gling, which becomes tiresome; but they take peoples minds of war, and that is what people pay for.
 Cinemas are not as popular, prin- cipally for the reason that they do not take peoples minds of war: Once the Nazi film dictators made the mistake of affording a very visible measure of what the public think of their propaganda films by opening a second-rate comedy called the Gas Man" at the Gloria-Palast on Kurfuerstendamm, while fifty yards away at the Ufa-Palast an extra. super colossal one hundred and fifty per cent war film, Bomb CT Wing Luetzov," was playing. The mediocre comedy played to packed houses at every presentation, while the war film showed to 8 half empty theater. Unfortunately, even mediocre comedies have become rarities as war and propaganda films increase in number.
 GERMANS DEVELOP
 BAD CASE OF NERVES
 News-reels which last almost as long as feature-films, used to be very popular with Germans, until the Russian war. Since then Ger mans have developed a bad case of nerves and don't like news-reelS any more Too many of them can visualize sons, fathers and cousins whom they have lost, in those dra- matic explosions on the screen. once they showed a big fat Naz bomber with white teeth painted on 1t to make 1t look like a shark, opening up Its belly and issuing a school of bombs, twenty or thirty of them, one after another. All over the audience you could hear women sucking their breath in throueh their teeth as though cold shivers were running up and down their spines. People began writing let ters to the Propaganda Ministry