Evening star., 1944-07-09
In His Last Doys

Cdi ~ III NofCilUcl, 1SoS, SUI utIlIl&
before his criminal colleagues at
rally in Munich, Adolf Hitler scofied
at warnings from London that Brit
ain was prepared to fight on indef-
initely, no matter how long it might
take to defeat Germany. The warn
ings were laughable, said the super
cilious Fuehrer. for "on the day the
British declared war I commanded
Goering to make all preparations
for a flve-year war. not because
believe this war will last five years,
but because we will never capitulate
in five years"
Hitler was in fine fettle when he
said that. So was Goering. So was
Goebbels. So was the German high
command. Indeed, Germany as
whole was in fine fettle. In those
days, with the war only three
months old, the Nazis and their fol-
lowers could afford to be cocksure,
since neither France nor Britain had
anything comparable to the "invin-
chile" Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht
and since it had already been DEM
onstrated in Poland-in little more
than the twinkling Of an eye-how
truly overwhelming and irresistible
was the military might of the Reich.
For once in his life Hitler was
probably speaking the truth when
he said at that time that he did not
believe the war would last five years.
And surely, in the following June,
after his locust legions had swept
through Denmark and Norway,
through Belgium and Holland, and
then knocked out France, he must
have thought that Britain, now
standing alone and subject to stran-
gulation by U-boat blockade and to
pulverization by Goering's air force,
would soon be forced to surrender.
The French armistice was signed,
and he danced an unforgettable jig
then, and rubbed his hands together
gleefully, while the newsreel cameras
ground on to record the scene for
the ages.
Surely the war would be short now.
The preparations for five years OF
1t, II Goering had really carried
them out. seemed scarcely necessary
now. Now the Fuehrer, with his
wonderful intuition and his military
genius outshining Napoleon's, could
proceed with his larger plans to con-
quer Europe and the world Now,
letting his U-boats and bombers
take care of Britain, he could turn
eastward and ravish Yugoslavia and
Greece and. after that. hurl all his
lightning bolts at the Soviet Union.
And this he did. and he did it so
well, in his opinion that in October,
1941, he boasted stridently to the
whole world that Russia was already
broken and would never rise again.
But fate, the forces Of history the
stirring indestructibility of the free
human spirit, and the workings of
that supreme intelligence and will
beyond the comprehension of Hitler
or of any finite being, all combined
to confound the conqueror. There
came Stalingrad There came Ell
Alamein. There came the invasion
OF North Africa, of Sicily, of Italy, of
France. There came the awesome
Allied air offensive. And there came
these present days when, from vir-
tually every direction, Germany is
being pressed to its doom, with its
material and flesh-and- blood re-
sources showing signs at last of the
appalling, all-consuming effects of
long attrition.
The clock ticks. The minutes, the
hours, the days, the weeks, the
months relentlessly roll by. Before
the summer closes the five years will
be over, the time when the last leaf
in Hitler's own calendar of war must
be ripped out. The end approaches,
but it is different by far from the
one he once expected, even though
he still vows never to capitulate.
II he is capable of any spiritual
thought at all. he must know now
how profoundly true it is that man
proposes, but God disposes; and
sometimes. to the depths of his
thwarted and lonely soul, he must
tremble at seeing, like Macbeth's
wife, the damned spot that will not
out, the ineradicable blood upon his