European Front

ON THE WORLD TODAY

HE military plight of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich threatens the Germans with disaster by the end of the coming spring. Collapse may occur earlier if, as seems certain, the blows rocking Nazi defenses grow in power and multiply in number.

As October passes, compare the status of German arms with the picture ten months ago. The Wehrmacht has been driven without respite through a costly, monotonous succession of defeats, all the way from the Don to the cities west of the Dnieper. There the Nazis are fighting a losing battle as the Red Army batters its way over the Dnieper.

Nearly three quarters of Russia’s armed strength (approximately 425 divisions) is assembled along or behind the front in Eastern Europe. Total Axis striking power on all European fronts last midwinter did not exceed 450 divisions. Axis losses on the Russian front alone, in the interim, are estimated by conservative British experts at close to a million men, including fifty divisions completely wiped out. Newly trained forces do not replace these losses.

The small number of prisoners taken by the Russians this summer, probably not exceeding 100,000 in all, is not a safe basis for judging German losses. Taking prisoners is becoming less and less popular with the Red armies, as they discover the almost incredible cruelties and irrational savageries practiced upon civilians by the Nazi troops.

Meantime, Italian collapse subtracts a hundred divisions from the Axis. Rumania and Hungary have lost more than thirty divisions. The latter has withdrawn her divisions entirely from the East. Finland has likewise called home the remnants of her army from collaboration south of Leningrad. Even slippery Franco, reading portents brought forcibly to his attention by Allied diplomacy, has summoned back his “Blue Divisions.”

Russia’s build-up

One of the surprises of the war is the swift progress of Russian reconstruction in the areas immediately behind her armies. Her engineers, on the heels of advancing combat divisions, have repaired railroads, rebuilt highways, and restored services essential to the military. Aiding the technical battalions are thousands of returned civilians.

Collective farms are emerging once more in the Kuban and the Don basin. Armies of masons and carpenters, aided by civilians, toil at the reconstruction of rural villages. This is in keeping with the decision made to give priority, in all non-military restoration work, to the rescue of agrarian economy. Thousands of horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and poultry are being shipped to re-emergent settlements in devastated areas from beyond the Urals, where more fortunate communities are “adopting” shattered towns and villages in the war zone.

It is worthy of notice also that, despite the war, — indeed, because of it, — the tremendous spurt of industrial expansion east of Moscow continues, while in the reaches beyond the Urals, mines, factories, foundries, and electric power developments are being pushed forward with as much speed as during the darkest hours of the German advance. Russia is not only proving herself able to shoulder a heavy share of the burdens represented by the greatest war in history: she is also building for her own tomorrow while the conflict rages.

Battle for the Balkans

Last spring the struggle in the Balkan Peninsula was a secondary affair for the Germans. Today this Balkan conflict is assuming proportions of widespread, murderous war. The crack-up of Italian garrisons in the Balkans is swelling native patriot armies enormously. Thousands of Italian dissidents have joined the irregulars. Two whole divisions have gone over to the Serbian Partisans with full equipment. Stocks of munitions and supplies, and several war industries, are now in the hands of the Balkan guerrillas.

Allied operations in the Eastern Aegean testify that a new front against the Nazis in the Balkan Peninsula is on the Allied program for the coming weeks. As a consequence, pressure on Turkey is now becoming really serious. Hitler acknowledges the threat to Salonika by brushing aside all pretenses in Bulgaria, taking over the country, incorporating Bulgaria’s twenty tough divisions into the Wehrmacht under German direction, and ordering his outpost forces in Crete and the Dodecanese Isles to hold the Lower Aegean at all costs. The storming of these island hurdles by Sir Henry Maitland Wilson’s armies in the Near East, aided by the Allied fleet and air forces, must come before any push north for the mainland.

War on five fronts

Germany knows that the grand crisis of the war is approaching. She is mobilizing her submarines in a last effort to delay it on the Atlantic side.

The Nazis began this year involved in serious warfare on only one front on the continent of Europe — in Russia. Mid-autumn finds them engaged in force on two fronts — Russia and Italy; being drawn rapidly toward another — in the Balkans: about to be hit on a fourth — in the West; and possibly on a fifth — in Southern France.

Meantime, the air fronts for mass bombing have doubled. The furious defense of Kiev, Vitebsk, and the Crimean salient indicates that the German High Command knows the war can be lost in the East this winter. Concentration of thirty-five picked Nazi divisions in the Po valley, to challenge General Eisenhower’s advancing fourteen, shows equally desperate determination to hold in that area. The final phase of this war will be both grim and costly. Maintenance of war production was never so urgent as it will be during the next six months.

Terror at home

That the war lords of the Axis are hard-driven must now be common knowledge even among the Germans. Defeatism is the inescapable consequence of military reverses, of the gruesome results of the great Allied air raids, the steady multiplication of refugees fleeing shattered cities. The epidemic of evacuations spreads far to the south, to Frankfort, Leipzig, and even Budapest and Bucharest.

Herr Goebbels is meeting the marked sag in morale at home with blunt warnings: but his broadcasts and the threats printed in the Nazi press do not work the old magic. Heinrich Himmler avails himself of the police powders added to his control of the Gestapo and Elite Guard during the summer. The terror foreshadowed at the time of his appointment as Minister of the Interior is operating through the length and breadth of Europe. Nothing like this reign of savagery has ever been known in modern history.

Execution, flogging, or the concentration camp faces any German heard speaking ill of the progress of the war or of the officials running it. Party badges — removed by members seeking to hide their party affiliation as certainty of defeat becomes impossible to conceal from the people — have had to be put on again.

This move is designed to set off the Party from the people, to cement its solidarity under pressure of terror by compelling Party members to identify themselves as sharers, with higher-ups, of the responsibility for Germany’s plight. Beheadings occur daily throughout the Reich. The most notorious “punishment battalion” in the Elite Guard has arrived at Prague to handle the anniversary of Czech independence. An order from Himmler to the army forbids the taking of prisoners in the Balkans.

A significant phase of this terror is Himmler’s concern about army officers who falter in their confidence of victory or their loyalty to the Führer. Evidently the propaganda drive of the Free Germany Committee, which is being staged in Russia, is producing results. An extensive purge of military waverers is under way. Colonel General Alexander Loche, former Commander-in-Chief in the Balkans, has been arrested and has “disappeared.” He was charged with being favorable to the Free Germany program.

The notorious commandant of Paris, General Eric von Stulpnagle, has also fallen afoul of the Gestapo. So has the commander of the occupational army in Denmark. Moderate German officers are being weeded out of the Wehrmacht and shot. Three points emerge from Himmler’s procedure in the terror: —

1. The Nazi Party, from Hitter down through the entire structure of its more important officialdom, does not intend to permit public revolt and the hierarchy will not hesitate to bathe Germany in the blood of its own people to prevent such rebellion.

2. The Party leaders are determined to deal ruthlessly with the remnants of the old German military aristocracy, to forestall any army coup. This implies a head-on collision also with the landed aristocracy — the historic source from which both the land barons and the war barons derive.

3. Hitler’s oft-repeated threat to invoke terror as a bartering pawn for eventual achievement of a negotiated peace, if needed, is becoming real. The systematic destruction of towns and cities in Russia by the German armies, and the wholesale massacres of civilian populations, — Naples is but the most recent example, — are the result of orders from the political, not the military, headquarters. Devastation and the torch await the great monuments of European civilization, apparently including Paris, if Hitler survives long enough to maintain this policy to the end.

Troop desertions continue to increase among garrison forces in Western Europe, and the deterioration of morale among U-boat crewmen is now the major problem of the German Navy. While extermination of the Jews proceeds methodically in Poland, the Himmler terror has reached for Denmark’s unfortunate Jewish minority. Looting in occupied areas goes on with no pretense of ordinary procedures of confiscation. Insurance companies are being compelled to hand over 75 per cent of all funds accumulated to cover policies held by Jews.

The exchange value of the German mark, held at about 40 cents throughout neutral European countries until this summer, has fallen steeply. In Spain it has hit two cents.

Three-power conference

Events in Europe emphasize that the war is moving rapidly toward a climax. They make clearer than ever before the urgent need for inter-Allied agreements, both as to the final phase of the war itself — including coördination of attacks during the months immediately ahead — and with respect to policies for dealing with the eventual collapse of the enemy. Enormous problems of political, economic, and physical reconstruction add immeasurably to the responsibility of the United Nations.

The preliminary conference among Britain, Russia, and the United States results from Russian initiative. That fact is of first importance. It is one of the hopeful factors in an admittedly difficult situation. It means that Moscow believes the moment ripe for a genuine meeting of minds to confront tasks as onerous as those of the war itself.

Stalin delayed approval of this conference for obvious reasons. He waited until Russia’s strength on the battlefield and her capacity for victory had been demonstrated, until her influence in Europe was powerful, until Russian ideas for settlement could be advanced with confidence and Russian policy could claim equality in its own right.

It is unlikely that this first meeting will resolve speedily all the differences which plague inter-Allied unity. These run too deep and range too widely afield for swift adjustment. How the Allies deal with a defeated Germany will determine the future relationships of all the states on the Continent. Here is the nub of the problem. Its complexity is not diminished by the certainty that the Allies will move, in each instance, from the decisions each may take regarding its own security. They have before them the job, not of remaking Germany, but of rebuilding a continent.

Russian policy, while not entirely in the open, is nevertheless more definite than that of her war partners. There is no doubt she desires to collaborate in peace as well as in war. Such collaboration, from the Russian standpoint, involves recognition of her demands for security in Eastern Europe, her interest in the Balkans, and may include her centuries-old desire for direct access to the open oceans of the globe.

It is certain that British policy will demand adjustments in the Mediterranean (Italy’s overseas empire being, in Mr. Churchill’s words, “irretrievably lost”). It is equally certain that America has intentions regarding her own future security in the Pacific. So it is useful to keep in mind that the three-power conference by no means divides automatically on issues of righteousness. The problem is one of adjusting mutual needs and rights among three powerful states to their ultimate mutual interest, while at the same time safeguarding the rights of their less powerful partners in this struggle against tyranny.

Russia has shaped two policies to meet this situation. She prefers coöperation with her British and American associates in the war. If that fails, her other policy, adumbrated by her support of France and her extensive influence in Eastern and Southern Europe, may emerge. This might mean the isolation of continental Europe, or a combination with Britain. It might have repercussions not only with respect to the future of Germany, but throughout the Near and Middle East and Asia as well. Britain and the United States have begun to realize the potential disaster to world peace implied by any such division of the great powers.

WHAT TO WATCH

1. The Balkans — their approaches from Italy on the west and the Aegean Isles from the southeast.

2. German pressure on Vichy France to counter the threat of invasion blows from Corsica.

3. The increasing pressure on Turkey.

4. The struggle for the Crimea.

5. The Nazi purge of the German Army.

6. The effect on Spain and Portugal of Germany’s treatment of the Vatican.