WHY HITLER FIGHTS A 'HOPELESS' WAR

Reimann, Guenter

Why Hitler Fights A 'Hopeless' War A Leading German Anti-Fascist Shows How Allied Strategy Aids The Nazis By GUENTER REIMANN HITLER is no Hindenburg and Himmler is no Luden-dorff. Many American...

...At the same time practical preparations for the deportation of 5 or 10 million workers to Russia, to work out "reparations," are to be organized...
...Only by fighting in this way will they be able to continue existence as a counter-revolutionary force for "order" in postwar Europe...
...They are unlike the old professional officers who consider themselves as mere defenders of the state against external foes and who fought for German imperialism without any claim to political rule, or leadership...
...They—and they alone of all Germans—would not have to worry for their future...
...In the light of these distinctions it will be well worth our while to reexamine present Nazi as well as Allied strategy...
...The Nazi strategists help to create a political situation wherein the victorious powers themselves would need the Nazi "experts...
...They are the leaders of a successful counterrevolution...
...They continue to fight because they stake their future existence on the creation of social chaos and economic ruin in Central Europe...
...Paul Sweet, and Lewis F. Gitler, came to this conclusion: "Many Germans to whom we talked regarded Nazism as a kind of foreign rule...
...The Nazi leaders had to decide to continue the war in such a way that they remain in power until all military resistance ceases and until virtually the entire country is occupied by the enemy armies...
...It is diabolical realpolitik...
...You will suffer even more than we, the party elite...
...They want to have fun and do the things other young people do, instead of being regimented...
...German militarism can not end the war in 1945 as did German militarism in 1918...
...The authors of this report, which was curiously disregarded by most American papers and which was inserted in the Congressional Record by Rep...
...They [the youth] want some kind of freedom...
...Most Germans have been little affected by Nazi ideology...
...but they all tell you they want some kind of liberty...
...Hitler's elite guard of today prepares for tomorrow...
...They can march as well under foreign flags— or whatever flag is permitted by the foreign powers— in the name of "order" and "reeducation...
...Some chance of survival is left if they lose only to the foreign enemy, but none at all if they are defeated in a civil war...
...Nazis Welcome Allied Policy The Nazi leaders have been simultaneously fighting two wars—one against foreign i'oes...
...They have a better chance of survival with than without destruction of the Reich...
...War prisoners and slave workers belong to a special category held for other reasons...
...Those liberals who believe that they will be needed or will be used to "reeducate" the German people are—at best—foolish...
...Hope for a "compromise peace" had to be written off...
...Many American liberals, as well as official Communist spokesmen, profoundly misconceive the historical and the contemporary situations when they pursue their line that Nazi deeds are "typically German" and the Nazis are organizing a "secret German Army Staff" to prepare for a third world war in accordance with the old traditions of German militarism/They are blundering, these liberals and Communists are, because this time German history does not repeat itself...
...Thus could the Nazi experts in mass terror and counter-revolution find a new basis for a profitable occupation...
...A crushed, enslaved, dismembered, and de-industrialized Germany cannot possibly build democracy on that kind of foundation...
...At the point of total military defeat they will be faced, however, with the other horn of the dilemma...
...After a survey among civilians in Aachen, these experts, Dr...
...They know that the planned fate of a defeated Germany leaves no possibility for experiments in democracy...
...It was brought in by Hitler, himself a foreigner, and in the last years it was supported in each locality by SS troops and other forms of coercive police from other regions...
...Ruthless, unscrupulous, but obedient administrators and policemen alone can do the kind of job that is to be done if, for instance, the Russian plan of sending 5 or 10 million Germans as state slaves to Russia is to be executed...
...They know that they have lost the first war...
...Hitler's Victory At Yalta The terror of the Nazis was first used against their own people...
...Whatever you felt, though, or think about us, whether you were for us or against us—you will be held responsible by the Allies for the deeds of our regime...
...Hitler and Himmler are of a different type and another time...
...Meanwhile new national distinctions will be made...
...The long delayed ending of the war and the physical and social destruction wrought will create a postwar crisis in which the victorious powers will have to employ the "administrative" abilities of the Nazi elite, reason the planners, and not without some justification if we recall what has happened in some German communities now in Allied hands...
...They were willing to surrender when it became clear to them that the war was lost...
...The special SS and Nazi elite troops were conscripted from the scum of all Europe and have been used throughout Europe...
...The association is now sealed by the official proclamation of the "war guilt" of the German people proclaimed by the Allied world...
...Saul K. Padover, Dr...
...Cogent evidence of the real state of mind of the German people has been supplied by three experts attached to the psychological warfare division of the American Army in Germany...
...The final destruction wrought on Germany by the foreign foe is to create such chaos that the military victor can bring out of it the kind of social order he desires only by employing experienced Nazi officials as "administrators" and police troops...
...They have to do this to avoid what appears to them the greater danger—-the danger of annihilation by revolutionary uprisings...
...Furthermore, you deserve enslavement, starvation, and humiliation if you are 'weak' and allow yourselves to be defeated...
...Here is no empty threat...
...These are the decisions of Allied leadership at Yalta and elsewhere...
...Here is the key to an understanding of the Nazi strategy of fighting on to final defeat...
...They will not march under the swastika...
...Other top-leaders may seek haven in distant corners of the world...
...They are at the same time part of the master plan of Hitler, who shared with Stalin the victory at that Crimea Conference...
...Goebbels has already played the tune of postwar propaganda for its German audience...
...The victors of the East and the West will have to protect themselves against the risk of such unsettling revolutions...
...It has never relaxed...
...The Nazi leaders are no fools...
...They will be especially indispensable if the victors insist upon a policy of national de-industrialization and enslavement of German workers...
...The leaders of the Nazi state think in terms of civil war as an integral part of modern warfare—a mode of thought entirely alien to the old conservative Army officer of the Seeckt or Hindenburg type...
...The German worker is to become the pariah of Europe, destined to play the miserable role the Ghetto Jew played for Hitler...
...They now try to avoid defeat in the second war...
...This refers particularly to the workers and to the proletarian youth...
...Hindenburg and Ludendorff could and did end the war in 1918 before the structure of the Reich had broken down...
...He has said in effect: "You Germans may still believe that you can dissociate yourselves from us Nazis in order to escape the revenge of the foreign victor...
...Fascism Feeds On Chaos The consequence of this policy is clear: Germany may be destroyed, German industries and towns pulverized, and the structure of German industrial society smashed...
...Proletarian masses, panic-stricken with the fear of becoming paupers or starving as state slaves, would be highly receptive to ideas of social revolution...
...And yet continuation of the foreign war until the bitter end—continuation that is utterly futile from the military point of view—is not meaningless for the Nazis...
...But the larger group of obedient Nazis will be left behind under conditions in which they will have a better chance for survival than will the ordinary German Volksgenosse...
...This is a basic fact that current strategy makes it c:-^"'1ient to forget...
...The execution of the grand strategy has already made considerable progress —since Yalta, and the final outcome, if pursued along present lines, can only be a great defeat for freedom' and democracy—and, correspondingly, a victory for fascism which thrives on chaos, destruction, enslavement, and vengeance...
...Then the overwhelming majority of the population would be socially and economically uprooted...
...On the contrary, it has been intensified since the war broke out, with the consequence that German prisons and concentration camps have always been overcrowded—with German workers and others who opposed the regime or were suspected of oppositional activities...
...The Germans are not yet finished with their Nazi masters...
...The Germans generals wanted to preserve the social structure of Germany, with the officer corps, the General Staff, and German industrial capitalism—and with these eventually to prepare for another war...
...Jerry Voor-his, California Democrat, and published in The Progressive, emphasized that the majority of the youth were anti-Nazi...
...They don't know a thing about democracy, can't define it, don't know what it is...
...Will the foreign victor apply drastic measures to liquidate Nazi activities...
...The overwhelming majority of the German people hate the Nazis bitterly...
...The "Nazi elite," on the other hand, came to power as the leaders of a successful counter-revolution by suppressing and terrorizing their own people—and only later foreign peoples as well...
...The entire strategy of the Nazi elite must now be oriented toward their role in future civil war and counter-revolution in Europe...
...Therefore Himmler and Goebbels welcome the Allied policy of "Unconditional Surrender" and plans for a "hard peace," for this helps them to continue the war which can serve only one purpose, survival of the Nazi elite...
...Final defeat—defeat in civil war—would be inevitable either if the Nazis accepted "Unconditional Surrender" now, or if some other political group could appear as a German peace party...
...at whose expense they tried to build a new world empire, and the other against their own people, whose involuntary services they employed for that purpose...
...Any dissociation of the German people from Hitler and the Nazi regime is strictly forbidden...
...Economic life would decay on a continental scale...
...Their strategy indicates they have given a provisional "no" to this question...
...The war is to be continued and to be ended without any step to encourage internal revolution, inflicting such terrible physical destruction on vast areas that little basis will be left for continuation of civilized life...
...Hitler has promised that, if necessary, he will sacrifice his own life in the interest of his followers...
...Many of their people had hoped we would pick the Nazis and punish them, instead of treating all Germans as equally guilty...
...Padover finally stated, "They [German antifascists] were quite distressed by our non-fraternization policy...
...Revolutions of desperate proletarian masses, beginning in defeated countries, could easily sweep the entire continent, if properly led...
...Nobody knows better the true state of mind of the German people than the Gestapo...
...This is not a romantic Goetterdaemerung...
...Certainly the development of a just Allied policy which encourages the building of a free, democratic, hopeful Germany is the last thing Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels want...
...The total number of "pure Aryan" prisoners has always greatly exceeded the number of Jewish or other non-German prisoners...
...But it is also a matter of fact that more SS troops have been required to hold down the German home front than have been used in any foreign country or on active fronts...
...Therefore the concentration camps remain overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of German workers newly arrested, while the foreign enemy is at the gates and the last battles are being fought...

Vol. 9 • March 1945 • No. 13


 
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