South Yorkshire Times, October 21st 1944
Root and Branch
If Hitler and Himmler have their way the war will go on for a good deal yet, but it did not need these latest frensied calls to arms to convince us of the savage thoroughness with which the Nazis intend to pursue their destiny. Those mad men hope to leave such an indelible mark on German history that it can never be erased. Nazism is to be so deeply stamped into the soul of the Reich, so drilled into the people by every device of education, propaganda, terror and finally by every callous incitement to die for the National Socialist ideal, that the extermination will defy the perseverance and patience of Germany’s conquerors. That is the aim of Hitler and the rest of the ruling clique in Germany. And to further these wild designs the Nazis are going to any lengths. The unspeakable cruelty they have displayed in all the countries they have overrun is the more horrible because of the long-term significance. Starvation, torture, death, separation; all these are weapons which the Nazis put to calculated use. They mean to bleed and maim those countries so that it will take generations to recover from the throttling presence of German occupation forces.
Happily, most of the countries subjected in this way have been liberated, but we hear still of cold-blooded extermination of thousands of Poles incarcerated in concentration camps, of the shooting of hundreds of Dutch people because there was not available transport to remove them to Germany. These are downright cold-blooded murders, but in subtler ways the Germans have sought to hamstring all possible European opposition with an eye to that future time when they hope once more to be on the war path, howling the old wolfish war-cry Deutschland Uber Alles.” French prisoners have been detained and French workers transported so that France is the poorer by thousands of unborn children; scientific starvation has been effected by a cynical policy of food pilfering on a grand scale which has led to chronic under-nourishment among the rising generation in such countries as Belgium, France, Holland, Jugoslavia, Greece and Poland. While German children have grown fat on stolen foodstuffs, forming a lusty field of recruitment for the Reichswehr of 1964, the Nazis have smiled secretly in contemplating the poor physical material which they have let their rivals to draw upon. Trade industry and morals have been similarly undermined.
What is the answer to this depraved and vicious manifestation of warped nationalism? Are the Nazis to be allowed to bank these ill-gotten gains? If they are, the Allied nations will be passing on a deadly legacy to posterity. Probably the very fanaticism of the Nazi leaders will undo many of the effects of this shy attempt to weight the scales in favour of future German plans for aggrandisement.
The fate of Aachen is prophetic. If Himler dragoons his boys and old men into prolonging the unequal struggle, the more surely will Germany be consumed by the fate which Hitler sought to impose on the nations he enslaved. The Reich has already been bled of the best of its manhood, and if the Nazis have their way the nation will be still harder hit before the end. Out of such transcendent chaos what do the Fuehrer and his partners in crime hope for? A final get-away in the confusion? An insoluble reconstruction problem for the victors? Hitler’s hint on Wednesday that he still hopes for a “live and let live” peace is the vainest of delusions.
The United Nations have sworn to extirpate every vestige of Nazism, and they will have fought and conquered in vain unless they do just that.