HITLER VOWS A TOTAL WAR. The surprise big story this week has been the abrupt appearance of Fuehrer Hitler to address a hastily-assembled rally Tuesday at the Berlin Sports Palace. It was the first Hitler speech since the attempt on his life at Munich beer cellar on Nov. 3. It was full of the usual sneering bombast -- he ridiculed Chamberlain at one point as a “pious, Bible-reading warrior for God.” But as Otto D. Tolischus reported in Wednesday’s New York Times, it carried a stern warning “that the first phase of the war -- the phase of political and military preparation, including the Polish campaign -- was ended and that the second phase -- that which will carry the war to the west on land, on sea and in the air -- was now beginning.” Hitler gave no hints, of course, on how or where the blows will be struck.
Most significant is the amount of time Hitler gave to denouncing France, in particular Prime Minister Daladier. Previously, the Nazi line had been to blame the war entirely on Britain and to refrain from criticizing France, in hopes of splitting the Allies. But last night Hitler address Daladier directly -- “The whole German people stand against you....[German troops] will give you enlightenment personally. You shall make their acquaintance.” He blamed “French generals” along with Winston Churchill for advocating the destruction of the Reich and reacted to Mr. Churchill’s claim that the British Navy has sunk half of Germany’s U-boats with a bit of humor -- “Germany must be on the verge of complete collapse. I just heard today that we only have three submarines left.”
POOR REVIEWS IN BRITAIN -- AND ITALY. Britain, not surprisingly, has seized on Hitler’s denunciations of France as evidence that the Nazis have abandoned a failed policy. Ralph W. Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune quotes the British authoritative commentary -- “The main lesson to be learned here is that he has at last learned the folly of his previous efforts to separate France from her ally in order to destroy each of them singly and at his leisure.” Intriguing, also, was the estimation in a New York Times dispatch from Rome of Italian reaction -- “they shrugged their shoulders after hearing the speech and forgot about it quickly.” The Times adds that, judging from the number of Hitler’s mentions of Russia, “it must have been hard for [Italians] to avoid thinking that the Berlin-Moscow Axis has now really supplanted the Berlin-Rome Axis.”
SCANDINAVIA WILL DEFEND HERSELF. Time magazine’s current issue observes that “nobody had any more doubt last week that Scandinavia would fight if attacked.” Two Time stories describe why. One tells of the debate in Sweden’s Riksdag on whether to jump into the Finnish war wholeheartedly -- the country’s former foreign minister, Rickard Sandler, revealed the reason he resigned last month was because cautious Prime Minister Hansoon vetoed Sandler’s plan to send an full-fledged expeditionary force of 10,000 men to defend Finland’s Aland Islands from the Red Army. Sandler also stood up in the Riksdag to denounce the government’s neutrality policy as “idiocy.” On the other hand, the Swedish government did take a tough stand in demanding -- and getting -- a formal apology from Stalin for Soviet violations of Swedish airspace.
The other Time dispatch describes a controversy in Denmark over a “pessimistic” New Year’s address by Premier Stauning, which caused Copenhagen’s press to debate “whether he meant to imply that the country would not resist if invaded.” In response, the lower house of the Danish parliament took a defiant stance, passing unanimously a resolution declaring that “all disposable means shall be used if necessary to...protect the realm’s peace and independence.” Norway, meanwhile, “issued a similar proclamation on the same day.” The Scandinavian neutrals may not have heeded Winston Churchill’s call to join the Allies, but at least they seem to be realizing that toughness and resolution are keys to holding off the dictators.
PERSECUTION OF CATHOLICS IN POLAND. The New York Times printed a full transcript Tuesday of the twenty-six-page report by August Cardinal Hlond, Primate of Poland, to Pope Pius XII on Nazi persecution of the church since the German conquest. Well worth reading, if you can make it through without falling ill. Some samples --
“A priest named Brasse has for four weeks been in a concentration camp. A priest named Styczynaki has been thrown out of his home. The Canon Tioczynaki is in a concentration camp...The Bishop Zablocki of Gniesno was shot...At Bydgoszcz nothing certain is known of the fate of the priest Schultz. Probably he has been executed, and the same applies to the priest Casimiro Stepczynski. The Lazarist Vicars Wiorek and Szarek have been shot...Boys of fourteen and under are being deported to Germany, and will probably undergo a concentrated Hitlerian education. Even girls, especially the good-looking ones, are being deported, to the despair of their families....The others -- women and babies, sick and aged -- after days or weeks of martyrdom in concentration camps, and loaded onto cattle trucks...Such journeys in the bitter cold last two to four days. There are dead in almost every car...”
It goes on, in this vein. Twenty-six pages of this. No wonder, as Dorothy Thompson writes Wednesday in her New York Herald Tribune column, that “the difficulty in telling the truth about the Nazis is, and always has been, that the truth is so monstrous that the ordinary human being cannot bring himself to believe it. The greatest advantage that the Nazis have had in this world is the incredulity of the human race.”
CHAOS IN BRITISH TRANSPORTATION. David Darrah reports from London in Tuesday’s Chicago Tribune that British highway and rail traffic has been brought to a virtual halt because of “unmentionable weather conditions” (i.e., the censors won’t allow him to write that a winter storm’s going on). Tieups in delivery of essential supplies have caused shortages of milk, meat, and coal. And if things are even half as bad as Mr. Darrah says, they’re pretty bad --
“Trains which left London and Scotland Saturday still were ‘lost’. Railroad communication between London and Scotland has been cut off and boat services to north Ireland has [sic] been abandoned temporarily. Hundreds of passengers who spent the week-end in snail’s pace travel, have been marooned in trains stranded in various parts of the country and in isolated villages and towns up to 36 hours. One hundred children, along with 400 other passengers, were held up more than 20 hours when their train became stalled. Police and air raid precaution workers organized rescue parties.”
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