GERMANY: Man in the Way

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People in the United Nations believed that victory in Europe was possible in 1943, probable in 1944, certain no later than 1945. They were asking how Germany could hope to win; why Germany did not see the ineluctable defeat, sue now or soon for peace.

Germany's Hope. Prime Minister Winston Churchill answered them last week, in a speech to a national conference of women, in London: ". . . And the enemy. What is their hope? Their hope is that we will weary; their hope is that the democracies will faint later on the long road; that now, in the fifth year of the war, there will be doubts, despondencies and slackness. They then hope that out of this they will be able to consolidate their forces in their central fortress of Europe, their remote home islands in Japan, and extract from our weariness and from any divisions which might appear among us the means of making terms to enable them to repair their losses, regather their forces and open upon the world, perhaps within another decade, a war even more terrible than that through which we are now passing. . . ."

Even more precisely, it can be said that Germany hopes: 1) to split the United Nations and to come to separate peace either with Britain-U.S. in the west or with Soviet Russia in the east; 2) to get a conditional peace that will leave Germany strong, independent, defensible—a world power to be treated with deference by the other world powers.

On this aim, big & little Germans seemed wholly agreed. The big—and therefore effective—Germans divided into two leading groups on how it can be achieved:

The Army Leaders, supported by most industrialists, Catholics and anti-Nazis on the home front and in the Army, know that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin are solidly on record against any peace with the Nazi regime. Russia, in its sponsorship of the National Committee of Free Germany and the German Officers' Union (TIME, Oct. 4), seems willing to make conditional peace with any Wehrmacht generals' regime that kicks out the top Nazis. To many a Wehrmacht general the Russian offer makes sense.* But it can be accepted only by an Army revolt. Hitler's strongest man in the way of such an anti-Nazi Putsch is Heinrich Himmler —supreme boss of the German home front; commander of 600,000 splendidly trained and well-armed SS youths, supersaturated with Naziism, mostly stationed on the home front.

The Nazi Leaders, those indelibly stamped with the Party label—like Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Göring, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and thousands of Nazis who hold cardinal state positions—these Germans know that perpetuation of the Nazi regime is, above all, a personal matter of life or death. They hope to consolidate their forces and successfully defend the Third Reich. They also hope, and they probably believe, that the Allies may weary, divide and make peace with a Nazi Germany.

Political Base. In the rush of war, people in the United Nations were apt to lose sight of the internal politics of Germany. But Germany is not only a military force to be crushed. Germany had a political dynamic—an explosive mixture of Naziism and the national will for a war of revenge and expansion that permeated all classes.