Foreign News 1941: Germany v. Russia, World or Ruin

GERMANY V.RUSSIA Worlds or Ruin

German People! National Socialists!

Weighted down with heavy cares, condemned to months-long silence, the hour has now come when at last I can speak frankly. . . .

Thus did Adolf Hitler, on the Sunday morning of June 22, 1941, begin a proclamation that ended with a declaration of war against the largest country and the largest army in the world.

Like two vast prehistoric monsters lifting themselves out of the swamp, half-blind and savage, the two great totalitarian powers of the world now tore at each other's throats.

GREAT BRITAIN An Artist Vanishes

One morning last month British Novelist Virginia Woolf sat down at her desk as usual, but instead of revising her new novel, she wrote a note to her sister saying: "Farewell to the world." She also wrote a note to her husband, Leonard Woolf, editor of London's Political Quarterly. Then she took a walking stick and went for her favorite walk across the rolling Sussex Downs to the River Ouse. When her husband, following the footprints across the fields, rushed up in panic, only her stick was lying on the bank. While searchers dragged the Ouse, Leonard Woolf told the press: "Mrs. Woolf is assumed to be dead."

All her family was inclined to think that Virginia Woolf was a suicide. She had always been morbidly self-critical, agonized over almost every book, sometimes suffered a complete nervous collapse. Perhaps, as she stood beside the Ouse, as World War II and the war's changes closed over her, Virginia Woolf came to feel at last like war-shocked Septimus Smith, whose suicide she had described in Mrs. Dalloway: "Human nature, in short, was on him—the repulsive brute with the blood-red nostrils. . . . The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself."