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In circles close to Marshal Göring, he is credited with having largely influenced the Führer to countermand at the very last moment a major German offensive which had been minutely planned and was supposedly ready last November to sweep through neutral countries and outflank the Maginot Line. While Ribbentrop keeps pressing Hitler for a "smashing blow" at the Allies and is said to favor German aid to Russia in crushing Finland, Göring keeps pointing out to the Führer the economic weakness of the Reich, the danger of staking everything on a drive against the Allies, the rashness of encouraging the Soviets. The Marshal's late and deeply beloved first wife was Swedish, her brother-in-law Count Eric von Rosen last week contributed largely in Stockholm to the Finnish cause.
In London last week the Conservative Evening Standard carried a Göring story worthy of E. Phillips Oppenheim. Accord ing to the Standard, the Marshal was angry because firebrand Nazi enemies of his in the Gestapo or Secret Police recently intercepted "more or less bona fide peace proposals" to him from the Allies. According to the Standard, the Marshal suspects that the bearers of these proposals were the mysterious "Best and Stevens," two Britons recently kidnapped from Holland into Germany by Gestapo agents who boasted they had caught "two British spies" (TIME, Dec. 4).
Although conservative in his counsels to the Führer, peacocky Air Minister Goring is a blusterer in public whose swagger appeals to German airmen. This week Göring was featured as a contributor to the special New Year edition of Hitler's personal newspaper Volkischer Beobachter, blustered: "The German Air Force knows its decisive role in the struggle and is ready to take off at any time in the new year. . . . Allied measures will call forth counter-measures that will constantly increase in their fierceness. The German Air Force will meet the blockade with mighty blows. ... All that is needed is the Führer's command. ... No land in the world is so vulnerable from the air as the British Isles. . . . When the [German] counterattack is made it will be an attack the like of which the world has never known." This was the umpteenth time that the Marshal had launched this sort of bombasting raid.
New Year editions of prominent local German newsorgans seldom quoted outside the Reich revealed this week that Nazi regional leaders and the Party rank & file are far from ready to see the Fatherland return to orthodoxy of any sort. In innumerable articles World War II is now being presented to the German masses as part of a vast, Nazi-led "international revolution" destined to crush capitalist society and usher in a "socialistic millennium." In these 100% National Socialist editorials "the greatest Reich and greatest people in Europe," the Germans, are said to have the mission of creating a "Socialism of nations." Their feature: a flat prediction by Adolf Hitler, "The Jewish capitalist world will not survive the 20th Century."