The year 1942 began badly for Adolf Hitler, with dissension in his High Command and before year's end, retreats on the bitter front in Russia. It brought sabotage, riots and hardening resistance among the people of the occupied countries. Death took from him some of his strongest men. In Africa, a new front threatened the underbelly of his Axis stronghold.
Last week, as the New Year broke, Adolf Hitler stood before his people to speak to them of 1943. The Führer's hair was greying and there were new lines in his face. The fear of defeat was in the air in Germany; he must find words to counter it. 1943 was an ominous year, the fourth year of the war. A generation ago, Germans remembered, the fourth year of war brought defeat and disaster.
Adolf Hitler could find no new words, but he reached far back into National Socialism's moldy files to find old words and give them new meaning. It was a long time since he had tried to sell socialism to the German people, since he had stressed the fight against the capitalists, the bloated moneybags who fattened on the poor man's labor. It was almost as though on this New Year's Day he was trying, as he did when Naziism was only a party, to win his people over to the Nazi creed: >"Russia . . . prepared her world struggle in the name of socialist states, with the support of capitalist countries, against . . . socialist Germany. >"Whatever pretext our enemies used . . . the fundamental cause was always the same: hatred against a strong German Reich . . . and their universal capitalist interests in war as such. ... All their statesmen are at the same time holders of shares of the armament industries. . . . The blood of their paid mercenaries, of even their own soldiers, produces their dividends.
>"The German people of today are no longer the same as the German people of . . . 1914-18. A people's state has sprung from the former bourgeois capitalist state. >"The surest guarantor for the strength of will necessary [for victory] is in the National Socialist Party with its organizations, and over & above everything, a nation educated by it."
Haunting Figures. The Führer's words on socialism may have sounded strange to Germans who knew that under Naziism plutocracy has risen to new heights of glory. But on another point they could feel with the Führer—when he spoke of 1918.
For 1918 was beginning to haunt the Germans. In the occupied countries the date was appearing everywhere, as "V" for Victory had appeared the year before.*It was painted on walls, fences, street corners—wherever there was room. In France the four integers were scrawled in luminous paint which glowed eerily in blacked-out towns. In Paris it was everywhere. Likewise in Brussels, where the Nazi Brüsseler Zeitung found it necessary to try to counteract it editorially.
In their own way the Nazis also used the fear that 1918 conjures up in German hearts, seeking to strengthen the people's determination to hold out and ward off repetition of the disaster. Fear of another 1918 was also a weapon in Nazi hands—perhaps their last.