(See Cover)
The crucial spring of his career came last week to Adolf Hitler. He could see it in sheltered, sun-struck places around the Berghof where lilies of the valley, violets, Alpine roses, blue gentians, and wild azaleas bloomed, and in the green showing through the white on the Untersberg's slopes across the way. But he could feel it even more strongly in his bones: spring, when armies march.
If the campaigns Hitler launches this spring are as successful as those he launched a year ago, he will almost indisputably soon be master of at least half the world. If they fail, the least that can be expected is that the tide of world power will begin to run against him as the weight of U.S. economic power begins to pour to the aid of Britain. For Hitler this spring is destiny.
He must have been keenly aware of that fact one morning last week when he stretched a tentative toe into his green-tinted bathtub, while he gazed at his face with its little mustache and flopping hair, as he covered his chin with lather (at the Berghof the great dictator is his own barber), while he sipped his Chinese tea, spooned his porridge and chewed his morning toast covered with a mountain of jam.
There must have been an extraordinary meeting that morning in his pine-paneled workroom, with his aides: General Alfred Jodl, the powerful, anonymous chief of his personal staff; huge Julius Schaub, his personal adjutant and bodyguard; Chief Adjutant Colonel Schmundt of the General Staff; Army Aide Major Engel; Navy Aide Captain von Puttkammer; Air Aide Major von Below, and a few others—Adolf Hitler's trusted links with the fighting forces whose preparations were already made.
If his blue eyes were sharper than April sky, and if he rubbed his hands with queer, excited jerks, that was only natural. Excitement makes him thrive and happy. Moreover he was about to compose his own words of destiny.
He called for a secretary, one of his three confidential secretaries—Frau Wolf, Frau Schroeder or Frau Daranowsky—and began to dictate. When the draft was brought to him, typed on special typewriters with huge letters designed to save his eyes, he slashed it making revisions in green, blue and red pencil.
Finally he was done. Copies were wired far & wide, one to each division of the armies poised in Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Italy; one for Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels to read to the world over the radio next morning; copies for the press. Excerpts:
Soldiers of the Southeast Front:
Since early this morning the German people are at war with the Belgrade Government of intrigue. We shall only lay down arms when this band of ruffians has been definitely and most emphatically eliminated, and when the last Briton has left this part of the European Continent, and when these misled people realize that they must thank Britain for this situation, they must thank England, the greatest warmonger of all time. . . .
In accordance with the policy of letting others fight for her, as she did in the case of Poland . . . Norway . . . France and Belgium . . . Britain again tried to involve Germany in the struggle in which Britain hoped that she would finish off the German people once and for all. . . . In a few weeks the German soldiers on the Eastern Front, Poland, swept aside this instrument of British policy.