(3 of 4)
No more lavish entertainments now, no more evenings amusing everyone by mimicking the fat Göring and the thin Goebbels, no more long, lazy conversations about art. And no friendly picnics in Bavaria. His society now must be his soldiers, who he says are "quick as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel."
No more tenderness to animals now. He must forget now how he once made pets of mice, how he wept when his canaries sickened and died, how he gave nuts to the squirrels around the Berghof, how, when a huge crowd was gathered for the ceremonies in Vimy last summer a cur dog appeared from the forest and came through those hundreds of people straight to him.
Now he must attend to the business of war.
Assets in the Bank. All these sacrifices are worthwhile to Adolf Hitler, for this spring all that he has accomplished is at stake. Now his work will come to fruition or else will be blighted.
He has increased Germany's size from 180,976 square miles to 323,360 square miles, plus 290,000 more in occupied but unannexed lands. He has spread his boundaries to include not 65,000,000 but 106,000,000 people. He has built a Party of 3,000,000, a youth movement of 11,750,000, a compulsory labor movement of 25,000,000. Before war came, he had built 1,300 miles of roads, given 315 new vessels to the merchant marine, more than doubled the carrying capacity of railroads, more than doubled the distance flown by commercial airlines. Starting with unemployment of some 7,500,000, he ended with such a labor shortage that 600,000 laborers have been imported from Italy, 750,000 from Poland, 150,000 from The Netherlands, over 1,000,000 from France.
It is no wonder that Hitler today is a far different creature from the man who deferentially greeted President von Hindenburg in January 1933 when the old Field Marshal reluctantly accepted him as Chancellor. Since then he has taken the measure of most of Europe's statesmen including Britain's own Prime Minister Chamberlain. His once co-equal ally, Mussolini, is now only his stooge (see p. 32).
Even war that has cost Germany much, has not stopped the steady accretion of Germany's strength. From the nations he invaded or persuaded—Austria, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Poland, Norway, the Lowlands, the Balkans, France—Hitler eased to varying extents strategic shortages of oil, iron, aluminum, manganese, cellulose, molybdenum and food. By developments of substitutes he eased pressure for rubber, to some extent for gasoline and quinine. He is still hard up for copper (but hopes to increase his stores by the conquest of Yugoslavia) and nickel (but has eased that shortage by seizing the nickel coinage of occupied countries).
His extraordinary accomplishments in increasing his naval, military and air strength, not only from 1933 to the beginning of the war, but since war began, is suggested by the estimates of the table (see p. 27). Not all this was achieved by Hitler. Some of it belongs to his predecessors, for instance to General Hans von Seeckt who organized the seven division (100,000-man) Army that Hitler inherited in 1933. Today virtually all Seeckt's well trained 100,000 are officers of the Nazi Army. Otherwise its rapid expansion would not have been possible.