The Charlotte News
Saturday, April 28, 1945
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Heinrich Himmler had offered unconditional surrender of Germany to the United States and Great Britain, but Prime Minister Churchill had responded that only unconditional surrender as well to Russia would be deemed acceptable. There was, however, no confirmation by the Prime Minister that the offer had in fact been made, as reported by Reuters.
Lt. General Kurt Dittmar, German military commentator captured by the Ninth Army, predicted that Germany would surrender following Hitler's death. He stated that Hitler was still in Berlin and would remain there until either killed or committing suicide, one of which he also predicted would take place within a few days. Any of the three leading generals who would likely seize control of the Army following Hitler's death, he continued, would probably surrender to the Allies.
The fact that these reports surfaced a mere two days before Hitler's suicide on April 30 lends some credence to the notion that the suicide was not as it has been recorded in history. But we shall return to that topic next week.
An attempt by Walther Funk, president of the Reichsbank and former Minister of Economics in the Reich, to establish a new German government at Salzburg on Tuesday had failed. He had issued a proclamation, signed as "provisional Reichs chancellor", urging all Germans to cease resistance as the German Government no longer existed. Field Marshal Walther Von Brauchitsch also signed the statement. But the Gestapo intervened and arrested both men, suppressing the rebellion. The two men were reported to have escaped custody with the aid of the military.
Anti-Nazi German troops were reported by the Third Army to have revolted in Munich and seized control of the radio station long enough to urge other German soldiers to lay down their arms, declaring that the Nazi leader in Bavaria, General Ritter Von Epp, had decided to surrender to the Allies. The "Free Action of Bavaria" group urged via radio the Allies to bomb Field Marshal Albert Von Kesselring's headquarters at Pullack, six miles south of Munich.
The revolt, however, was quickly arrested and Paul Giesler, Nazi Gauleiter of Munich, announced that the "traitors" had been "made harmless".
Following an advance of 45 miles into the Bavarian redoubt, the Seventh Army was within 25 miles of Munich after taking Augsburg and crossing the Austrian frontier at Fuessen, 55 miles from the Brenner Pass into Italy.
The 86th Division of the Third Army was 27 miles north of Munich following an overnight 13-mile advance along an 85-mile front, proceeding down the Berlin-Munich autobahn, as the 71st, 65th, 86th, and 99th Divisions moved ten miles down the Danube Valley from captured Regensburg toward effecting junction with the Russians west of Vienna. The Army was about 25 miles from Linz. The 90th Division crossed the Czechoslovakian frontier at a new point, reaching Smaxov, 32 miles southwest of Pilsen.
The French First Army was 40 miles southwest of Munich within the redoubt and had driven over the Italian border along a front of 50 miles and to a depth of up to ten miles in the Maritime Alps south of Switzerland.
A report indicated that the continuing occupation by the French of Stuttgart was holding up Allied armies seeking to penetrate south into the redoubt. The Sixth Army Group headquarters had requested that the French move out of the city but the Army had refused, citing the support of the French Council of Ministers. The basis for the stubborn position was that the Big Three had taken no action on French demands for a postwar occupation zone in the Saarland. They also wanted to have policing rights of the region from the Ruhr to Lake Constance.
Perhaps, they also wanted to drive a Porsche.
The Canadians tightened the siege around Oldenburg and continued their assault against Emden and Wilhelmshaven, as young Nazis were making suicide charges and being killed by the thousands.
The three armies together took 60,000 German prisoners during the previous 24 hours, bringing the total to 1.2 million during April and 2.5 million since D-Day.
Germany was now broken into two traps, the Hamburg-Berlin sector in the north and the Bavarian redoubt in the south.
Following the historic meeting between the First Army and the First Ukrainian Army at Tornau on Wednesday, the two armies plus the American Ninth Army were at a standstill. Speculation ran as to whether one of the armies might be deployed back into battle elsewhere. Other Russian units were also making their way toward the Elbe to link with the Ninth.
In the Ruhr, one of the armies captured in Millrath the brother of Herr Doktor Goebbels, Hans. He was reported to resemble his brother. He made no attempt to resist. He had been a major general in the Neiderrhein SS anti-aircraft group and had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1929. He claimed not to have talked to his brother since January because of interruption of communications and transportation.
In Berlin, the Germans reported that the Soviets were fighting within Alexanderplatz, site of Gestapo headquarters. Only a quarter of the city was still in German hands as the Russians advanced relentlessly block by block. Many Nazis were discarding their uniforms and donning civilian clothes amid the chaos of the streets. Others continued to fight fanatically to the death.
Among the civilians, however, were found not only ordinary troops but officers and even commanders who had given up the fight as senseless.
Progress in the city center was necessarily slow because of the presence of mines and booby-traps guarding the headquarters buildings of the Reich, with the Russian lines now not far from the Reichstag Chancellery. Women members of the Nazi Volkssturm were dressed in pretty clothes and approached Russian soldiers with flowers and candy, behind which lay tommyguns. Old men and young boys likewise were feigning innocence and then firing on the Russian troops.
The Russians reported being able to see Unter Den Linden, a quarter mile away, down several streets on which they were fighting. Brandenburg Gate was within rifle range.
New inroads had been made from the north in Charlottenburg and from the south across the Tempelhof airport.
German troops withdrawn from the Elbe were attacking from the southeast, according to German reports.
--See, Blondie, I told you. The war is won, with the secret veapon.
In Italy, the Fifth Army captured Bergamo, 30 miles from the Swiss border and 125 miles from the Brenner Pass. Also captured was Brescia, 30 miles southeast of Bergamo. A Milan broadcast declared that the Fifth Army had reached the Swiss frontier and entered Como, to which Mussolini had fled and near his point of capture the previous day by the Partisans.
A special task force on the Ligurian coast entered Pontremoli, 20 miles north of La Spezia, en route to Parma.
Still other Fifth Army troops moved into Genoa.
A Partisan radio station broadcast a report that the Partisans had linked with Allied troops north of the Po River and that all roads leading to the Brenner Pass had been blocked.
The Eighth Army was mopping up several pockets of enemy troops south of the Adige River, but was still facing determined German resistance north of the river along the Adige Line.
As yet unreported, Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, captured by the Partisans while seeking escape by airplane from Switzerland, had been taken to Mezzegra and there
Benito Mussolini was 61 years old and had been out of power since July 25, 1943, when King Victor Emmanuel dismissed him and appointed Pietro Badoglio in his stead. Following his immediate arrest and then rescue by the Nazis in mid-September, he had been holed up in Northern Italy, protected by the Nazis for 19 months, until recent days.
The father of modern Fascism in Europe who had come to power in 1922, the inspiration for Hitler and the Nazis, was dead. His protege had but 48 hours left on the calendar as well.
At the San Francisco Conference, a challenge was issued by Australia, Belgium, and Bolivia on behalf of the smaller nations, seeking a larger role in the conference. An immediate result was the expansion of the executive committee from eleven to fourteen members. The aim was to obtain a like expansion of the proposed Security Council.
Otherwise, good news prevailed in that the Big Four were harmonious again, as Russia had compromised on its demands regarding the leadership of the conference and the primary committees. Each of the Big Four foreign ministers would act as the leadership of the conference.
In Valenciennes, France, a woman was fined five times the illegal profit she had made of 92 million francs in the wholesale of wine and liquor on the black market. The fine came to half a billion francs.
On the editorial page, "Pfft—And Farewell" starts with the suggestion that a good headline for the story of Wes Gallagher anent the junction of American and Russian troops at the Elbe on Wednesday would have been, "But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first."
For the times, they were a-changin'.
As the small motor launch ferried the refugees from the east bank to the west bank of the Elbe in advance of the arrival of the Russians, the German civilians had begged to be taken across into American custody as prisoners. But they were held at bay by the M.P's, in favor of British and American soldiers freed from internment and the various liberated foreign slave laborers.
The piece suggests that if these latter escapees from the Reich's clutches had looked back and spat upon their one time captors, then "who's to say it wasn't the perfectly expressive farewell?"
"How's Your Blood?" suggests that states as North Carolina which required pre-marital examinations and Wassermann tests should observe the results of an Army study, as published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in which 100 men who had never had syphilis, but had contracted in the past malaria, were tested. Fully 25 of them were found positive or doubtful on the Wassermann test for syphilis.
Not unrelated, insofar as the unreliability in some instances of medical tests and procedures of diagnosis, we note this editorial appearing April 27, 2012 in the Washington Post. Always obtain a second or third or fourth opinion before accepting anyone's panacea consisting of medication.
Unfortunately, as we have too often observed, doctors tend to be overly trained in the pure sciences, and grossly lacking in training in the social sciences, especially such sciences as sociology, where one learns to recognize variables and either systematically eliminate them as a source of causation or establish one or more more firmly based on evidence, a system for diagnosis of the cause for any problem, including personal health issues.
Of course, that is not to say that one should go to the other extreme and adopt a panacea of honey
Yet again, there is nothing wrong with honey or a well-balanced diet and good, sensible exercise.
"Bleak Contrast" observes the dichotomy between the Russian and American troops joining at the Elbe and the news from the San Francisco Conference, also published the previous day, that the Big Four were deadlocked over chairmanship of the conference and the Executive and Steering Committees.
On the battlefront, it was the culmination of years of war, a tremendous release for both armies.
But in San Francisco, the thrill of the moment had escaped the delegations. The harmony of the Elbe could not be found at the Golden Gate, even as the hospital ships unloaded onto the Embarcadero the wounded of Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and Saipan.
The disagreements were not without cause in the conference. Foreign Commissar Molotov had been acting, no doubt, on the orders of Mosocw, to keep the United States under control at the conference; the reaction of Britain and the United States, in anger, had been genuine. The problem suggested that the issue of governance of Poland would not have an easy solution. The Russians were aware that Mr. Stettinius favored a "soft peace" for Germany, enabling it to rebuild its industrial base, making it all the more imperative in the eyes of the Russians to have a friendly Poland as a buffer to Germany. Russia obviously had a plan of resistance at work in San Francisco because it trusted neither Britain nor America. Likewise, America and Britain did not trust Russia.
And so, opines the piece, expectations from the conference should be minimal.
The Germans, it determines, had to have smiled at the juxtaposition of the two stories.
"Post-War Navy" reports that the Navy budget for the Pacific war for the coming year would be nearly 25 billion dollars, a reduction of four billion. The Navy wanted a post-war force of 1,191 combat ships and 4,639 auxiliary vessels and minor craft. The total was about three times the pre-war strength of the American Fleet. But many of these vessels would be placed in mothballs, only 492 of the combat vessels to be kept on active duty. The Navy planned to scrap or use for target practice 6,000 ships, most of them obsolete. Some 66,000 small craft also had to be disposed of during demobilization.
The piece suggests that this approach was probably the best which could be practicably accomplished, for to maintain the ships in fighting condition during peacetime was simply too costly. So, rather than scrap the Fleet, as after World War I, a significant contingent would be maintained, albeit in large part in mothballs.
The excerpt from the Congressional Record finds Louisiana Representative James Morrison (Ketchup) Morrison reporting that the Washington Daily News had run a story stating that the last Washington butcher shop had closed its doors. He points out that throughout the country that scenario had already taken place. He lays the blame on the "stupid blundering" of Chester Bowles, head of OPA.
He reminded of the incident a couple of months earlier when Mr. Bowles had barred Congressmen from an OPA meeting when they were seeking to help their constituents.
He also remarked of the many problems in the local offices of the agency, where bribes were found to be regularly paid and accepted to avoid price controls.
He reported that a little bird had told him that Mr. Bowles had already feathered his nest and that the Senators and Congressmen were going to be the ones left holding the blame for the manifold sins and crimes of OPA.
At the beginning of Drew Pearson's column, the editors place a note stating that a letter had been addressed from J. P. Morgan labeling as libelous the story which Mr. Pearson had published two days earlier and the day before anent the company, regarding its trafficking with Nazi Germany during the war through 1941 and its expressed pride in an anti-Semitic history. The letter asserts that Morgan had refused to do business with the Nazis during the war and that the French partner of Morgan in Paris who was quoted by the German banker was presently a member of the French Army, not a former collaborationist.
Likewise, Chase Manhattan Bank had characterized the statements in the column as false.
Mr. Pearson had replied to the Morgan letter by stating that his data was verbatim from text of U.S. Treasury reports and that Treasury officials were prepared to substantiate the facts if necessary.
The column, itself, again reporting from San Francisco, discusses the conference, remarking that the war-torn world was no worse off than San Francisco had been after the 1906 earthquake and yet it had managed to rebuild itself into a revitalized and modern city. The city, he found, provided energy to the conference which Old World capitals such as Geneva, Versailles, and Paris lacked. The spirit was infectious to the delegates. But language remained a barrier, especially with respect to the Russians who isolated themselves from the city, shutting up their hotel suites.
He then provides various notes on the conference: Jan Christian Smuts of South Africa had written what the columnist considers to be an historic preamble to the United Nations Constitution; the British dominions were acting independently of Britain, paying more attention to the American positions; the State Department had originally headed off a meeting between President Truman and Australian External Minister Herbert Evatt, until Senator Hatch of New Mexico had intervened and called the President who then gladly met with Mr. Evatt; Mr. Evatt warned that when Japan became strong again, it would be necessary to have regional agreements in the Pacific to protect against aggression; many of the delegates, including the U.S. delegation, were against the unilateral veto provision of Dumbarton Oaks which allowed any of the permanent Security Council members to veto action by the Security Council to resist aggression.
Marquis Childs tells of the captured German documents which showed a plan in place following the war for the Nazi underground to maintain propaganda to exploit all Allied mistakes, especially those of America, to convince Europe that the only wave of the future would be a return to Nazism.
Already, German radio constantly harped on the Allied bombing mistakes, that of the RAF against The Hague, taking numerous Dutch lives, and other such tragedies. They also stressed the fact that the French had eaten better before the liberation, a true statement.
The best way to get around such propaganda efforts, suggests Mr. Childs, was to insure that the distribution of food, clothing, and other necessities was performed efficiently in the future. He warns again that if Europe had to suffer through another winter without adequate supplies, then the Nazi underground could cultivate recruits rather easily out of the starving masses. And those recruits, he ominously warns, would carry out the next steps—"assassination of those who are trying to maintain law and order".
Samuel Grafton comments on the inevitable disappointment as the reality of the San Francisco Conference and its human limitations set in with its actual beginning. Almost all of the delegates were up in years and did not, by appearances, suggest the hope for establishing the brave new world.
The whole thing did not square with a Hollywood casting director.
Men who had been part of the original League of Nations, Lord Halifax of Great Britain and Paul-Boncour of France, for instance, were present.
The new blood, represented most visibly by Edward Stettinius, seemed hardly equipped to bring about the millennium in world relations. No one was.
Yet, Mr. Grafton continues, perhaps the very pedestrian nature of the conference had a good aspect in that world peace could not be achieved until ordinary men made it the order of the day. It bespoke the fact that what so few could understand in the wake of World War I was now understood by almost everyone.
One newspaper, he remarks, had asked cynically whether these men could have stopped World War II. That, insists Mr. Grafton, was not a proper issue. The war determined the need for the conference and its urgency. The war had imbued in these men the central importance of success this time in the formation of a world security organization.
A piece from Science Service comments from Washington on the consternation among people of the West at how any supposedly civilized people could behave as the Nazis had with respect to humanity caged and killed within the concentration camps.
Before the war began, various commentators had sought to explain how, under corrupt leadership, entire societies might go mad. As explained in 1936, in an article by Dr. William Brown, a British psychologist of Oxford, appearing in the medical journal Lancet, the primitive tendencies of every human being might, under certain circumstances, be released of their inhibitions. Normally, these primitive instincts are maintained in check by social forces, morals, rules, etc. But when the social sanctions were removed, violence could easily erupt and the primitive instincts take control of a whole society.
A group of psychiatrists from 30 nations had signed an abstract in 1935 warning that war is a mental disease, a psychosis, whereby whole societies go mad, often after being led by fiery speeches from corrupting influences. Whole peoples could wind up with common hallucinations and delusions and thus be led to conduct perilous to their own safety.
Dr. William Alanson White had written in 1937 that "[a]n orgy of killing lets the aggressive instinct loose, and it is a good many years before it is ever chained up again." He concluded that the phenomenon was occurring in 1937.
It should be added that the reason for the phenomenon obtaining a foothold in any given society is the preference of the ruling orders in place for one group against another in applying sanctions, applying them strictly against one group while applying them loosely or not at all against another, preference of the Nazi Aryan over the Jew, the white over the black, the Northerner over the Southerner, the Southerner over the Northerner, the conservative over the liberal, the libertine over the temperate. For, if all were treated equally, even after societal controls generally break down, the tendency would be toward quelling through informal sanctions, i.e. self-help, any such loosened restraints. But once the ruling orders, invariably authoritarian under such conditions, make preference as to which group is allowed to be unrestrained, the self-help sanctions of the bullied group are eliminated in favor of the self-help of the other, invariably a group of thugs and reprobates.
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