The Charlotte News

Saturday, May 2, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that thus far in four months of fighting, 5,486 U.S. Navy personnel had been killed, wounded, or were missing, substantially more than the 3,500 killed or missing in the first four months of World War I. The figure included the 2,114 Navy personnel lost at Pearl Harbor.

Japan claimed that a United States submarine had sunk a Russian merchant ship off the coast of Japan. Russia did not confirm the loss.

Mandalay in Burma was close to falling, the Japanese claiming that the city was already theirs, British sources claiming that British and Chinese soldiers still held the city but that Japanese forces were on the outskirts.

On the editorial page, Dorothy Thompson, reminiscent of a Cash diatribe on the subject, lashes out at Hitler in a way seldom seen in the national press, deriding him as a "psychotic idiot, whom even the democratic world likes to think of as a genius." She decides that he hates the German people and always has.

The cause for the derision was Hitler’s declaration the previous week of his grand exalted status as master of Germany, Grand Exalted Cyclops, Ipse Dixit, Dipsy-Doodle, or whatever the hell he called himself, taking away the "duly acquired rights" earned by every German, not provided by contract or inherent in law by birthright as a citizen as, in theory at least, in the United States, but earned commensurate with the labor and conscientious dedication to the state displayed by the worker.

But now, even that was gone. Hitler and the Gestapo as enforcer would decide who was fit, who was not. The unfit, in Hitler’s words, would be "cashiered"; the fit would replace the unworthy and thus inherit the other’s "duly acquired rights".

No longer could generals disagree and resign with promise of pension; instead, they ran the risk of liquidation: kaput.

Likewise, judges. Even the People’s Court, a kangaroo court for political prisoners to begin with, would no longer function except at the whim of Hitler.

The entire state and German society were now held captive at the capricious whimsy of Der Fuehrer—as was most of the free world by this point.

As the Russians put it, reports Ms. Thompson: "Hitler’s Spring offensive has begun. It is against the German people." It was, alas, springtime for Hitler in Germany.

Should Hitler carry through with this system of unlimited fiat, she insists, the German people will kill him, or Germany will be finished as a country. Though it was tried and narrowly missed by a military cabal, it would finally take Hitler’s own hand to do the deed. It would be over three years from this day and his tawdry little existence turned to ash, indiscernible from the ash and cinders spread about the landscape above his bunker in the ruins of Germany wrought at his behest. And Germany, itself, would be divided as a country between East and West for the ensuing 44 years. So, Ms. Thompson was mainly correct in her prediction, perfectly correct in her assessment.

The problem with killing Hitler was that a failed attempt meant widespread indiscriminate killing of innocents, including family members of the plotters, just as had been the case recently in Norway, Belgium, and France when German officers were killed or where, as in one case, a train transporting officers and troops was blown up by sabotage. It would not be just the saboteurs or assassins who would pay the penalty.

There were at least five attempts to curtail Hitler’s existence between March, 1943 and March, 1944, each of which in turn failed for various fortuitous reasons, changes of schedule, bombs which didn’t explode. All of the plots were developed by high ranking officers within the German Wehrmacht, some having immediate access to Hitler.

The plot known as Walküre, a modified version of a contingency plan which Hitler himself had authorized to deal with mass civil unrest in Germany, involved placing a bomb in Hitler’s "Wolf’s Lair", near Rastenburg in East Prussia. At around 12:40 p.m. on July 20, 1944, a briefcase bomb, planted by Wehrmacht Colonel Claus von Stauffenburg next to a table leg of a conference table at which Hitler sat, went off, killing three officers and a stenographer sitting nearby Hitler. It barely missed the Fuehrer, blowing off his pants, but miss nevertheless it did. Untold numbers still would die in the remaining nine months of his miserable little life, even if the evil fates astride the world from time immemorial managed to keep him alive for so long thriving on his venom which the Nazis found so delectable.

The retaliation for the plot was swift and furious and Hitler had the gruesome deaths of the primary conspirators, exacted by strangulation with piano wire, filmed, then reportedly watched the film with gruesome delight.

Five thousand people were arrested in the aftermath of the plot and two hundred were executed.

And, were Cash still around, he would have no doubt been cackling at whoever let fly twice in the opening editorial, "Reverse Twist", with a synopsis of a short story by someone named "O’Henry", whoever he was. We shall simply refer you back to the piece of December 27, 1938, all anent o’possums. Since O’Henry enjoyed reverse twists in plot, had he lived long enough, say until April 30, 1945, he would have no doubt enjoyed the end of Die Walküre which Hitler finally endued as the deus ex machina.