Christmas in Germany

Over every radio station in the Third Reich, nervous Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister, last week broadcast a Christmas message to the German people.

It was no message of cheer. After a perfunctory mention of "the accomplishments of our Army" (now retreating in Russia), the little Minister got down to business. What he wanted was Christmas presents for the soldiers on the Eastern Front: overshoes, stockings, woolen underwear, furs, blankets, gloves, ear muffs--anything, in fact, that would turn the keen winds of the Russian winter.

The German people, he admitted, had already given all they conveniently could, "in consideration of the tense situation regarding textile supplies. Nevertheless . . . as long as a single object of winter clothing remains in the Fatherland, it must go to the front." Though he spoke of shortages at home, Dr. Goebbels did not give a rounded picture of Germany facing its third wartime Christmas. He did not say that each German soldier in frozen Norway has had to give up one of his three blankets for use in Russia. He did not tell of a new rubber-saving rule which forbids workers living within two miles of their jobs to cycle to work. He did not explain why some German planes shot down over Britain have inefficient wooden propellers.

There were other signs that Germany's Christmas would be far from gemuetlich. French factories, even those working on German war orders, got an unwelcome holiday vacation of two weeks in the form of a shutdown to save coal. In Hungary the food situation was so acute that hunters were permitted to use precious gasoline driving to the woods in taxis. The Reich is so short of doctors that it is advertising for more physicians in the occupied countries. The overworked doctors in Germany itself have been warned not to prescribe iodine, aspirin or diets with extra food. For the last two Christmases Germans have had generous extra rations of food. This year the Christmas ration is two ounces of coffee and six of lentils.

But it was Adolf Hitler himself who set Germany's Christmas in its full, stark perspective. In a proclamation quoted by Goebbels, he published, for once, a thing very bitter if true:

"Millions of our soldiers stand after a year of the heaviest battles against an enemy who is superior in numbers and material on the front."

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