Rust

BEHIND THE STEEL WALL--Arvid Fredborg--Viking ($3).

Arvid Fredborg is a young Swedish journalist who represented Stockholm's Svenska Dagbladet in Berlin from February 1941, to the end of May 1943. Behind the Steel Wall was written from private notes just after the author had quit the Third Reich following a series of discreet warnings from his friends. His book, in easy, gossipy pages, presents the most up-to-date picture of Germany from within. It is the picture of a war machine that is being run without provision for maintenance. It is coughing and bucking, and a couple of broken pistons are gouging into the cylinder block. Basic reason: the Nazi inability to comprehend the fallacies of their own "total" war doctrine.

Policy of Idiocy. Before the Germans plunged into the Ukraine, Ukrainian Nationalists had some hopes of German "deliverance" from the Bolsheviks. But in the Baltic States the Nazi party went to idiotic lengths to lose friends and alienate people. Fredborg says the Nazis lost the rest of Europe the way they lost the Baltic States and the Ukraine. Where they might have taken advantage of the "latent, or rather instinctive, anti-Bolshevist sentiment still existing in most nations," they systematically outraged whole populations into feeling that Stalin was a brother in arms.

Hitler's struggles, as seen by Fredborg, resemble those of a fly struggling to get out of a pot of glue. If Hitler had not dominated the plan for attack on Russia, the German Army might have used an adaptation of the old Schlieffen strategy offered by General Marcks. The Marcks plan was to prepare a tremendous mass concentration in the Balkans, which the Russians might logically interpret as a move against Turkey. Then, without warning, the concentration could have been hurled against the Ukraine, with an ultimate wheeling turn toward Moscow up the valleys of the Dnieper and the Don. The Marcks plan would have resulted in a gigantic concentration of German strength at one point. But Hitler insisted on three large attack wedges, none of which was strong enough to win a decisive victory in 1941.

Raiding the Home Front. Having failed to defeat the Russians before winter, the German Army was forced to raid the home front merely to exist. Great collections of clothes were taken up, German workers were called out of the factories and sent to the training camps, the Government offices were combed out, and foreign labor--the potential "Trojan horse" that all Germans fear--was imported to keep the productive machine going.

A year later the raids on the home front were still going on. Fifteen-year-old boys were ordered into the anti-aircraft defense, men who lacked one or more fingers or who had weak hearts were passed by the Army doctors. And women began taking the place of men even in barracks and police stations. After the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa, the retreat of Rommel and the disaster at Stalingrad, hope of victory had almost disappeared. Goebbels was forced to use the technique of killing one piece of bad news with another.

Nevertheless, Fredborg does not think Germany will collapse until she is beaten in the field. Says Fredborg: "The Allies have, as a matter of fact, given the German people no alternative except unconditional surrender. It is difficult to make a people accept such an outcome before a military catastrophe. Actually this situation and Germany's enemies are whipping Germans together under the Swastika."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.