Hope of the Herrenvolk

Two travelers from Occupied Europe reached Turkey. They had traveled separately, did not even know each other. But both had talked with officials in the Reich. In Ankara, both gave much the same account of Germany's last hope.

Strategy in the Dark. German officialdom does not yet admit that Germany has lost the war. The official reasoning:

The decisive battle for Europe will come in a few weeks--not in Normandy, but somewhere between Normandy and Paris. German generals, now running the war without interference from Adolf Hitler, stake all on the Wehrmacht's ability to halt the Allied armies of western Europe in one thumping, head-on collision. If this gamble is lost, all will be lost. But the hope is that a smashing success will send the Allied armies back into the sea. A new invasion from British bases then would be at least two years away. And even if there were no German victory, there might be a stalemate.

In that event, the official Germans tell one another, the occupied countries of Europe would again fall into despair. The U.S. and Britain would be shaken beyond repair; Roosevelt and Churchill would surely fall. "With its war won anyway," Russia would make its own peace with the Reich.

Correspondents who heard these accounts concluded that the word for Germany's official state of mind was not hope. It was hysteria.

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