The Invaders

THE TEMPERING OF RUSSIA--Ilya Ehrenburg--Knopf ($3).

As a sample of Russian propaganda, written at white heat, this savage account of Nazi savageries, by the famed correspondent of the Soviet Army's Red Star, is vastly and violently impressive. As an expression of Russian hatred of Germans, it is appalling.

Ehrenburg's most impassioned reports are purportedly based on diaries and letters taken from German corpses and prisoners. Some of these writings are arrogant, some bestial, some pathetic--but to Correspondent Ehrenburg they are one & all evidence of an utterly "brutalized" culture led by "an epileptic and ignorant Fuehrer."

Nazi soldiers, reports Ehrenburg, meticulously note down the number of children they have shot, the prisoners they have tortured. Side by side with obscene French pictures they carry sentimental photographs of their wives and children. They are "libertines, Sodomites, perverts" who think nothing of wearing the bloodstained underwear of the juvenile victims they have raped. German women represent the "greedy, drooling snout of a German hyena." Ehrenburg, the Soviet's most widely read writer, believes that Russians have been vastly hardened and strengthened by their conflict with the invaders, but he doubts that the Germans can ever be educated back to sanity. "Fuse bombs," he muses, "leave a good impression on the average German mind."

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