The Bombing of Hamburg (Collier's Magazine, 1943)
A 1943 article that was cabled from Stockholm, Sweden relaying assorted eyewitness accounts of the Allied bombing campaign over the German city of Hamburg in 1943:
"The people of Germany have now learned, through the terror-filled hours of sleepless nights and days, that air mastery , the annihilating blitz weapon of the Nazis in 1939 and 1940, has been taken over by by the Allies...The most terrible of these punches has been the flood of nitroglycerin and phosphorus that in five days and nights destroyed Hamburg."
The witnesses were all escaped Scandinavian laborers who had been working in that city.
|
Life in W.W. II Germany (Collier's, 1943)
This COLLIER'S article illustrates well the gloom that hung over the German home front of 1943:
"Nobody escapes war service in Germany. Children serve in air-raid squads; women work very hard...The black market flourishes everywhere. More fats are required, as are fruits and vegetables, for the people's strength is declining. A report I have seen of Health Minister Conti shows that the mortality rate for some diseases rose 49 percent in 1941 - 1942."Heinrich Himmler, who lorded over the German home front, ordered the death of one father who failed to be more cryptic about the despair in Germany when writing his son on the Russian front. The article is peppered with similar anecdotes.
|
Can the Germans Take It? (Collier's, 1941)
The attached 1941 COLLIER'S MAGAZINE article reported on how the people of Berlin were faring after one solid year of R.A.F. bombing. By war's end it was estimated that as many as 580,000 Germans were killed as a result of the Allied bombing campaign (many of them were children and far more women than men):
"Can the Germans take it -as well as they can give it?"
"Modern Germany's heart never before had to endure hostile fire. Now the R.A. F. carries it there...If you go to a dinner party, you are prepared to either leave with dessert or to spend the night...During the bombing raids, the restaurants will quietly warn all their customers to rush their kraut, pony-up, and schell nach Hause gehen."
Just how accurate was the Allied bombing campaign of Germany? Click here and find out.
|
What Were the Germans Thinking? (Click Magazine, 1943)
"We cannot conduct a Gallup poll in Germany, but we can find out by other opinion polls and from other inquiring reporters what the average German is thinking. Our reporters are the Nazis themselves. The poll is tallied daily at short-wave listening stations, among them that of the Columbia Broadcasting System. The C.B.S. corps of engineers monitors and records and interprets the voices of the enemy.""The Nazi propaganda here analyzed is a record of Nazi failure to keep the German people from thinking 'non-German' thoughts and failure to prevent the record from being known." This article is illustrated with fourteen W.W. II photographs.
|
| |
