32
PARTISAN REVIEW
of imperialist warfare.* The object of warfare, they reasoned in their
earnest Teutonic way, is to demoralize and destroy the enemy. Therefore,
in addition to the usual technology, the Nazi general staff devised such
refinements as air bombs with terrifying sirens attached to them,
th~
use
of refugees as an instrument of war (forcing or decoying them onto the
roads so as to block enemy troop movements, and often, to insure traffic
jams, later machinegunning them from the air), parachute troops who
landed dressed as peasants, motorists, enemy officers, even priests and
nuns, and the whole fantastic "fifth column" technique of spreading con·
,fusion and despair behind the enemy lines.
Such methods were used in the most deliberate, purposeful way. These
were no hordes of Mongols, lusting for destruction, but rather the highly
trained employees of the firm of A. Hitler
&
Co., specialists in war. It is
significant that there are no atrocity stories in this war, no tales of rape
and looting. On the contrary, all reports stress the extraordinarily "cor–
rect'' behavior of the German soldiery. When the Nazi troops entered
Paris, they strolled about the city gaping at the sights, guide book in hand,
like so many quiet, sober workmen on a cultural holiday. The "Strength
through Joy" organization was ready with maps of Paris and sightseeing
tours. Descriptions of the organization and methods of the Reichswehr
read like the articles
Fortune
prints on manufacturing technique. Destruc–
tion has been rationalized, and the business is gone about with the orderly
precision of any large-scale industrial process.
This is especially notable in the air force, where destruction is turned
on and off like a water tap. Nazi bombers developed such skill that they
were able to destroy every building around the cathedral of Rouen without
seriously damaging that historic structure-a feat which there are photo–
graphs to prove. It was a commonplace of their bombing technique in the
Low Countries to bomb not roads and streets, thus impeding the advance
of their own troops later on, but rather objects alongside the roads, so that
whole towns would be levelled to dust without a single bomb crater in
the streets.
But the showpiece of the
luftwaffe
was the destruction,
betw~n
the
.hours of 12 and 2 :30 on the afternoon of May 14, of the central district
of Rotterdam. The
luftwaffe
demonstrated its virtuosity by localizing all
the destruction in a sharply defined area of two and a half square miles.
In presenting pictures of the results,
Life
(September 9) states: "By 2:30
some 26,000 buildings were in ruins. The sewer pipes, the water mains,
the canal machinery had been smashed. The falling wreckage had trapped
• Lest I be accused of overemphasizing racial traits, I hasten to add that the Nazi
military triumph is due also to the fact that the Germans had
~o
face the unwork–
ability of democratic capitalism much sooner than did other nations. The Allied democ–
racies won the last war and had vast resources and colonial empires to draw upon, but
the Germans had to grapple with problems of class
strug~~:le,
of huge productive capac–
ity and inadequate markets, of extreme economic instability. Adversity is a great dis–
ciplinarian-and teacher. Nations, like individuals, do more thinking in hard times
than in prosperity.
·
