Goring's Empty Mouth

Hermann Goering did more than report last week what Adolf Hitler had said last March: that Germany was no longer crusading for world domination, but was fighting for its very life.

Indirectly but strikingly he confirmed reports that Europe is facing the worst crop failure in years--that not only subject peoples but the Herrenvolk may taste real starvation.

It was the German home front which collapsed in 1918 under food and spiritual deficiencies. It was this same front that Goering addressed last week, for 80 minutes. He blamed the weather ("Nature really has treated us very unkindly") for crop shortages and the need for a new "temporary reduction" in ration cards. A second broadcast of Goering's speech was suddenly canceled. The text of it was released, then halted in transmission to neutral countries.

Noteworthy facts : It was announced that Argentine-born Food Minister Rich ard Walther Darre had gone on "a prolonged leave of absence." Perhaps either Hitler's food policy or the worst weather in a century needed a scapegoat.

Bad Weather--or Worse? Goering admitted that the weather could not be held solely accountable for the bashing the Nazi war machine received in Russia. The decision to invade Russia, said he, had been caused by the Russian speed-up in tank production, by the Russian construction of "nearly 1,000 airdromes in one year in the newly occupied Polish territories."

When winter came, "the Russians were able to break through in the night over frozen rivers, lakes and morasses. . . . One bad report followed another. . . . In the south the Russians were in our rear; and in the center the Russians were in our rear; and in the north the Russians were in our rear. Guerrillas blew up our railways and ambushed our supplies. Our troops nearly froze to death in the grim cold. . . ."

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