Goebbels' Week

Last week was a great little week for little Joe Goebbels. He gloated over:

> German gains in Russia, with no sign of a second front (see p. 26). "The conditions for a thorough settlement of our account with Britain in the future are being created on the battlefront in the east. The day is not far distant when we shall give Britain the answer she deserves."

> The riots in India, the jailing of Indian leaders (see p. 19). These meant that the Axis must become "the liberator" of natives oppressed by reactionary plutocrats. Arguments over British policy meant a split in United Nations ranks. A special "Handbook on India" was rushed to the printers. A dozen newspapers reprinted a graphic account of a British lathee charge from the late Webb Miller's book: I Found No Peace.

> Production lags and announcement of raw material and steel shortages in the U.S. (see p. 13). These meant, said Goebbels, that the U.S. could never overwhelm the Axis with the weight of industrial power.

> Delay in the U.S. capture of the Solomon Islands (see p. 25). The German press emphasized that the U.S. Marines had taken staggering losses.

> The sinking of the British aircraft carrier Eagle (see p. 31).

> The renomination to the U.S. House of Representatives of Isolationist Hamilton Fish (see p. 15), whom the Nazis feted and paraded in 1939 as a friendly American bigshot.

> A speech before Conservatives in his constituency by Winston Churchill's Parliamentary Private Secretary Harvie Watt, who described British second-front meetings as "violent political propaganda" and told off advocates of a second front with the remark that they "had never distinguished themselves by any great desire to shoulder arms."

Goebbels even gloated over the execution of the six German saboteurs (TIME, Aug. 17). To the Herrenvolk this was supposed to mean that the U.S. had forfeited all rights to condemn Nazi executions of hundreds of Europeans, either without trial as suspected saboteurs, or as hostages.

On the propaganda front, the U.S. and the United Nations will not fight Goebbels with his own dark medicine. There was a basis of truth in most of his twisted claims. The way to deny him ammunition was to alter the facts.

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