What to do with Germany

Series

Series Name

The March of Time 10th Year

Issue

Issue No.

3

Date Released

1944

Length of issue (in feet)

1690

Stories in this Issue:

1. 1What to do with Germany

Story

Story No. within this Issue

1 / 1

Summary

The March of Time synopsis: Germany’s crimes are the direct responsibility of the German people, says the March of Time... More than a decade ago they turned from the pattern of a normal peaceful life to follow after, as they did before, the fools’ goal of world conquest. All too willingly the mothers and fathers of Hitler’s Germany permitted their children to be brutalised. They have their sons to become cogs in the military machine of the nation, and allowed their daughters to become so enthralled by propaganda that German women, whether married or not, considered it their highest patriotic duty to supply cannon fodder for the nation’s war machine.

Germany’s will to militarism is deeply ingrained, and long before Hitler came to power German children were taught to worship the ideal of armed might. Moulded to purposeful savagery, the German nation followed Hitler blindly, and willingly mobilised every economic resource and every available worker to make the weapons with which to annihilate their neighbours. With few dissenting they allowed themselves to be debauched by the pageantry of the great Nazi spectacles which Hitler and his stage managers produced. Gladly Germans grasped at the savage creed Hitler offered them as their road to salvation, turning their faces from the ethics of Christianity to the Prussian concept that might alone makes right. When Hitler lashed out at Poland in 1939, the German people followed him into the war without regrets. This was the day they had been building and waiting for, and they gloried in the destruction they were letting loose upon the world. Thousands of villages have been wiped out, and more than ten million civilians - men, women and children - from nearly every nation in Europe have been butchered. With a new application of Teutonic efficiency they put murder on a mass production basis. Behind this pitiless and inhuman slaughter, says the film, is the coldly reasoned plan of the German general staff to prevent the normal development of Europe’s population. By killing off those who will breed the next generation of other countries the Germans expected to have more potential soldiers for future wars than any of their neighbours, no matter how the peace is written. This the Germans call biological victory, and that they were not wholly wrong is indicated by the prediction of Western Europe’s comparative population in 1970.

Within three triumphant years Germany was close to achieving its immediate goal - the plundering of all Europe, and Britain alone prevented Hitler from completing the conquest. Then the Soviet Army unleashed its giant reserves and proceeded to tear the heart out of the German Wehrmacht. Then came ‘D’ Day, and the Americans and British inflicted still further defeats. Within four months France was free and Allied troops were in Germany. With victory in sight the problem of What To Do With Germany still remains to be settled. In every land, says the film, is the belief that Germany must be taught a stern lesson for fear that otherwise in the years immediately following war’s end remnants of the old Germany majority will secretly re-organise. For the World has determined to teach Germans tha those who live by the sword will in the end perish by the sword.

Researcher Comments

This story was included in Vol.11 No.2 of the US edition.

Keywords

Politics and government

Written sources

The March of Time Promotional Material   Lobby Card, Used for synopsis

Credits:

Production Co.

Time Inc.