Goebbels Worries about Germans Who Don’t Want to Fight to the End

Today I add the penultimate of Joseph Goebbels’s weekly articles for Das Reich.  It was mid-April, and despite constant calls to fight to the end, Germans in the West were all too eager to surrender to the advancing British and American forces.  The worst came on 1 March 1945, when the citizens of Goebbels’s hometown of Rheydt easily accepted American troops.  This article is titled “Risking One’s Own Life.” Goebbels argues that only a few spineless Germans accept enemy occupation, while the good ones fight to the end.