Goebbels Compares Russian Tanks to Hannibal's Elephants

During the last months of the Third Reich there was abundant evidence that the war was lost.  Still, Germans kept fighting to the very bitter end.  Goebbels’s weekly articles in Das Reich are particularly interesting.  He wasn’t stupid.  He knew the war was lost, and he didn’t have good arguments any longer.  About all he could do was argue that the Allies would destroy Germany, so Germans might as well go down fighting, and that since military situations had changed in the past, they would in April 1945, too.

This article, titled History as a Teacher,  makes an interesting comparison between Hannibal’s elephants and Russian tanks.  After all, the elephants terrorized those who encountered them, yet Rome won in the end.  So, too, would tanks be overcome.