3 AUGUST 1944, Page 4

It has been suggested somewhere, not at all surprisingly, that

as a last desperate throw Himmler (for he looks like being now the chief controller of the situation) may try to make peace with Russia on any terms and then ,throw all Germany's remaining force against her enemies in the West. If anyone has any fear that such a manoeuvre might succeed I commend to him Alexander Werth's last book Leningrad. It argues no theories, it makes no case ; it is simply a perfectly objective report of a five-days' visit to the former capital in the latter part of last year, while it was still invested, but no longer blockaded and no longer starving. But the plain record of Werth's conversations there—with a factory manager, with the city architect, with a schoolmaster, with a front-line gun-battery, With writers like himself, with the Mayor of Leningrad—leave no roc for a moment's lingering doubt about the feeling of every Russ: for every German. It is no blazing desire for revenge—rather a cc; implacable hatred, born of what Germans have done to Leningra .and, if I were a German, I should fear that far more. If these to are tygical, and all the news from all the Russian fronts sugges that they are, Russia will make no peace with any Germany capa of firing a shot against any enemy anywhere.