"What We are Fighting For" was a propaganda article that appeared in the German magazine Signal during World War II. Its illustrations showed a wounded Wehrmacht man on one page, his left arm bandaged and bloody, his mouth open in a shout of anger and pain, and a closeup of a blonde, blue-eyed little girl, perhaps five years old, on the facing page. Reinhard Heydrich dug up the article after the war, and had it translated and circulated throughout occupied Germany.[1]
Lou Weissberg found copies of it on walls in Nuremberg, and noted the following passages:
We fight for the sake of our own culture. If you had invaders ruthlessly occupying your own land, you too would rise up against them. How can a brave folk do anything else? Once we have once more our own state back in our hands, we solemnly vow that we seek no new foreign conflict. Europe has seen enough of war. All we seek is a fair peace and our own national self-determination, which is the proper right of any free people.
Weissberg found these statements unconvincing, given Germany's brutal conquests of other nations and oppression of native peoples throughout the war.[2]
Weissberg asked Major Tony Hawkins how these placards could have been put up without anyone noticing, but their discussion was interrupted when the German Freedom Front destroyed the Palace of Justice.[3]
Literary comment
This may be an actual article from an obscure OTL publication.
References
- ↑ The Man With the Iron Heart, p. 106.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 109-110.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 110-111.
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