The Death of Hope (January–May 1945)

Abstract

The year 1945 opened with the Catholic daily Ya carrying in full the New Year’s address of the Fuhrer, in which he declared: ‘The war cannot end except in the victory of Germany.’ The speech appeared on the journal’s front page and covered seven columns, while Churchill’s speech of the same day, in which he described the destruction of Germany as inevitable, was presented on page 3 and abridged.1 In its own first issue of the year, Arriba highlighted Hitler’s opening phrases: ‘It is not because of New Year that I speak to you today. The time requires more of us than speeches, but I can assure you of this: there will never be another Ninth of November 1918 in the history of the German Reich.’2 In the previous issue of Ya, published on New Year’s Eve, an editorial struck quite a different note. Federico Izquierdo Luque, director of the Falange youth journal Juventud and winner, in January 1945, of the national prize for journalism,3 wrote: ‘It would be a good idea to revise the formula “unconditional surrender” … . It is an error of political judgment which, apart from opening up the war to unknown extremes of passion, can result only in exposing Europe to new misfortunes in the future … . Is there really an ideological cause that justifies the struggle? Quite clearly, no.’4 Quite clearly, Izquierdo Luque did not consider anti-fascism a justification for the struggle.