Chapter IX: Part 9

“d. All North Africa from the Straits of Gibraltar to Somaliland to be placed at the disposition of the Axis, though France may be permitted to retain colonies under certain conditions of co-administration. Certain British and African colonies to be placed under German and Italian control. South Africa would be required to have complete independence and abolish trade preference tariffs.”

The last sentence means that South Africa should leave the British Empire. The fleeting, condescending mention of the French who _may_ be permitted to share colonies is the only reference made to them. It ought to be noted carefully by the men of Vichy who pretend at any rate to believe that Hitler would not rob them if they abased themselves sufficiently. For the United States, the significant thing here is that Germany would control the naval, air, and military bases of Africa including Dakar opposite Brazil.

“e. Continental Europe to be organized into a corporate state under the Reich with domestic autonomy for unit members whose economic and political cooperation would be based on Berlin.”

There for all to read is the future map of Europe. The name of Europe itself will scarcely be needed any more, save as a geographical term once used to identify the continent now known as Great Germany. No more France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland. All will come under the Nazi yoke, even Spain and Portugal and the states which yielded without a struggle, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria. You ask, but isn’t this the unification of Europe we have all been hoping for? The answer is no, because what the world needed was a Europe voluntarily united in a United States of Europe, or whatever else you wanted to call it, for the purpose of promoting the mutual prosperity, health, and happiness of all its members. Hitler Europe’s avowed object is to confiscate and exploit the resources of the conquered states and to employ their man power as slaves for the exclusive, perpetual benefit of the “master race.” This is not a new Commonwealth of Nations; it is the first step in the Nazis’ program for the systematic degradation of the human race. The only parallel for it is in Aldous Huxley’s _Brave New World_. His robot human race was divided into Alpha masters and various classes of slaves, down to the Epsilon automatons who would correspond to Hitler’s Slavic serfs.

“f. The United Kingdom to remain the heart of the British Empire with a gradual transfer of authority to Canada.”

This seems to be a covert bid for isolationist approval in the United States, a hint that as the British Empire will not exist at all much longer, the United States may profit by absorbing Canada and whatever other vestigial remnants of the Empire may be granted Canada as the residuary legatee. This profit-taking by the United States has already been proposed by Lindbergh in his suggestion that we take over Canada.

“g. The German sphere of influence may go as far as the Sea of Marmora unless that were handed over to the joint administration of Turkey and Soviet Russia. But Germany may demand participation in the oil wells of Iraq and Iran.”

This paragraph has been rendered obsolete by the German invasion of Russia. Germany certainly hopes eventually to get all the oil of Iraq and Iran.

“h. The United States’ sphere of influence would be Canada, Central and South America, Newfoundland, and Greenland with islands and regional waters, but the United States would undertake not to form any hegemony over South America inimical to the Axis and would accord the fullest freedom and equality of opportunity to Germany and her Allies in that continental brotherhood. No American naval bases would be west of Hawaii, and that stronghold would be reduced in importance.”

How does it feel to an American to hear this sort of dictation? It is dignified treatment compared with what we would receive if we acceded. Never was a proverb more true than the old Russian one, based on the bitter experience of their vassalage to the Tartars. “A nation is never too poor to pay the first installment of tribute and never rich enough to pay the last.” We are asked to give up all our naval bases in the Pacific west of Hawaii, but there is no hint of Japanese reciprocity. The Japanese when the time came would move in and fortify the bases we had dismantled.

“i. In the Pacific the Netherlands Indies might be detached from the Netherlands and placed under an independent government with native participation, and British possessions would obtain increasing independence. Throughout all these Pacific islands, Japanese advisors would be admitted and entrusted with the duty of rationalizing forms of cooperation in the ‘co-prosperity sphere.’ French Indo-China would receive independence on the same terms.”

We see now what this “independence” is. Just twelve weeks after the publication of these “peace terms” the Japanese took over Indo-China.

These peace terms are not even hypocritically polite. They simply assume the opposite “negotiators” are beaten, and that of course includes the United States, as we may see from our prominent position among its stipulations. Lindbergh declares we would be beaten from the start if we entered the war, and that a negotiated peace would be more acceptable than outright military defeat. But these terms, vouched for by the Imperial Japanese Foreign Office organ, show us that we would be treated as a conquered nation if we negotiated a peace.

“j. Australia would remain within the British Empire, but would eliminate immigration bars and allow Japanese settlement on terms of equality.”

The exclusively Japanese interests would be safeguarded by Germany in a negotiated peace only if Japan had earned it by following German orders. Japan, however, may disappoint her senior partner.

The next to last paragraph reads ironically:

“k. India would obtain self-government.”

We may be sure that if the Axis wins, India will not receive self-government. Both Germany and Japan want India. Somewhere in the path of this war appears the possibility of a clash between the Germans and the Japanese. Already Japan shows signs of being afraid that if Germany wins, Japan will suffer the same fate as Italy and Russia. Japan likewise shows signs of wanting to wait for better evidence that the Allies are going to win. Stranger things have happened in this war than that Japan should finally quit the Axis and go to war on the side of Britain and the United States.

But the most ironic paragraph of this peace offer is the last:

“l. Religious and political liberty would be enjoined throughout the world.”

That’s all. That completes the offer of negotiated peace.

Q. _Why do they call it a negotiated peace?_

A. It is not “negotiated.” It is a dictated peace; it represents a complete Hitler victory but that is the only kind of negotiated peace he would consider until he is himself defeated.

Q. _But is it possible that these are authentic, genuine terms of the Axis? It seems to me that the publication of such arrogant demands upon America was an undiplomatic step, contrary to the interests of the Axis, since it would be bound to arouse our indignation._

A. It was a “semi-official” publication of the Japanese Foreign Office at the very time when the then Foreign Minister Matsuoka advised Anthony Eden that Japan was ready to mediate a negotiated peace if she were requested to do so. Its authentic character can hardly be questioned. If it is arrogant it is because the Axis is arrogant, and considers that Britain is already beaten and that the United States was beaten before she began to fight. As the _Japan Times Advertiser_ put it: “These may be called victors’ terms but the Axis powers have achieved a dominant position permitting liberty of dictation.” These terms could not be worse if we had entered the war and lost it. They would mean that from now on until perhaps centuries later when the Nazis shall have become soft and self-indulgent and until some new, rougher race arose to oust them, the Germans would rule the earth. For of course if Britain or America were to be willing to accept such terms it would prove they really were beaten.

During the period immediately after the signing of the negotiated peace which would be used by the Germans to consolidate and strengthen their military position, we should probably be allowed to retain our nominal sovereignty, although we should not be able to do anything in the realm of foreign politics or economics that was not permitted by Germany. During this period our Lindberghs would declaim that they had been right after all since we had not been invaded and we still elected our own president and still sang “God Bless America,” and still called ourselves the land of the free and home of the brave; and the Lindberghs would insist that the sacrifices we had made were far better than to have fought a war. But soon we should find that Hitler’s idea of “equality” in South America meant complete Nazi monopoly. Soon we should find we had lost all our world trade save that permitted us by the Axis with the Axis on Axis terms.

Q. _Would the Nazi use of slave labor be an advantage? Can’t free American labor always produce better and cheaper than slave labor?_

A. That is one of our popular fallacies. We proclaim this doctrine at the same time that we use tariffs to protect American industry from the products of foreign workers who receive lower wages than American workers. Japanese manufactured articles, the cheapest in the world because they are made by virtually slave labor, were able to flood our market in spite of our high tariffs. For ordinary mass production, for nearly every type of manufactured article save quality goods, slave labor is more profitable than free labor. If it is not so efficient, it makes up for that by being so much cheaper. If Hitler were to get his slave Europe organized, he could turn out products which would undersell anything we could make.

Q. _Wouldn’t he try to make us take his goods also?_

A. He would. We are talking now of the alternative to our going to war and defeating Hitler. We are visualizing the situation as it would be after Hitler had won, and had made all of those arrangements with the rest of the world which we have described, and was now in process of adjusting his Empire to the United States, or rather of adjusting the United States to his Empire. We are discussing now how we would have to behave if we wished to continue to be at peace with Hitler. We would of course have to make some kind of trade agreement with him. What kind of trade agreement do you think Hitler would propose? We can suppose he would offer us the same kind of agreement he has concluded with other states before they fell, or before they volunteered to become his vassals--the sort of agreements he had with Jugoslavia, or Greece, and with Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria. These agreements provide that German goods may enter at lower tariffs than the goods of other countries or that tariffs on German goods are abolished altogether, and usually the country concerned must promise to take a minimum quantity of whatever articles Germany wishes to export. If we hoped to have any kind of trade agreement with the victorious Germans at all, it would have to be one like this. We should probably have to consent to receive German goods in such quantities and at such prices that our own industry would step by step be ruined. This would be the German aim. They intend to make German industry not only the only industry in Europe, but the master of the manufacturing world. They intend to wreck any industry they cannot control.

Q. _But you don’t think we would put up with such treatment as that, do you? It would be better to go to war, wouldn’t it?_

A. By that time it might be too late to go to war. Now is the time to go to war. Now is the time to avoid those calamities we have just discussed. If we had done nothing to protect ourselves while we still had the power to protect ourselves and still had strong allies fighting in the field, what use would there be to try to resist Hitler after he had become master of the world outside America? We should then face the alternative of submission to Hitler or fighting an almost hopeless war.

Our isolationists like the Quislings and the Darlans and Lavals abroad, are working themselves into the position of the French collaborationists. That is, they are going so far out on the limb of isolation-appeasement that eventually they will not be able to withdraw. Even today they refuse to admit their error. If the worst came to the worst and we remained out of the war, and Hitler won, and all these things we are discussing came to pass, our isolationists would be bound to continue to contend that they were right, and they would have to advocate collaboration with Hitler, as indeed many of them do now. We can see what collaboration means in France. Ninety-five per cent of the French people are against it, and five per cent who advocate and practice it are now considered traitors. This would be the history of our isolationists also. When the alternative, war or surrender, was offered, their answer would be that war was hopeless, and the only sensible thing to do would be to collaborate with Hitler.

Q. _But isn’t there another way out for us? Couldn’t we simply give up our foreign trade? In 1939 it amounted to only about six billion dollars. What is that compared with the monstrous expense of war? It is only one-seventh of the amount we have already agreed to spend for defense. It is only one-tenth of our national income._

A. Even if our total foreign trade represented only one-tenth of our total business activity, that would make it vitally important, for as you know, in an economy such as ours, ten per cent means all the difference between failure and success. Hitler said of Germany, “we must export or die.” Our case is not that desperate, but it would be fair to say we must export or suffer a lower standard of living and increased unemployment. Witness the effect on this country of our war export business which has revitalized the entire economic system and practically wiped out unemployment. Before long the last of our unemployed ought to be at work, as they have all found jobs in England. Of course if we wished to crawl into a completely abject isolation, we could give up our foreign trade, recall our ships from the seven seas, seal our ports, and retire into a kind of hillbilly life, eating our corn bread and sowbelly, drinking our home-brew, and supporting a permanent mass of millions of unemployed.

Even if we attempted such a thing we would not be permitted to continue to live peacefully behind our imagined walls. The world wants what we can produce. Nazi Germany wants it. If we were to carry the isolationist argument to its final absurdity and really try to set up a complete autarchy and live within the continental borders of the United States, the Nazis would never let us do so. From within and from without the Nazis would attack us. Our own Nazis would labor to bring us into Hitler’s New Order, while the German Nazis would assume the role of our own Commodore Perry and as he broke open the Japanese closed door in 1854 the Nazis would smash the locks of American isolation.

We are discussing what would be a comparatively short period of time, the period between the end of the war with a Hitler-negotiated peace and the moment when he felt himself strong enough to resume the war, this time to conquer all that was left unconquered at the first truce. As soon as he had his machine in order and perceived that his strength had risen relative to ours to such a point that he considered victory certain, he, with Japan, would attack Britain, then America. If we had agreed to any such negotiated peace such as the one we have been discussing, we would be lost. Britain and America have held out so far because despite the importance of air power, sea power is still paramount and we have had sea power. We would not have it after a negotiated peace.

Q. _But aren’t these terms of a negotiated peace somewhat dated now since the German attack on Russia? Hasn’t the unexpectedly strong Russian resistance diminished Hitler’s feeling that he can already dictate as a victor?_

A. No doubt Hitler’s arrogance has been reduced at least a little since the “scum of the earth” checked his warriors, but the Russian setback to Hitler has been only that, and it has not yet changed his long-range plans. He still aspires to conquer the world and he still believes he can do it, and any negotiated peace he may offer, whether it is the one whose terms we have just discussed, or some other terms more fitted to the moment, will be calculated to give the Germans a respite in preparation for resumption of the war. That, after all, is the important point to remember. Specific terms are at this juncture unimportant. It is only essential to remember that _any_ negotiated peace with Hitler would not be a peace at all, but only a truce to which Hitler would never agree unless he believed he would thereby be strengthened for renewal of the war. We can never emphasize too much that there is no such thing as a peace with Hitler; there is no such thing as a peaceful Hitler; Hitler will either conquer or be conquered.

Q. _But if Britain and the United States had agreed to the sort of negotiated peace offered through Tokyo, they would have surrendered practically everything, so why should Hitler go to the trouble of attacking us?_

A. Because Hitler does not want “practically” everything; he wants absolutely everything. Also Hitler cannot stop making war; it will take a greater Nazi than he to convert the German war machine to garrison duties and the Nazi hordes to peaceful production.

No conqueror ever stops conquering until he is stopped by some outside force. Alexander was just getting into his stride and longing for more worlds to conquer when he died of a fever after drinking too much. Hitler will never be stopped that way. Caesar was stopped by the assassin’s dagger. That could stop Hitler but it would be foolish to depend upon it. Napoleon was stopped at Waterloo by superior force. That we hope will be Hitler’s end. But never did a conqueror stop as our Lindberghs believe Hitler would stop, of his own accord, satisfied with what he had won. Far more true is the analysis by my old friend Douglas Miller, who during his fifteen years as United States Commercial Attaché in Berlin was the constant source of knowledge about the Nazis for all of us American newspapermen, and who now has written the wisest book about the Nazis to appear from the pen of an American, _You Can’t Do Business with Hitler_.

Miller puts the matter with hair-fine accuracy thus: “The essential sterility of the Fascist system is one explanation of its aggressiveness. The totalitarians are a group of bandits who have learned no useful trade or occupation but are well armed and have no scruples about attacking their neighbors. Germany has, under Hitler, thrown away her possibilities of peaceful trade and understanding with all the world and has no option but to go forward in the campaign of aggression. She must not, in Hitler’s words, ‘export or die’; she must fight or die. Under these circumstances it is completely useless to await any peaceful settlement of Europe’s troubles. The Nazis are not organized for peace. They are not prepared for it. They would not know what to do with it.”

But beyond these reasons for attacking Britain and America even after they had accepted such humiliating, emasculating terms as those we have sketched, Hitler would have the same reason to attack the Anglo-American combination that he had to attack Russia. He attacked Russia partly to remove the remote possibility of a Russian attack while he was attempting to invade England, but he attacked Russia also to get complete control over the Russian resources which Stalin was doling out to him too slowly and meagerly. So it would be with the resources of the rump British Empire and of the United States. Hitler would not be satisfied with the necessity for negotiating or trading with Anglo-America. He would demand the power to dictate. So in the long run Hitler by achieving such a negotiated peace as is advocated by Wheeler, Nye, Lindbergh, and others, would have conquered America.

Q. _What kind of a peace would we make if we win the war?_

A. That is more difficult to forecast than to sketch the outlines of a Hitler world. His peace is engraved in his past and blueprinted in his program. We know what it is like, a simple pattern of masters and slaves. All we can say positively about our postwar world is that the British and Americans and the populations of Hitler’s conquered territory, wish it to be a world in which there shall be no masters or slaves; we want justice for everybody, and all the liberty possible, and we want to get rid of fear and want. We know we will not be able to get all this but the difference between us and Hitler is that Hitler does not even want such a world. If he could have such a world by merely asking for it, he would prefer to battle for his sort of world, because violent struggle and the infliction of pain upon others is an essential part of the satisfactions of the Nazis.

Q. _What chance has Communism in a defeated Germany?_

A. If Hitler is defeated it is possible that the Communists will be the strongest party or political group of any kind in Germany. When he came to power Hitler dissolved all parties, and only the Communists continued a militant, underground organization. The bourgeois, democratic parties completely disappeared, and it is hard to imagine their revival. It is easy to imagine the revival of the Communist Party. It won six million votes at the last honest election before Hitler seized the government. A great many Germans who voted Communist entered the Nazi Party or Nazi organizations such as the SA Brownshirts and the SS Elite Guards. This confirmed the observation that between Nazism and Communism as systems there existed more similarity than difference. It would be easy for those who had been Communists before Hitler came to power to return to the Communist cause after Hitler fell. A Communist program promising immediate peace for the German people and vengeance on the Nazi leaders would appeal more and more to the masses of German workingmen as the war lengthens and shows no signs of ending. We should not forget that the Soviet government, or rather Joseph Stalin, unless he capitulates, will have something to say when the time comes to think about the kind of government Germany is to have.

_Q. Well then, it seems to me that the first problem of our Peace Conference will be what to do with the Germans._

A. It is likely that an even more urgent problem, demanding the first attention of the Peace Conference, will be how to keep millions of people in Europe from starving to death; how to restore the railroad lines and other means of transportation; and how to prevent sheer anarchy, or gutter-communism from seizing the continent. In the period immediately after the Nazis collapse--and be sure of one thing, and that is that when Hitler cracks he and his regime will crack all at once in one frightful cataclysmic smash beside which the German surrender in the last war will look like a fight to the finish--the likelihood is that throughout Europe law and order will disappear for a time at least until Allied troops arrive. For years the only law and order will have been the German troops and Gestapo. The former leading citizens of the occupied territories, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech, French, etc., will all have been either killed, exiled, or demoralized. There will be no firm group of strong men left to restore order anywhere in Europe. In Germany itself the disorder will reach its height as the Nazi masters flee and the German people take vengeance upon them. There will be throughout the continent a universal struggle, as of beasts, for the scanty food left. It is possible that more lives will be lost in the immediate postwar period than in the war itself. Therefore I say the most urgent problem before the Peace Conference will be how to give Europe the physical means and the police force to keep it alive.

Q. _That is such a horrible picture that in spite of myself I must ask if it would not be better to let Hitler have his way?_

A. It is natural for us to recoil from such horrors. But let us remember that whereas the agony of Europe and of the world, brought about by the struggle to expel Hitler from power, will be severe but brief, the degradation of all mankind which would result from the failure to expel Hitler, would last perhaps for generations, certainly far beyond the length of time it would take to restore order in a Europe purged of the Nazis. What did it cost to achieve liberty in the first place? Think of all the wars it has taken to enable each of us to stand up and say, “I am the equal of any man on earth.” If we are not able to face the prospect of fighting and suffering and starving and dying for liberty and if we are not confident enough in the righteousness of our cause to demand, not request but demand, that our fellow citizens do likewise, then we do not deserve liberty, we deserve our place with the rest of Hitler’s slaves. Better that half the generation of men alive today go down to early death than that Hitler should enslave all mankind.

Q. _Very well, I agree, but isn’t it understandable that we, away over here in America, should shrink from such a future?_

A. Yes, but unless we learn not to shrink we shall surely die as a nation. How many Americans today understand and fully realize, emotionally as well as intellectually, that in order to retain our liberty and our national independence and make secure the lives of our children, we have to face now the prospect of years of war, hardship, and the loss of many American lives, and the wounding and maiming of many more? Certainly it is brutal, not my words, but the reality. It is unworthy of a nation of 130,000,000 for its leaders to suggest that all will be well if only we pass this piece of legislation or take that stand or appropriate another trillion dollars. Nothing will save this country except our own blood and our own tears. And please do not go away and say that I “blithely” recommended blood and tears. I bitterly declare there is no alternative.

Q. _After we have been able, as we hope, to install temporary law and order and emergency rations throughout the continent, isn’t the problem of Germany next on the agenda of the Peace Conference?_

A. It must be. There is a still larger, the largest problem, that of trying to reorganize the world into a scheme for living without war, for some kind of Federated Humanity, but for us in the Western World nothing can be done until we discover what to do with Germany. Here is a nation of 80,000,000 whose leaders, clamoring for “living space,” shamelessly declare they intend to multiply into 250,000,000 within a century and use their superior force to exterminate or enslave everybody else. Here is a nation which thrice in the memory of living man, in 1870, 1914, and 1939 has launched its war machine against its neighbors, taken the lives of millions, and now has disrupted the civilization of the entire world. Here is a nation, distinguished in its past history by precious contributions to the arts and sciences, which today, led by the lust for conquest, has discarded Christ, truth, justice, and has debased a whole generation of its youth to the moral and ethical level of savages.

Here is a nation which is one of the most talented on earth in the theory and practice of the natural sciences, capable of world leadership in bending nature to the peaceful services of mankind, to the amelioration of suffering and the increase of prosperity, and what does this nation do? It devotes all its talents to the cultivation of the science of warfare, and becomes adept beyond all other nations in the arts of destruction. Why? What is behind all this evil? Never in modern history has any nation in the Western World displayed such incorrigible tendencies to raid, rob, seize, invade, plunder, conquer, and torture. Torture! For the deepest blot upon Nazi Germany is its dark love of torture, its base delight in pain endured by others, its cruel concentration camps. Never in any quarter of the globe at any time in mankind’s history has any nation revealed so determined a will and clever a method to exploit permanently as slaves the unfortunate victims of its martial skill. The problem then is, how to restrain Germany, or how to reform Germany, how, if possible, to bring her into our world family.

Q. _Why not say the problem is how to destroy her or at least paralyze her?_

A. For several reasons. First, because it is impracticable to destroy 80,000,000 persons even if we were Nazi enough to wish to do so. You can be sure that if Hitler as head of a non-German Alliance were faced with the German problem he would solve it precisely that way, by extermination of the Germans. But we are not Nazis, and even suppose some on our side were to advocate destruction of the Germans by mass emasculation, you can be sure that millions of Americans and Britons would arise and cry out in defense of the poor German people, misguided victims, innocent souls. Politically and morally this solution is out of the question.

Q. _Is there no way we could render Germany impotent to do harm, no way we could deprive her of the possibility of attacking the world again?_

A. There are two ways: military occupation or deindustrialization of the Reich. It is plain that if Germany is allowed the least opportunity, she would rearm and attack with the same swift ferocity she has just displayed. There must be physical restraint to keep her from doing so. Military occupation is the obvious, traditional method, but it has serious drawbacks. It is expensive and tiring. Nevertheless if the Nazis are defeated in this war, it will be imperative to occupy Germany far more thoroughly than after the last war, if only to preserve order. There are some advocates of deliberately allowing Germany a period of disorder during which it could be hoped that the Germans would themselves exterminate a great number of Nazis. This would only render more formidable the task which already appears staggeringly difficult, to re-establish a state of law in the Reich, where since 1933, law as we know it, has been abolished. Whatever permanent system of controlling Germany is eventually adopted, the first step will have to be military occupation. Theoretically, military occupation could be continued indefinitely. Actually it never is continued long, because the occupying troops and their people at home grow tired of it. Even the French, who directly after the war were fanatically determined to secure their frontier by taking the Rhineland, and who did get in the Treaty of Versailles permission to occupy the Rhineland for fifteen years, even these prudent and wary French grew so tired of it that they evacuated the Rhineland three years ahead of time, in June 1930.

Six years later the Nazis moved in and constructed the Siegfried line along the very positions which had been occupied by the French troops. I know there were other reasons for the French to give up the Rhineland. The British had pressed them to appease the Germans. The Germans had agreed in the Young Plan to a new system of reparations and as reward received the Rhineland ahead of schedule. But the moment the last French troops left Germany the period of fulfillment of the war treaties came to an end, and Germany began the period of repudiation and revision which ended in this war and for France in her present national humiliation. Looking backward one can see that nothing should have moved the French to leave the Rhineland. That they did so is a classic example of how people grow so careless, lazy, forgetful and peace-minded that they become insensible to a threat to their very lives. That is the state of mind of America today.

Q. _You mentioned a second possibility for physically retraining Germany and you used the word deindustrialization. What does that mean?_

A. It is an ugly word but I know no other to describe the process of taking away a country’s factories and leaving it without industry. That of course would also leave it without the means of making war. This is what Germany plans to do to the rest of Europe, as we have seen. The civilized world would have every right to impose the same treatment on the inventor of the scheme. Briefly the plan would be to occupy Germany militarily; to disarm her rigorously; to dismantle all her factories capable of making instruments of war; to prohibit the import into Germany of raw materials which could be used for making such instruments; to confiscate and turn over to Allied ownership and operation all German mines producing iron or other metals; and to appoint a permanent Inter-allied Control Commission to supervise these restrictions. It would be necessary to forbid all manufacture or use of airplanes by Germans in Germany.

Q. _How does this proposal fit in with the fourth paragraph of the eight-point Atlantic Charter which reads, “They will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all states, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.”_

A. There is the difficulty. Adherence to this paragraph would prevent any such solution as deindustrialization, because there could be no economic prosperity for a deindustrialized Germany. The first effect of it would be a widespread return to the land, as Germans would have no manufactured articles for export, and hence nothing with which to buy abroad, and hence would be forced to grow all their own food. The population would decline, young folks would emigrate if any country would take them, and in general it would be a very unhappy period for the Herrenvolk. Apparently Roosevelt and Churchill have rejected this solution in favor of simple old-fashioned military occupation.

Q. _They said nothing in their statement about militarily occupying Germany._

A. No, but they said plainly they intended to disarm the aggressor nations. You do not suppose you could disarm Germany without occupying her, do you? It ought to be possible to devise something more effective and novel than the thousand-year-old method of sending in troops. One suggestion is that all German officers (there may be around 500,000 of them) should be exiled to an island under perpetual guard where they could make their own living and end their lives in contemplation of their sins. The German Army would be abolished entirely; not as in 1919 reduced to 100,000 men who were to become the cadre of the present seven-million-man machine. For a decade or more the Allies would have to accept the responsibility of policing Germany. All military manuals and textbooks would be destroyed. Aviation of all kinds and the building of airplanes would likewise be forbidden. These measures would be for the purpose of demilitarizing the population, and it is possible that, deprived of military instructors or any means of military instruction, the plan might work, as least for a time.

In any plan dealing with postwar Germany it is important to avoid vindictiveness. Nothing should be done as a punishment of Germany’s crimes in the past; everything should be done to restrain her from crime in the future. How much better it would have been if there had been no reparations imposed upon Germany after the last war, but the Allies had kept their Military Control Commission permanently in Germany while Allied troops permanently occupied the Rhineland. There is no use, however, in hoping for any such _permanent_ resolution on our part. We have only one hope of being able to restrain Germany for any considerable period, by the humane means which are the only ones open to us.

Q. _What hope have we of being able to restrain Germany?_

A. It is the hope that while we occupy Germany with our troops, say for the next thirty or forty years, a new generation of Germans would grow up which would forego its desire to conquer the world, forget that it was a Herrenvolk, and would gradually learn the habits of civilization. Meanwhile we would try to develop a World Federation or League of Nations under Anglo-American leadership to such a point of effectiveness that we could afford to allow Germany to become a member of it.

Q. _But do you suppose our people or the British would put up with the trouble and expense of occupying Germany militarily for thirty or forty years? Wouldn’t there be an outcry on behalf of the Germans?_

A. Many of our people would probably try to sabotage any realistic handling of the Germans. After the last war and at the beginning of this one you could hear many Americans remarking: “How could you expect the Germans or any upstanding, self-respecting people to tolerate being treated unequally, to put up with being disarmed while their neighbors were armed?” These remarks disclosed misapprehension of the German mind which will surely be duplicated at the end of this war by similar persons. That will not matter so much since the British will have a great deal to say about how the Germans are to be restrained, and this time the British will not be as shortsighted as they were after the last war.

You may remember that the French in 1919 wanted to occupy permanently various strategic points in Germany, including the Rhineland, but the British said no. They had two principal reasons for not consenting to proper restraint of the Germans and both reasons were, as we can see from our perspective of today, completely invalid. First, they did not want France to become too strong; they believed they had to maintain a balance of power with Germany, apparently leaving out of account the enormous, patent facts that there were 80,000,000 Germans to 40,000,000 Frenchmen, that the French birth rate was nearing the point of racial suicide, that Frenchmen were concerned not at all with expansion but only to keep what they had in their beloved “security.” Second, the British people had failed during the war to suffer any of the pain and tribulation the Germans had visited upon the French, who had seen their towns and villages destroyed, their families blown to bits by German artillery.

Today when the British sit down to a Peace Table they will be a different people. In Britain today are upward of 44,000,000 persons who have been under bombardment for two years and have suffered a strain upon their courage such as has no parallel. They have witnessed the mutilation of their dear ones, the destruction of their monuments. They have heard the menace from their enemy that he intended to destroy England as Carthage was destroyed. Is it likely that when the British sit down victorious in a Peace Conference they will shrink from the application of methods, no matter how severe, to prevent the recurrence of this horror? We shall not earn the right to speak at all at the Peace Conference until we have borne our share of the heat of the day. I hope we shall not try to exercise our influence to obstruct whatever solutions may seem appropriate at the end of years of war, to solve this essentially insoluble problem of the Germans.

Q. _Why do you call the German problem insoluble?_

A. Because no matter what we do, short of destroying the Germans, which we have agreed is impossible, the Germans are likely to break out again on the warpath some time. Let us assume that we take the view that the Versailles treaty was too harsh, and this time we will avoid all the mistakes of harshness. We grant Germany a peace treaty which not only takes nothing from her, but allows her to retain a considerable quantity of the territorial spoils she has accumulated by violence. We agree to let her retain all the territory inhabited for the most part by German-speaking people. Thus she is allowed to keep Western Poland whence she has so brutally expelled the native Polish population. She is allowed to keep the German Sudetenland, formerly Czechoslovakian, and until the men of Munich gave it to Hitler, never before a part of Germany. She is allowed to keep Belgian Eupen Malmedy; and even any part of Lorraine which may desire to opt for Germany. She is allowed to keep Austria. In short, Germany is allowed to keep all her 80,000,000 Germans together. More than that, in order to “right every wrong,” Germany is given back her old colonies, all of them. Thus there is no thought of dividing the country. There are of course no reparations. There are no punitive measures of any kind. Germany is invited to join the new World Federation as soon as it has been formed. Certainly this sort of treatment ought to mollify any people. This ought to be a perfect peace. But wait, there is a crucial point. Shall Germany be allowed now, at once, to bear arms again? Or ever again? And how many arms? What kind?

Q. _Haven’t Churchill and Roosevelt already declared the aggressors would be disarmed?_

A. Very well, the victors will insist that Germany is to have no arms at least for a period of years. Do you think that then the Germans, even with a treaty such as we have sketched, granting every conceivable amelioration, would be satisfied? No. If we restricted their armed forces in any degree, for example, by depriving them of offensive weapons, of tanks and bombing planes, you can be sure that the complaint of the Germans would be as great as though they had been stripped of half their population, the Reich divided into a score of puppet states, and their cities occupied by divisions of Senegalese.

Q. _Aren’t the Germans merely demanding absolute, uncompromising equality?_

A. They always demand absolute, uncompromising superiority. Look back on Hitler’s reign. He had several chances to stop this side of war, after having gained for his people not mere equality with his greatest rival, France, and not mere equality with the political and military forces of all his neighbors put together, but with real superiority in arms and in political power over all Europe. Look at the chances he had to stop short of war and build in peace, and perhaps go down as a greater man than he will appear after this bloody debacle is over. He could have stopped after he got the Sudetenland, and had finally united nearly all of his 80,000,000 Germans. He could have stopped after he took Austria; after he occupied the Rhineland; after he got the Saar back into Germany. The taking of the Sudetenland would have been a place to stop at the pinnacle. Suppose he had done that, and had used his power and talent to transfer his war machine into a peace machine, and had used his mighty prestige to bring Europe into a new economic order. Germany had attained practical “equality” with France by 1936 when Hitler’s troops entered the Rhineland, and they had “equality” with all the rest of Europe put together--as Hitler has now so disastrously proved--by 1938 when they got the Sudetenland. So the point is that the Germans never wanted equality, will never be satisfied with equality, but will always demand to be what they believe themselves to be, namely, the _master_ race.

Q. _Aren’t you confusing the Germans with Hitler and the Nazis?_

A. No, the Germans have done that themselves. By their so-called plebiscites which document their uniformly spineless behavior since Hitler came to power, they have identified themselves with him and permitted him uncontradicted to define himself as Deutschland.

There is just a chance that a combination of generosity and firmness may impress a minority of Germans which may grow and eventually bring the whole nation into our hoped-for World Federation. If, on the contrary, the Germans secretly arm, and prepare another ambush for civilization, our only hope is to find it out in time. We should have no hope at all if our sobbing societies succeeded in inducing the Peace Conference to give the Germans equality in arms. Let us remember that if we were all to disarm, including Germany, it would be just as disadvantageous for us as if we remained armed and allowed Germany to keep equal arms. For at any stage of armament or disarmament the Germans are superior to almost any combination of their opponents. Germany is not just another nation. It is a nation, not exceptionally numerous, but so highly talented in the mechanics, chemistry, and physics of warfare and so professionally skilled in the staff work of war, and so obediently brave in the practice of battle, that its military power is greater than that of any other single nation on earth, with no exceptions.

Q. _What are we going to do with all the former nations of Europe, especially the fifteen or so which were conquered? Are we going to reconstitute them all as they were?_

A. We shall try to reconstitute all those which are capable of maintaining a national life, but how can one foresee the fate of such unfortunate little states as Esthonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? The Soviet government, through its ambassador to London, Mr. Maisky, now declares that it approves the Atlantic Charter’s Eight Points, including the right of self-determination of all nations. This has been hailed as a great step forward; but I should prefer to wait to see the Red Army evacuate voluntarily any territory it may hold at the end of this war.

The attitude of the Soviet government toward the rights of small nations is brilliantly illustrated by Stalin’s treatment of the Baltic States. First, he asked Britain and France for them to be handed him on a platter, as roast chicken. Having been refused, he waited until the war began, then forcibly occupied the three little states, which were among the more attractive and in many ways more admirable little countries in Europe. We have almost completely overlooked the grisly fate of the middle-class population of the Baltic states--virtually exterminated by Stalin’s gunmen in one of those side shows of horror which only the great war could obscure. The Baltic population is suffering an epic of agony. After Stalin’s G.P.U. had killed or exiled all the professional and business people and all those suspected of being Nazi sympathizers, and then after war had swept the three countries, the Germans and the Gestapo moved in and killed all the Communist and other labor leaders and anti-Nazis. Now that Stalin has been driven out of the Baltic states, and they are occupied by the Nazis, the Soviet policy is ceremoniously announced to be in favor of restoration of full national independence to all states.

That must ring bitterly in the ears of the pitiful remnant of the population of Esthonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Is there enough of them left to make it possible to resuscitate their nations? The experience of these countries shows how difficult it will be in our postwar settlement to give national independence to small states and at the same time allow them the possibility of national security. Many a small state will have to choose between the one or the other. If it stands alone, it may be devoured by a larger neighbor. If it enters a larger unit, it will have to sacrifice some of its sovereignty. All this points to the necessity of making the larger unit big enough to comprise all nations.

Whatever we do, the Soviet Union will present us with almost as many problems as Germany. How can Britain and the United States confidently outline specific war aims as long as we do not know what the position of the Soviet Union will be at the end of this war? And if the Soviet Union survives in her present form and temper, and has not defected from the war, how is she to fit into our world peace organization? There are in it only two durable points of reference: the United States and Great Britain, and one great hope of success for the organization of peace, the firm friendship of the two countries, braced by their control of the seas. Our only chance of realizing such a peace is by cherishing between ourselves a mutual trust which will override our selfish ambitions, for there are many points and places on the globe where our material interests conflict. We cannot maintain this relationship until we Americans begin to carry our full share of the burden of the war and the British in turn make us feel we are welcome to the comradeship as well as the responsibilities of the war and the peace.

Q. _Do the British want such a Pax Anglo-Americana which would divide their victory with us?_

A. Let us not be sentimental about the British in spite of our partnership and friendship with them. The British would like nothing on earth so much as to be able to win this war without the United States’ help. They would dearly love to win alone and enjoy the fruits of victory alone. But they know now they cannot win alone. They know they cannot beat the Germans without our full, shooting participation in the war. And so they are resigned to accepting our companionship in battle.

Q. _“Resigned to accepting our companionship in battle”? Is that the way the British feel? Well, then, I for my part...._

A. Yes, I know what you are going to say: that you for your part would just as soon not help the British if that’s the way they feel about it. How many Americans there are left who still think in terms of “helping the British”! Cannot we finally understand that we are helping first of all ourselves, and that it would make no difference to us if the British were not human beings at all, but a race of perspicacious, pugnacious penguins?

So long as these penguins are fighting off our common enemy who would attack us if the penguins fell, is it not just good sense to throw our whole combat aid to the penguins, no matter what the penguins may think of us? If the British were to have a mental breakdown and declare they disliked us so thoroughly that they would accept no more help from us of any kind and would rather be beaten by the Nazis than win with American help, we should be compelled from our own vital self-interest to beg to be allowed to help them and then we should have to urge and even threaten until reluctantly the British made room for us in the battle line. It is good luck that the British are people who would be worth saving even if thereby we were not going to save ourselves.

Q. _Will you recapitulate how you visualize the organization of peace?_