he has here. He is as important for the preservation of our liberties
and our security as any legislator, judge, or executive. One can almost
formulate a law that one can judge the quality of a democracy and its
expectancy of life by its press. By that standard France was doomed to
fall. France under the Republic had the most venal newspapers on earth.
As the American press is honest, so was the French press dishonest. The
French government was a faithful reflection of its press, one might
say almost a creation of its press. Some good Frenchmen even go so far
as to lay the major responsibility for the fall of France on their
newspapers whose editorial opinions for the most part were as plainly
for sale as the vegetables in the market.
The reasons for their venality go back to the period at the end of
the nineteenth century when all the states of Europe were floating
government loans in Paris, the banking center of the continent. The
French peasant, who kept his gold in his _bas de laine_, his woolen
stocking, was the chief investor, and the French newspapers were the
chief salesmen. Profits from the flotation were so enormous that the
governments concerned could afford to pay very large bribes to the
French newspapers to recommend their bonds. The French peasants at
that time believed their newspapers, bought the bonds, and the corrupt
newspapers grew rich and content. This easy money made it unnecessary
for them to go out and get advertising, and from that day to this
French newspapers have lacked the economic foundation that American
newspapers have. After the war, the bribes from financial quarters
largely disappeared and the French newspapers, without advertising, and
with the habit of venality, became more unscrupulous, because hungrier
than ever. French newspapermen, worse paid than ever, were reduced to
selling their services cheaper than ever before, and the corruption
became almost universal.
One famous French correspondent was fired by his famous newspaper
because he had taken a bribe from a foreign government--and had failed
to split it with the managing editor. Hardly a newspaper in Paris would
refuse a subsidy from a foreign government, but all this giving and
taking of bribes became trivial when Hitler came to power in 1933. From
then on the French press was inundated with German money, and from then
on could be dated the certainty that France would fall.
I want above all things to emphasize that there were a few honest,
capable, patriotic, and incorruptible French journalists. It is
sufficient commentary on the Vichy government that most of them had to
flee when the Germans came.
Q. _Is there any hope for the French? Do you think they can come back?_
A. Yes, because they have learned to hate; the Germans have taught
them. I know it sounds most un-Christian to insist upon the necessity
of hatred, but the thoughtful will remember that Christ hated evil,
and when he scourged the money-changers from the Temple he did it with
fury. Who will dispute that Hitler is more evil than money-changers in
a Temple, and that all the forces of Christianity ought to be ranged
together to destroy his hateful power. You cannot win a battle, you
cannot win a war, you cannot win any kind of fight that involves
killing unless you have the spirit to kill. You cannot have that spirit
unless you are convinced of the justice of your cause, and you know
that God is on your side, and that God approves your killing your
enemies.
The French never had any such spirit during the war, except perhaps
at the very end, but they have it now. During the war they were all
the time debating in their hearts whether it would not be better to
quit and make friends with the Germans. They thought in terms of the
last war. They thought of the Germans as the same sort of human beings
as the Germans of 1870 or of 1914-1918. They simply failed to grasp
the most important fact in the world of international affairs today,
namely that the Nazi Germans under Hitler are a new species of creature
never seen before in modern times, a deliberately amoral species of
men who reject every tenet of Christianity or of any other religion
which enjoins kindness, truth, and justice, and who are possessed of
such unique talents for war that they could conceivably achieve their
ambition to conquer the world if they were not stopped by a coalition
of all the decent peoples on earth. The French above all failed to
take seriously Hitler’s cool, considered statement that he intended to
exterminate France as a nation.
Q. _How about the treatment Hitler has given France so far; he hasn’t
tried to exterminate them, has he?_
A. No, but Hitler is not through with the French; he has not even begun
to treat them the way he intends to ultimately. There are several
reasons why he has been comparatively lenient to France so far. First,
he wished to end French resistance immediately in order that the whole
force of the German Army might be thrown at England. Second, he wished
to lull the French into a belief that by collaborating with the Germans
they might obtain the “honorable peace” Pétain talks about. Third, he
wished to make it appear to the British and eventually to the Americans
that surrender to Hitler is not so bad. Finally, he wished to get from
the Vichy government several important things he either did not dare
demand or was refused at the Compiègne armistice, chiefly that the
French should go to war against Britain or at any rate turn over the
French fleet and naval bases to the Germans for use against the British.
Q. _Do you imply that later on Hitler’s treatment of France will be
different?_
A. I do indeed. He will eventually fulfill the one principle which
has guided his foreign policy more than any other; to destroy the
power of France _ever_ to threaten Germany again. How could any
Frenchman forget the words of Hitler in _Mein Kampf_ when he wrote:
“We must at last become entirely clear about this: the German people’s
irreconcilable mortal enemy is and remains France”? And again: “The
political testament of the German nation ... must read substantially:
See an attack on Germany in any attempt to organize a military power
[_i.e._, France] on the frontiers of Germany, be it only in the form of
the creation of a state capable of becoming a military power [_i.e._,
France] and in that case regard it not only a right but a duty to
prevent the establishment of such a state [_i.e._, France] by all means
including the application of armed force, or in the event that such a
one be already founded, to repress it.” So you see what the fate of
France is bound to be, now that she has given up her arms and her will
to fight.
If left alone her fate will surely be that defined by Churchill in
his address to the French people while Vichy still hesitated: “I tell
you truly and what you must believe when I say this evil man, this
monstrous abortion of hatred and deceit, has resolved on nothing
less than the complete wiping out of the French nation and the
disintegration of its whole life and future. By all kinds of sly and
savage means he is plotting and working to crush forever the fountain
of characteristic French culture and French inspiration to the world.
It is not defeat that France will now be made to suffer at German
hands, but the doom of complete obliteration. Army, navy, air force,
religions, laws, language, culture, institutions, literature, history,
tradition, all are to be effaced by the brute strength of a triumphant
army and the scientific low cunning of a ruthless Police Force.”
This is true. This will be the fate of France unless the United States
and Britain and Russia defeat Hitler. Of course so long as the French
under the men of Vichy remain the strictly obedient vassal, Hitler will
have no need for sharper measures until the time comes for him to shape
France into her ultimate permanent role of coolie agricultural colony
of the Reich.
Q. _What did Hitler promise Pétain?_
A. He promised that if Pétain would sign the armistice, very soon
afterward he would give France a permanent and just peace, that German
troops would evacuate France, and in the New Order of Europe Germany
would help France become a free and independent partner. All this
was, however, tacitly contingent on the defeat of Britain. The German
excuse for not freeing France now is that the battle against Russia and
Britain is still going on. France meanwhile is compelled to suffer in
a slavery worse than she ever suffered in her entire national history.
Q. _What do you mean by the term “slavery”? The French people are not
being driven about in slave gangs, are they, with an overseer carrying
a black-snake whip and all that as in_ Uncle Tom’s Cabin_? I understood
the Germans were behaving very “correctly.”_
A. It is true that only the prisoners of war, who still number about
a million and a half, are in this literal, physical sense enslaved.
The rest of the French people, though, are just as much the slaves of
the Germans as if they were housed in slave pens and driven to work
in chains. Why? Because they must give up to their German masters
all the fruits of their labors except a bare subsistence. The French
people have been paying the Germans an indemnity of roughly ten million
dollars a day, or $3,650,000,000 a year, and with this money the
Germans have been buying from the French, who are forced to sell, all
the property of any value in the country, from objects of art to great
industrial plants. Consider the size of this indemnity. The maximum
yearly reparations payment Germany had to make after the last war was
$600,000,000. That is one sixth of what the French have had to pay in
the first twelve months of German rule in this war.
Q. _How was this indemnity fixed?_
A. In the armistice agreement which Pétain so trustfully signed, it
was stipulated that the French would pay for the cost of maintaining
the German Army in France. No sum was named. You can imagine the
astonishment of the French when, after they had laid down their arms
and there was no possibility of refusing, they learned they had to
pay the Germans 400,000,000 francs, or roughly $10,000,000 a day. It
will give you some notion of the difference between the old-fashioned
German conqueror and the new-fashioned Nazi to recollect that after
the Franco-German War of 1870 Bismarck exacted a _total_ indemnity of
$1,250,000,000, or one-third of what the French of today are forced to
pay _yearly_.
Q. _How does this French payment compare with the total amounts Germany
paid for reparation after the last war?_
A. The maximum estimate of German reparations payments in cash and kind
is about $5,000,000,000, which is almost precisely the amount of money
Americans lent Germany and never got back. It is the literal truth
that Germany paid no reparations. The United States paid them. I was a
correspondent in Germany during all those crucial years from the French
occupation of the Ruhr onward, and most of us who were on the spot
agree that despite the dislocation of wealth in Germany the country as
a whole had not lost wealth through payment of reparations, since for
every dollar that went to France or England, an American dollar came in.
All critics of the Versailles treaty insist that its worst feature was
the reparations, but if you keep in mind the fundamental fact that the
Germans borrowed (and never repaid) every cent they used to meet the
reparations claims, the Versailles treaty and the German complaints
about it take on a very different aspect. This is so important that it
cannot be overemphasized, because one of the principal reasons why the
United States withdrew from the peace and why England and eventually
France relaxed their vigilance and permitted Germany to arm and grow
into the terrible power she is today, was the feeling that the Germans
after all had been treated unjustly.
You could make a case for the argument that our own “guilt complex”
about Versailles allowed Hitler to tear up the treaty and finally
attack the world. Paul Birdsall has pointed out that this “guilt
complex” received powerful encouragement from John Maynard Keynes,
who correctly analyzed the economic impossibility of the reparations
clauses, but went on from there to condemn the whole treaty as a
Carthaginian peace. It has taken Hitler, who climbed to power on his
denunciation of Versailles, to show us how lenient a peace it was.
Remembering that the Germans actually paid no reparations, it is
instructive to examine what they formally paid in comparison with
what they are now extorting from the French. The Allies at the London
conference in April 1921 fixed their demands on Germany for “damage
done to civilians” at $33,000,000,000--which at the time was considered
insanely high, but incidentally is $11,000,000,000 less than the
$44,000,000,000 the United States has now appropriated and recommended
for national defense. Isn’t this a startling confirmation of the
mistake the American Congress made in repudiating the League of Nations
and refusing to ratify the security treaty with England and France?
It is fantastic to realize that we could have paid the entire bill
for the last war and if by so doing we could have prevented this war,
we would still have saved money. We will eventually learn that the
isolationists’ or appeasers’ program for America is not only the most
dangerous but infinitely the most costly. France has certainly learned
how true this is.
_At the rate they are now paying, the French will have paid the Germans
in about seventeen months an amount equivalent to all the reparations
payments ($5,000,000,000) made by the Germans with American money in
the twelve years during which the Germans pretended to pay._ They
stopped even the pretense of payment you remember after the Lausanne
Conference in 1932, even before Hitler came to power. This immense
indemnity the French are paying now is merely an interim payment for
the alleged cost of maintaining the German Army. Actually the cost of
maintaining the army is estimated to be not 400,000,000 but 125,000,000
francs, so that the Germans have a surplus of 275,000,000 francs or
around $7,000,000 for their daily “purchases.”
Q. _Why did the Germans select the figure 400,000,000 francs daily?_
A. Because this was the amount the French were spending on the war.
In their 1940 war budget they allocated 106 billion francs to the air
force, 36 billion to the army, and 15 billion to the navy, making a
total of 157 billion, which is roughly 400,000,000 francs a day. Hitler
reckoned if the French could afford to spend this sum on fighting the
Germans, they could spend the same amount to feed, clothe, transport,
lodge, amuse, and otherwise support the Germans as they are doing now.
Q. _But if the French were spending this much money on the war anyway,
how are they economically worse off by continuing the same expenditure?_
A. They are incomparably worse off because formerly the proceeds
of this sum were consumed by Frenchmen; today they are consumed by
Germans. The money formerly circulated throughout the French economic
body as healthy blood; today it is sucked and swallowed by the vast
German leech. Furthermore the French expenditure on the war did not
cease with their defeat; they still have large expenses besides their
tribute to Germany.
Q. _What means do the Germans use to buy up French businesses? Why
don’t the French refuse to sell?_
A. Some of them do, but the Germans always have the power to force them
to sell.
Q. _Why do the Germans bother to go through the form of buying, if they
can confiscate whatever they want?_
A. Because they can get what they want with much less trouble and in
better shape and be able to make better use of it if they go through
the form of purchase. They had their whole system of plundering France
worked out before the war. During the prewar period thousands of
Germans crisscrossed France, as tourists or traveling salesmen. They
located the most desirable industrial or other properties, nearly all,
incidentally, in the rich Northern half now Occupied France. When the
Germans came in they rushed a specially trained corps of experts to
all the banks and business houses, embargoed banking transactions and
ordered every security holder in France to give a list of his property.
Soon they knew the precise financial position of every important
corporation or individual in France. With this knowledge they were able
to buy into the control of all the businesses they wanted. Sometimes if
the French owner refused to sell, the Germans could make the owner’s
bank foreclose on his loan and thus force the owner to raise money
by selling a share of his business. The Germans were modest; usually
they wanted only 51 per cent. Sometimes the Germans would withhold
raw materials from a stubborn industrialist. Sometimes the German
authorities forcibly confiscated the property; just often enough to
remind Frenchmen that, if they liked, the Germans could take every
machine, sack of flour, and stick of furniture in the country without
recompense.
Another most effective weapon used by the Germans to force the French
to sell their businesses is the German edict that all concerns, from
shops to factories, must remain open and keep their full roll of
employees. Since almost no business is being done, and most concerns
would normally have closed, this rule drives most businessmen into
bankruptcy, as it was intended to do. By these and other similar means,
the Germans, using the francs paid them by the French, have gone far
toward buying “legal” control of the most valuable property in France.
With appalling swiftness the French people are being pauperized and
reduced to slaves in what used to be their own homes.
They are like the Negroes on a pre-Civil War plantation in our own
South. The Germans, like the white folks, live in the big house, eat
caviar and chicken, drink the wonderful wines of France, clothe their
women with the creations of the great couturiers, and promenade the
Boulevards while the French people, half-starving, broken, humiliated,
work desperately hard to support their masters. The French are now not
even being treated as well as slaves under a master considerate enough
to wish to keep his slaves in good health and fit working order. I
should think it would be fair to say that out of an eight-hour day the
Frenchman today has to devote four hours to working for the Germans.
Q. _If these are the interim armistice terms imposed on France, what
will the final terms of peace be like?_
A. You can be sure that the German demands will be limited only by the
total wealth of France. We know Hitler intends the total productive
wealth of the country to pass into German hands. Without waiting for
peace, the Germans are, as we noted, already systematically stripping
France of her movable valuables and taking them to Germany, and
buying control of the immovable property they want. But if the time
ever comes, when Hitler makes a so-called peace with France, we may
expect that he will take pleasure in basing his demands partly on the
Versailles treaty.
He will first demand that the reparations Germany paid after the last
war be paid back; then he will demand full compensation for the German
merchant and fishing fleets, and the railroad equipment, cattle, etc.,
turned over to the Allies after the last war to make up for similar
items seized by the Germans; he will demand replacement of all the
shipping Germany was compelled to build for the Allies to take the
place of the ships sunk by the Imperial Navy; he will bill the Allies
for the coal Germany delivered the Allies to replace the coal taken
from the mines of Northern France during the war. After the broad
category of claims from the last war has been put down, Hitler will
then ask for reparations for this war, and of course he can set any sum
he likes.
Q. _But why should Hitler take so much trouble to claim formal
reparations? Since he obviously intends permanently to cripple his
victim, why should he bother to go through the legalistic form of
itemizing his claims?_
A. Because that is the way Hitler and his Nazis always do things. The
German, even the Nazi, is an orderly fellow. The first principle of
all Germans is “_Ordnung muss sein._” Aside from that, or above it, is
the fact that Hitler, deeply conscious of the illegality of all his
actions, beginning with the seizure of power, has always insisted on
clothing everything he does with the appearance of lawfulness. When he
seized power he did it by banning the Communist and then the Socialist
parties from the Reichstag, and thus obtaining a majority vote in the
Reichstag. Whenever he attacks a nation he announces a long list of
reasons, backed sometimes by an extraordinary array of documents, many
of them forged, to prove he not only had a right to attack but was
compelled to do so.
This necessity for self-justification explains also one of the
queerest Nazi practices in their torture chambers. When they have
finished torturing a victim, they invariably make him sign a statement
testifying that he had been well treated. One would think since the
Nazi power is absolute, they would not care, or bother to take this
trouble, but they seem to be under a profound compulsion to make this
gesture toward the justice they have in practice abolished.
Q. _What is the use of our maintaining diplomatic relations with Vichy?
In view of all that you have said I should think we ought to withdraw
our recognition of Vichy and transfer it to de Gaulle and the Free
French._
A. I suppose the chief reason we do not break diplomatic relations
with Vichy is the same reason why we have not broken formal relations
with Germany: in both cases we wish to keep a diplomatic observer on
the scene. That is understandable in the case of Germany, since we
are only formally at peace with her, and are morally at war and all
the world knows it. In other words, until we begin to shoot, it would
not make much difference whether we broke relations with Germany or
not. But in the case of Vichy, it would make a world of difference if
we took our recognition away from Pétain and gave it to de Gaulle. It
is true that de Gaulle is actually in control of only some central
African French territory while Pétain nominally rules all France, but
we have continued our recognition of all the governments in exile and
refused any kind of recognition to the Quislings and Rexists, and in
this spirit we ought to withdraw our recognition from Pétain. It would
immensely hearten the Free French to have our recognition and if we
extended Lease-Lend aid to de Gaulle’s forces it could have important
military consequences. However, I suppose Washington is still hoping
against hope that we may one day be able to gain some profit from
having treated Pétain as well as we have. I personally do not believe
we ever will.
6. THE UNITED STATES
Q. _What is the greatest danger we face as a nation?_
A. Our complacency. It is colossal, cosmic, suicidal.
Q. _Can you still call us complacent after we have conscripted an
Army, begun to create an Air Force, gone far toward building a
two-ocean Navy, flung a line of outposts from Iceland to South America,
appropriated and recommended fifty billion dollars for defense, and
told our Navy to sink German fighting ships?_
A. The very list you name reeks with complacency. All of that put
together does not equal a week of what even the “despised” Russians
are doing now. The bitterest thing yet said about us was: “Better a
Bolshevik who kills Germans than a Democrat who kills time.” We still
unwaveringly and unblushingly expect somebody else to do the job for
us. Now it is Russia.
To begin with we said France and England would do the job; then Norway;
then the Low Countries; then the Balkans; and now we sit back and
actually rely on the Russians. We cheer the news that the Navy is
going to fight but shrink at the idea of an American Expeditionary
Force. Why? For the same reason that war with Japan has many more
advocates than war with Germany, because we could leave a sea war to
the professional fighting men of the Navy. We shirk calling things by
their proper names. Never have we used so many weasel words. Conscripts
are “selectees”; naval war is “hunting pirates”; hiring the British
to do our fighting for us is “lease-lend”; isolationists become
“noninterventionists”; interventionists argue tediously for “all-out
aid,” but few of them ever come out plainly and say we ought to go to
war. All of this evasion stems from the refusal to face the supreme
reality, namely that we have to go to war, that it is our war and was
our war from the beginning.
Q. _But haven’t we gone far toward recognizing that it is our war by
our lease-lend appropriations of around thirteen billion dollars?_