Not This Time!
Reading edition
Raemaekers the Prophet
“FOR twenty years I have clearly foreseen Germany’s present attack on the world. For twenty years I have been drawing and publishing the same type of cartoons which have attracted so much notice since the war. Seven years before the war I was already being called ‘ein feind Deutschland’ by the German press. I cannot possibly express to you the unhappiness which I felt at being absolutely certain of the impending doom, and at the same time being incapable of making people foresee and believe it. My friends used to call me ‘the man who can see ghosts even in sunshine.’ Yet it was I, not they, who really knew the beasts as all the world knows them today; I was born in the little town of Lemberg near Roermond, at a distance of only a few miles from the German frontier, and have known the beasts all my life, not only in my own country, but also in theirs, which I have visited many times. I might almost say that I have visited it every year of my life. In Holland we have a saying that ‘even the best German has stolen a horse.’ I do not believe that there is any German who is not a pan-German. All of them suffer from this national and nation-wide megalomania.”
—From a conversation with Raemaekers reported in Eric Fisher Wood’s “Note-Book of an Intelligence Officer.”
