5. FRANCE (continued 2)

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.