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Knickerbocker
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Title: Is Tomorrow Hitler's?
200 Questions on the Battle of Mankind
Author: Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker
Release Date: September 8, 2021 [eBook #66251]
Language: English
Produced by: Tim Lindell, Craig Kirkwood, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital
Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IS TOMORROW HITLER'S? ***
Transcriber’s Note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
* * * * *
Is Tomorrow Hitler’s?
* * * * *
H. R. KNICKERBOCKER
IS TOMORROW HITLER’S?
200 Questions
On the Battle of Mankind
Reynal & Hitchcock : New York
* * * * *
COPYRIGHT, 1941, BY H. R. KNICKERBOCKER
_All rights reserved, including the right to
reproduce this book, or portions
thereof, in any form_
Second Printing
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE CORNWALL PRESS, CORNWALL, N. Y.
* * * * *
TO AGNES
CONTENTS
_NOTE: This descriptive table of contents gives only a sampling of the
many provocative questions discussed._
CHAPTER PAGE
FOREWORD xi
INTRODUCTION xv
1. GERMANY 1
Have you ever met Hitler?
What impression does he make when you meet him?
Does Hitler’s personality grow upon closer acquaintance?
Is Hitler personally brave?
Is it true that Hitler is a homosexual?
Are women attracted to Hitler?
What kind of public speaker is Hitler?
What is the secret of Hitler’s power?
Do you think Hitler is personally responsible for the war?
Is Hitler the real boss of Germany?
Are any of the men around Hitler of a calibre to succeed him?
Does Hitler actually direct his battles as did Napoleon?
Why didn’t Hitler attack England after Dunkirk?
What was Hitler’s second mistake?
Isn’t there anything constructive about Hitlerism?
How has Hitler run his show without money, without gold,
without foreign exchange?
Can the Nazi economy continue to run indefinitely?
How can you describe the German people as hysterical?
What would happen if Hitler were killed?
Why doesn’t somebody kill Hitler?
What was the explanation of the bombing attempt on Hitler in
the Munich Beer Hall?
Were the Nazi atrocity stories exaggerated?
Do you consider _Out of the Night_ authentic?
Hasn’t Hitler proved he is an enemy of Bolshevism by attacking
Russia?
What should we do with Hitler after he is defeated?
2. RUSSIA 88
What is the best way for the United States to help the Russians?
How can the Russian resistance to the German attack be explained?
What do the Russians fight for?
Is it true that the Soviet government has restored freedom of
worship?
Are we running a risk if we support the Russians?
Can Stalin be trusted?
Under what circumstances would Stalin make a separate peace?
What would be the effect of such a compromise peace on Great
Britain and the United States?
What is the NKVD?
Are the peasants better off on collective farms?
How about the Soviet elections of which we hear?
Why do you give so much importance to the Soviet Terror?
How do you explain Russian inefficiency and wastefulness?
How has the Red Army been able to stand up so well?
Could Stalin carry on with the resources of the Urals?
3. ENGLAND 139
What place will Churchill have in history?
Is Churchill really backed by the English people?
Can Churchill be trusted?
What does Churchill think of the United States?
What are Churchill’s characteristics as a person?
Would the British Navy survive the fall of the British Isles?
How can the flight of Hess be explained?
What is the secret of Churchill’s success?
What are Churchill’s principal interests?
4. WAR AIMS 184
What are Britain’s war aims?
What was the meaning of the Churchill-Roosevelt meeting?
How can the gains of victory be consolidated?
Will the United States come out of the war in a better economic
condition than others?
What will the peace conference be like?
In what sense will the conquered peoples be slaves?
How could we compete with Hitler after a German victory?
Can’t American labor produce better and cheaper than slave labor?
What are Hitler’s plans for Europe?
What kind of negotiated peace would be acceptable to the Axis?
What is the text of Hitler’s terms?
What chance has Communism in a defeated Germany?
Is there any way to render Germany impotent?
Is the problem of the Germans insoluble?
Will England come out of the war with a socialist system?
What is to be done with all the former nations of Europe?
5. FRANCE 234
Why did France fall?
Were there traitors on the French General Staff?
How did treason manifest itself in the operations of the army?
Who gave the orders?
What is the opinion of informed Frenchmen?
Is Pétain a patriot or traitor, or misguided?
Is Pétain moved by personal ambition?
What would Hitler do if he finally tired of fooling with Vichy?
What about Darlan? And Laval?
Has Laval a chance to seize power?
In what way are we Americans very much like the French?
Are there any encouraging differences between ourselves and the
unfortunate French?
Is there any hope that the French may come back?
Will Hitler’s treatment of France be different later?
How was the French indemnity fixed?
How does this compare with the reparations paid by Germany
after the World War?
What is Hitler doing with French industry?
Should we continue diplomatic relations with Vichy?
6. THE UNITED STATES 293
What is the greatest danger we face as a nation today?
Is our morale very bad?
What is the state of our armament?
If we have nothing to fight with, how can we go to war?
Could Hitler succeed in invading the British Isles?
Why doesn’t Ireland allow Britain to take over naval bases?
Is it true that Hitler wants to destroy the United States?
Haven’t we plenty to do at home without getting into a foreign
war?
Why do you think we ought to go to war with Germany today?
Why would a declaration of war be worth so much immediately?
What effect would a declaration of war have on the morale of
the Army?
But weren’t we suckers in the last war?
Would an American declaration of war have any effect on the
morale of the Germans?
Would another A.E.F. be required?
Might a new League of Nations be successful?
7. FIFTH COLUMNISTS 339
What makes Lindbergh the way he is?
Are we fair in calling Lindbergh a Copperhead?
What is the reason for the divorce between Lindbergh and the
American people?
Why did Lindbergh attack the Jews?
What is to be the fate of the Jews?
What are Lindbergh’s arguments against our entering the war?
What is the answer to America’s Fifth Columnists?
FOREWORD
I met H. R. Knickerbocker way back in 1927 or thereabouts. Those were
the good old days. They were the days of the Long Armistice. No one
had ever heard of the Rome-Berlin Axis, Stuka dive bombers, or the
Haushofer Plan. Mr. Roosevelt was out of politics, Mr. Churchill was
a chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mr. Lindbergh had just flown the
Atlantic. We talked of such neolithic creatures as Pilsudski of Poland
and Alexander of Jugoslavia, and most of us thought that Hitler was a
bad Austrian joke, more or less. Those were the good old days. Even so,
thunderheads were gathering.
I first met Mr. Knickerbocker in Berlin. This was fitting, since
Berlin was his bailiwick. We all had bailiwicks in those days. Duranty
was in Moscow, Raymond Swing was in London, and Dorothy Thompson had
just left Berlin. I was bouncing all over the place. I didn’t have my
bailiwick yet. We were all very good friends. We formed a kind of fluid
international community. We were buzzards in every foreign office, and
kings on every wagon-lit.
We didn’t meet often, since we lived in different cities, and it took
something of a catastrophe to bring us all together. When we did meet,
the vault of heaven shook. I remember days--and nights--in Geneva,
Bucharest, Cairo, Helsingfors. I think of Sheean, the Mowrers, Webb
Miller, Shirer, Jay Allen, Fodor, Whitaker, and many more. Don’t let me
sound nostalgic. I am thinking merely that we have all grown up. We are
not cameras any longer.
This foreword is not about Mr. Knickerbocker’s book. Let that speak
for itself. Knick is the most pertinacious, plausible, and inquisitive
question-asker I ever met. In this book he answers questions instead
of asking them. I like to see the tables turned. I don’t know that I
agree with all his answers. But let him answer them.
This foreword is about Mr. Knickerbocker himself. His flaming red
hair, his flaming red personality (I mean “red” chromatically, not
politically) are famous on four continents. He needs no introduction.
But certain nuggets of memory stay fixed in mind. I remember the time
he fed me caviar inside a baked potato, at Horcher’s in Berlin, and
I remember the time I fed him a dinner in London that, deliberately,
we planned so that it would cost exactly five pounds. I remember the
time that he took me to hear Putzi Hanfstaengl hammer out a tornado
of Wagner in the Hotel Kaiserhof, and I remember the time I took him
across the freezing Danube, on the way to Sofia, in what was supposed
to be a rowboat. I remember week-ends on the Semmering, bad oysters
in Madrid, evenings in the Café Royal, drinks in Rome, Budapest, and
points beyond.
Knick’s career has been spectacular in more than one dimension. He
once set out to fly the Atlantic, as a passenger in a German plane,
long before the Lindbergh flight; he was the only correspondent during
the Ethiopian war to glimpse the front from the air; he has had more
interviews with European heads of state, I imagine, than any other
newspaper man alive.
Mr. Knickerbocker was born in Texas in 1898. He went to Europe in
1923, and, a student of psychiatry at the University of Munich, walked
straight into Hitler’s Beerhall Putsch. He studied briefly in Vienna,
and then got a job in Berlin on the _New York Evening Post-Philadelphia
Public Ledger_ foreign service. Since then his career has been a
calendar of most of the great events of our time. He spent two years in
Moscow as correspondent for the International News Service (this was in
1924-26, when Trotsky was declining and the N.E.P. expanding), and in
1928 took over Dorothy Thompson’s job as chief correspondent in Berlin
for the _Public Ledger_. He won a Pulitzer prize for distinguished
foreign correspondence--a series of articles on Russia’s Five Year
Plan, but for almost ten years Berlin was the blazing focus of his life.
Meantime there were trips to take. In 1933 he travelled all over Europe
for a series, “Will War Come in Europe?” for I.N.S. He saw the death
of Dollfuss in Vienna, and the burial of Hindenburg in Germany. He met
Mussolini, Masaryk, King Alexander, King Boris, Otto Habsburg, and
hosts of others. He did one series of articles on Russia and the Baltic
states, comparing living standards under communism and capitalism, and
another surveying economic aspects of the Europe that was crumbling.
Came the war in Ethiopia in 1935, which he covered on Haile Selassie’s
side. I will never forget the agitated days in London when Knick was
accumulating the vast equipment he took along. In 1936 came the Spanish
civil war, and the next year the war in China. He saw bombings all
the way from Toledo to Nanking. He returned to Europe to cover the
Anschluss crisis and the Munich disaster; then he dipped briefly into
South America, and reached Peru. Then Europe called again; he saw the
beginning of World War II in London and France, and in 1940 accompanied
the French armies till they collapsed, and then saw the battle of
Britain at its fiercest climax, in September.
But let me go back to those days in Berlin. The main point I want to
make has to do with Knickerbocker in Berlin. During the turbulent
1930’s he was much more than a journalist covering Germany; he was a
definite public character in German political life. After Hindenburg
and Hitler, he was practically the best known man in the country. His
_réclame_ was fabulous, personally and politically. Everyone knew the
lithe, active, red-haired Herr Knickerbocker (pronounce the K, please).
Once a musical comedy was named for him--supreme tribute!
Partly this was because he published half a dozen books in German,
compiled from the long newspaper articles he wrote, which appeared
serially in the _Vossische Zeitung_ or the _Berliner Tageblatt_. The
books were extraordinarily successful in Germany; they introduced
German readers to a new type of American journalism. Among them were
_Der Rote Handel Droht!_, _Der Rote Handel Lockt!_, _Kommt Europe
Wieder Hoch?_, _Rote Wirtschaft und Weisse Wohlstand!_, _England’s
Wirtschaft und Schwarzhemden!_, _Deutschland So oder So!_, and _Kommt
Krieg in Europa?_
Knick knew practically every human being of consequence in Germany. He
explored the country from top to bottom. He talked to Hitler, Spengler,
Brüning, Goering, Goebbels. Then Hitler came to power. At the time
Knickerbocker was in the middle of a German lecture tour that had begun
in the Lessing Hochschule in Berlin. Knick watched the Nazi revolution
crushingly obliterate all opposition. He wrote a series exposing the
Brown Terror that caused violent comment in New York as well as Berlin.
Presently he was excluded from the country. There are hate affairs as
well as love affairs. The hate affair between Hitler and Knickerbocker
is one of the most torrid in political history.
But this should not detract from the main point, which is that Knick
knows the real Germany, loves it, and respects it. He is a Nazi-hater,
but not a German-hater. His authority on the subject is authentic and
complete.
_John Gunther_
INTRODUCTION
There is no such thing as winning a fight without passion. France went
to war apologetically; France fought the war without music, and so
France lost. Britain went to war apologetically, but Britain had the
inestimable advantage of being bombed, and today for the first time
in 100 years Britain is angry and is fighting as she has never fought
before. We, the United States, are today apologetic, so sorry that it
seems we after all are called upon to fight, and some of us still say
we should not fight, and others say we must fight only with aviators
and sailors, and never with infantrymen, and very few indeed are the
strains of martial music throughout the land. From all sides we are
called upon to restrain our emotions, and it is said that the cool head
is the shrewd head, and that is correct, of course, but a cool head
without a hot heart is useless on a battlefield. Without anger there
can be no victory and useful anger is based upon understanding. Unless
the American people can be brought to understand that our national
existence and our individual security are today in peril, and unless
the American people become angry at the enemy, we shall become a part
of Hitler’s Reich.
History may eventually record that Britain was saved by the bombs
Hitler has rained upon her since the fall of France. Unless they
annihilate the British, these bombs will have fulfilled a function
Hitler never imagined. He thought they would terrorize the British into
surrender; instead the bombs aroused a resistance such as no other
population has ever shown, for the prolonged punishment of Britain’s
cities has been worse than anything we know of elsewhere, including
Belgrade, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Madrid, Barcelona, or Chungking. The
British required this experience to awaken them. They had been at war
eight months when the Germans finally attacked in the West, but they
had not given up the grand old British custom of the Friday to Tuesday
week end. It took the German break-through on the Meuse, and then the
German bombs on London, to shock every inhabitant of the British Isles
into the realization that they faced death for their nation and death
or slavery for themselves unless they fought with a ferocity even
greater than that of their jungle enemies.
We are today as sound asleep as the British were before May 1940.
We are as sound asleep as the French were before they saw their
fortifications fall and their army of 4,500,000 soldiers with the
tradition of Napoleon dissolve between May 10 and June 17, in five
weeks of the greatest military debacle of all time. We have had no
bombs on America, and presumably shall not have them until it is time
to trek for the Rocky Mountains. A sober American patriot remarked,
“How fortunate Britain has been to have had the bombs to arouse her
martial spirit before it was too late. If Hitler were to have a lapse
in judgment and send just half a dozen bombers over New York, and drop
just half a dozen bombs, it might be the salvation of America.” But
Hitler will do no such thing. He is glad to accommodate those Americans
who refuse to believe they are threatened until they are physically
attacked. When and if the Germans break through upon America we shall
awake to find ourselves alone, cut off, surrounded, outnumbered,
outgunned, and outlawed amid a world of enemies.
A few of us, chiefly correspondents formerly in Germany, have been
trying to do duty for German bombs on America, and for the German
break-through. We have been called alarmists. For years the world of
international observers was divided into two groups: the one composed
of nearly everybody on earth outside of Germany, who understood nothing
of the true character of Hitler’s Third Reich; and the second tiny
group, small enough to be contained within a lecture hall, composed
of correspondents, diplomats, and a few businessmen who had firsthand
knowledge of what the Nazis mean. Today a good many persons without
this intimate knowledge of Nazi Germany have been able to decide for
themselves about the character of a regime which has overrun fifteen
countries in three years, but the danger to America still looks very
remote and impersonal to millions of patriotic citizens. I have been
talking to about 100,000 of these citizens, during a lecture series.
My thesis was in brief: That the United States should be in a state of
formal, shooting war with Germany as speedily as possible because only
by this means can we make the world safe for America; and that we must
realize that after going to war we have only begun a task which may
last for many years and one which we can fulfill only by learning to
fight with even more fervor than the demoniac Nazi shock troops, and by
greater national self-sacrifice than we have ever been called upon to
make.
On this thesis I was asked around 3,000 questions during the question
period following the lectures. For this book I have chosen around
200 as representative of what the American people are thinking. I
have arranged the questions in categories and have added many recent
ones to bring the Forum up to date. Eager, painful, almost agonizing
concern for the future of America was the background of these queries
from audiences in 128 communities, including two-thirds of all cities
of more than 100,000 population and scores of towns and villages. The
people with whom I talked ranged from millionaire winter tourists
in Florida to coal miners in Pennsylvania, applegrowers in Yakima,
oilmen in Oklahoma, college boys in the Great Lakes states, farmers
in the Midwest, workers, bankers, club ladies, teachers, cowhands,
Catholics, Jews, Protestants, atheists, Yankees, Southerners, Texans,
Westerners--Americans.
I am convinced that these earnest Americans, representing through
their family and friendly connections at least ten times their number,
or more than 1,000,000 persons, are far in advance of the President’s
moves toward active defense, just as the President has always been far
ahead of the Congress. They wanted action even before the President
offered it. Among 3,000 questioners there were not more than six openly
hostile hecklers from the floor. Would it be too hopeful to say that
America is 2,994 to 6 in favor of liberty?
1. GERMANY
Q. _Have you ever met Hitler?_
A. Many times. From 1923 until today I have watched and studied him
and a good part of that time I was close enough to have opportunities
for firsthand observation. I first heard him speak in August 1923, not
long before his unsuccessful attempt to seize power, in the famous
Beer Hall Putsch, and then I witnessed the Putsch, and reported his
trial with Ludendorff for treason. He was released from Landsberg
Prison in December 1924 where he had been held in comfortable “fortress
confinement” just long enough for him to have time conveniently to
write _Mein Kampf_. I interviewed him for the first time in the Brown
House in Munich in 1932. Thereafter I had a series of interviews with
him, and was present at many of the great moments of his career.
Q. _What impression does he make when you meet him?_
A. The first impression he makes upon any non-German is that he looks
silly. Not to a German, mind you, and I suppose he did not look silly
to any of those heads of European states who crawled to Berchtesgaden
to get their orders. But to a foreigner not subject to his commands he
certainly looks silly. I know that is a strong word to use about a man
who has already conquered a continent but it fits.
I remember well the first time I ever laid eyes on him, in August
1923, when he was speaking at the Zirkus Krone in Munich--I broke out
laughing. Even if you had never heard of him you would be bound to
say, “He looks like a caricature of himself.” The moustache and the
lock of hair over the forehead help this look, but chiefly it is the
expression of his face, and especially the blank stare of his eyes,
and the foolish set of his mouth in repose. Sometimes he looks like a
man who ought to go around with his mouth open, chin hanging in the
style of a surprised farm hand. Other times he clamps his lips together
so tightly and juts out his jaw with such determination that again he
looks silly, as though he were putting on an act.
Indeed Hitler is, more than anything else, an actor. He will go on
being one the rest of his life, a great actor who in his role as tyrant
conqueror will have affected the destinies of more millions of people
than any other human being in history, but an actor to the last, a
tragedian whom no one would take seriously until he began shooting at
his audience. Even in the midst of his triumphs he manages to look
silly to any outsider capable for the moment of detaching himself from
horrified contemplation of the fate inflicted upon his victims.
I remember watching him roll down the Ringstrasse in Vienna standing
beside the chauffeur in a cream-colored Mercedes car, with his arm
outstretched in the stiff salute he affects on such occasions, the
hand rigidly held at a slight angle downward. It was the moment of
his conquest of Austria. The streets were crowded with half a million
people, a few cheering sincerely, many cheering out of fear, and
hundreds of thousands grim-faced, weeping inwardly.
At that moment when I, too, felt like weeping at the abasement of the
city where I had worked and danced and studied and played when I first
came to Europe fifteen years before, even at such a moment I found
myself smiling and saying to friends looking out the window of my room
in the Hotel Bristol, “Doesn’t he look silly?” That oversized cap of
his, the military cap with the too-large crown and the visor which
completely hides his low forehead!
There is something absurd even about his stance as he rides his
victorious chariot through freshly conquered cities. He is softly fat
about the hips and this gives his figure a curiously female appearance.
A scientist friend of mine watching him once remarked that Hitler
seemed afflicted by _steatopygia_, which he defined as “an excessive
development of fat on the buttocks, especially in _females_.” It is
possible that the strongly feminine element in Hitler’s character
is one of the reasons for his violence. He realizes his femininity,
is ashamed of it, wishes to be a man, and overcompensates by brutal
behavior. This little fatty-hipped, slope-shouldered, lonely figure,
standing so inflexibly, his arm outstretched so tautly, his eyes
staring over the heads of his subjects, is incredible. “No,” you say to
yourself, “this can’t be true.”
If this odd creature finally conquers the world, his last victims,
we once proud Americans, would still be saying as we filed into
concentration camp, “It’s impossible. He looks too silly.” But he is
not silly. My friend, Captain Philippe Barres of the French Army, one
of those who did not surrender, remarked to another Frenchman: “You
say Hitler is merely a madman, an idiot. I suppose you must be one of
those Frenchmen who prefer to have been conquered by an idiot than by a
clever man.”
Oh no, he certainly is not an idiot; but is it not incredible that
this mighty conqueror, now master over two hundred and fifty million
Europeans--more civilized white human beings than ever before came
under the tyranny of a single despot--and now reaching out to drive
another thousand million under his yoke, that this man usually looks
completely insignificant? I am sure that was the first impression
Mussolini had of him. I saw the two dictators when they first met and
Hitler never looked sillier in his life than at that time.
Q. _How did the two behave toward each other? Did they seem to like
each other?_
A. Not much. It was June 14, 1934 when Hitler first visited Italy to
meet the Duce and discuss with him the fate of Austria. Hitler had
not yet created his army and Mussolini could still talk on terms of
equality, or even a little better. Mussolini wanted to impress his
guest as much as possible with the power and glory of Fascist Italy.
Hitler had to try to impress Mussolini with the coming strength of Nazi
Germany. Mussolini, being at home, had all the advantage. For Hitler
the trip itself must have been a great experience because it was the
first time he had ever been out of Germany or Austria in his whole
life, if you except the time he spent as a soldier in the trenches of
Northern France.
Mussolini proved a great stage manager. He arranged the meeting to take
place in Venice, and had his guest land on the airfield of the Lido.
The fact that it was an island made it easy for the authorities to
exclude the public, and when Hitler arrived he stepped directly into a
perfectly appointed theater.
There were representatives of all the Italian armed forces, companies
of Bersaglieri, Alpini, Sailors, Airmen, and the Black Shirt Fascist
Militia, and a group of the highest civilian officials in black uniform
with the black-tasseled fez caps of the party, surrounding the Duce
himself who was in the powder-blue uniform of a Corporal of the Fascist
Militia.
Mussolini used to think of himself as the successor to the Corsican
Corporal. I remember once noticing that the only ornament on his desk
was a framed portrait of Napoleon. I remarked on it, and Mussolini
exclaimed, “A great Italian!” One of the Duce’s most ambitious literary
ventures was a play called _The Hundred Days_. Whether he is still able
after Greece, Libya, and Ethiopia to fancy himself in the role of a
conqueror when he meets Hitler now, he still appears in the uniform of
a corporal as when he met Hitler the first time.
The only persons on the field not in uniform were the foreign
correspondents and we looked very dim compared with the brilliant
Italians. Mussolini appeared a few minutes early and when he strode
down the line and looked over his warriors he made a most vigorous
impression. He had an electric step; his feet seemed to bounce off the
ground, and the air vibrated with his personality. After he finished
reviewing his troops he came over and stood within a few feet of us and
we waited.
Presently Hitler’s Junkers plane roared down out of the sky, landed,
taxied up to us, and came to a full stop. The door opened. The Italian
troops, dazzling in full dress, presented arms. The Fascist officials
stood at attention. The sunshine sparkled on Mussolini’s gold braid
and the Duce, stepping close to the open door of the airplane, flung
out his arm in a Roman salute with so much energy that it seemed as
though he might lose his hand. He trembled with passion. Then, out of
the shadow of the door, emerged Hitler. There, before the splendid
Italians, he stood, a faint little man arrayed in his old worn
raincoat, his blue serge suit, and a brand-new Fedora hat. His right
hand faltered up in the Nazi salute.
He gives the salute two ways. For reviewing his own troops or crowds
he gives it stiff-arm. This is his Prussian style. For greeting
individuals he gives the salute, Viennese style, with a limp hand, the
arm not outstretched but bent at the elbow and the hand flopping back
until it almost touches his shoulder, then flopping forward feebly. He
used the Viennese version on Mussolini. Hitler was embarrassed. Later
we learned he had threatened to dismiss Baron von Neurath, then chief
of protocol, for having advised him to come in civilian clothes.
The Fuehrer stood for a moment, blinking in the sunlight, then
awkwardly came down the steps, and the two dictators shook hands.
They were not over three yards from me, and I was fascinated to watch
the expressions on their faces. Beneath the obligatory cordiality I
fancied I could see an expression of amusement in Mussolini’s eyes and
of resentment in Hitler’s. At any rate Hitler’s embarrassment did not
diminish, for when Mussolini led him down the line of troops he did not
know how to carry it off. This was the first time he had ever had to
inspect foreign troops, but that was not the chief trouble. The chief
trouble was his hat.
He had taken it off as a salute to the Italian flag, and he started to
put it back on his head, thought better of it, and held it in his right
hand. Then, as he walked beside the Duce, who was chattering all the
time in his fluent German, Hitler shifted the hat to his left hand,
then back to the right, and so back and forth until one could feel he
would have given anything to be able to throw the hat away. Finally,
when they reached the end of the line, he clapped the hat back on his
head, but he had not yet recovered his poise because when they came to
the launch which was to carry them to Venice, Hitler, flustered, tried
to insist that Mussolini, the host, precede him on board. The Duce
finally got behind the Fuehrer and shooed him down the gangplank first.
Mussolini arranged that his visitor should constantly be reminded that
although Germany might have her great man, Italy had a greater. With
true totalitarian courtesy Mussolini ordered thousands of young Black
Shirts to cheer him and keep up a continuous howl of “Duce, Duce,
Duce!” whenever Hitler appeared. They jammed St. Mark’s square and that
night when Mussolini gave his guests a banquet in the wonderful old
Palace of the Doges, the Black Shirts yelled so much and so powerfully
that nobody could hear the speeches. Finally Mussolini had to send word
for the boys to quiet down.
The show had its desired effect as far as the Italian populace was
concerned. The climax of the evening was a procession on the Grand
Canal. They had taken from museums the most treasured old gondolas,
and decorated them with lanterns. You may imagine what a spectacle they
made under a June moon. My wife had a gondolier who spoke a few words
of broken English. She asked him, “What do you think of Hitler?” “Oh,”
said the gondolier, “Eetlaire, Eetlaire is only a _piccolo_ Mussolini.”
I wonder if the gondolier still thinks Hitler is a “little Mussolini”?
Q. _What did the two dictators accomplish by their meeting? Did they
lay the basis for the Axis there?_
A. No, just the contrary. They laid the basis for nearly going to
war with each other. The Axis was not formed until much later, after
Mussolini had been compelled to recognize Hitler’s supremacy and take
orders from him. At the time they first met, Mussolini still fancied
himself Hitler’s superior. At Venice they were supposed to negotiate an
agreement about Austria.
At that time Mussolini wanted very much to take Austria himself, or to
keep it independent as a buffer state between Italy and the Germany
which he felt was going some day to become strong enough to menace him
as well as the rest of Europe. Hitler, on the other hand, was bent upon
the Anschluss, upon annexing Austria as the first item on his program
of expansion.
Mussolini had an army of unknown quality but big enough compared with
Hitler’s to make the Duce feel superior and Hitler feel cautious. So
they talked on this basis and Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and
already Propaganda Minister, took me aside the afternoon of the second
day and triumphantly whispered that a “gentleman’s agreement” had been
reached that both parties would respect the integrity and independence
of Austria. It was all I could do to restrain myself from putting in my
cable some obvious crack about the agreement between those two notable
“gentlemen,” but one does not do that under censorship.
What happened then? I must say that everything that has happened in
Europe since the gangsters took over has the quality of a caricature.
Sure enough, Hitler and Mussolini made their “gentlemen’s agreement” to
keep hands off Austria on June 15, and just forty days later, on July
25, Hitler sent a band of Nazi revolutionaries to seize the Austrian
government. They murdered Chancellor Dollfuss, but were overpowered by
loyal troops, and before Hitler could move, Mussolini had mobilized on
the Brenner mechanized forces strong enough to make Hitler back down
and disavow the whole action. I reached Vienna and the Ballhaus Platz
while the loyal troops were still besieging the Reichskanzlei. Dollfuss
had not died yet. In the midst of it all I had to laugh at the thought
of that “gentlemen’s agreement.”
Q. _That must have made Mussolini cocky, to make Hitler back down?_
A. Decidedly! I went from Vienna where I had covered the Dollfuss
Putsch, back to Berlin for the death of Hindenburg--and incidentally
for a sidelight on Hitler, let me remark this. You still hear repeated
the wishful thought that the German Army will some day “do something”
about Hitler. Nobody who knows anything about Germany believes that
for a moment now, but I admit I thought it possible until the day
Hindenburg died that the army might stop Hitler.
That was August 7, 1934, and at the moment Goebbels announced on the
radio the death of the President he also announced that Hitler had
assumed the presidency, which meant he was commander in chief of the
armed forces as well as Reichs Chancellor, and thus had sole executive
power. That morning I came early to the office in Berlin and as I
entered the door Goebbels’ voice began to come over the radio. I worked
on the cables until mid-afternoon and then Dosch-Fleurot and I went out
to witness the swearing in of the Berlin garrison. That was where I
learned that the army would from then on do nothing to stop Hitler.
The regiment was drawn up in hollow square and in the middle stood
the commanding general on a platform. Every one of the 2,000 men and
officers held his right hand above his head with the two fingers
extended as in taking an oath in court. The general repeated the words
two at a time and the troops repeated in sonorous chorus, “I swear--by
God--eternal allegiance--to my Fuehrer--Adolf Hitler--to obey him,”
and so on, with no word about the flag, the Constitution, or even
the Fatherland. The oath was a personal oath to Hitler himself, as
commander in chief. I believe it is unique; at any rate I have never
heard of such an oath in any other army.
The officers corps knew what it meant, so much so that thousands
of officers absented themselves that day from duty “on account
of illness,” but when they came back each had to take the oath
individually. The significance of that is that no German army has ever
mutined, and this oath bound every soldier of Germany to the person of
Adolf Hitler. It was a most impressive ceremony and I carried away from
it the conviction that this army would never break its oath and turn on
Hitler until it met defeat. I am still convinced this is true.
Q. _Yes, but what about Mussolini? You said he was decidedly cocky
about defeating Hitler over Austria._
A. I started to say that after having covered the death of Hindenburg
and the accession to the Presidency of Hitler, I went down and reported
the Nuremberg Party Congress, and directly thereafter went to Rome
and met Mussolini. It was October 1934. I had met him several times
previously and he always used to insist on asking more questions than
he answered; so he began our conversation by saying, “I hear you have
been to Nuremberg--what did you learn there? What did they think of me?”
I answered that frankly the Italians were not popular in Nuremberg,
and that one of my English colleagues, Chris Holmes of Reuters, who is
tall, dark, and handsome, had once been mistaken for an Italian and had
some trouble with Nazi Storm Troopers until he identified himself. “So
we are unpopular there,” Mussolini ruminated. “And go on, what else did
you observe in that line?”
“Well,” I continued, “one night I met a group of officers of the SS
[_Schutzstaffel_] and we were talking about affairs, and one of them
asked me what you, Your Excellency, would have done with those troops
you mobilized on the Brenner during the Dollfuss Putsch if you had
marched into Austria.” “Yes,” said the Duce leaning forward. “Yes, yes,
go on, what did they want to know?” “Well,” I hesitated, “they wanted
to know if you had marched into Austria, would you have stopped there,
or would you have gone on and marched into Germany?” Mussolini put his
hands on the desk and leaned halfway over it, and a great smile came on
his face as he ejaculated, “Ahhhh! Were they afraid?” I laughed and he
laughed and it was agreed that the Germans had been afraid, and if ever
there was a delighted man it was Mussolini, reveling in the thought
that he had frightened his gentlemen friends.
Q. _You have told us that the first impression one gets of Hitler
is that he looks silly, but you remarked that this was a false
impression.... Do you imply that on closer acquaintance his personality
grows upon you?_
A. In a way, perhaps. At any rate you realize after several meetings
that the silly appearance is due to superficialities. His moustache,
the lock of hair over his forehead, and his staring eyes make his face
easy work for a cartoonist, and a world of them have taken advantage
of it. It is almost like a mask. He frequently looks as though he were
gazing into space when he is looking straight at you. He has terrific
power of concentration and sometimes when he talks he appears to forget
his surroundings, and to be conversing with himself, although he may be
shouting loud enough to be heard by a great multitude.
His manner is various, and he can be quietly affable just as another
time he may rave and bellow until his voice breaks. Once, during his
trial for treason, I heard him bellow and then surrender to a louder
voice. This was an incident worth recording, because as far as I know
it is the only time Hitler has been literally shouted down. All during
his trial the courtroom was dominated by the figure of Ludendorff,
the great Ludendorff who for the last two years of the war had been
master of Germany. Ludendorff of course was as guilty of treason as
Hitler, and if the court had done its duty both Ludendorff and Hitler
would have been sentenced to death and executed. Ludendorff, however,
had such prestige that even this republican court was afraid to find
him guilty, and as you know, they acquitted him. And having acquitted
Ludendorff it was not possible to sentence Hitler to death. They gave
him the lightest possible sentence, fortress confinement for five
years, and later commuted by a general amnesty to less than a year.
Ludendorff used to bark at the court in _Kommandostimme_, the tone of
the parade ground, every syllable clipped harsh, and when his imperious
voice rose, the little Chief Justice in the middle of the Bench would
quiver until his white goatee flickered so badly he had to seize it
to keep it quiet. Hitler at that time had nothing like the authority
of Ludendorff but he made up for that by his volubility and his rough
treatment of the witnesses against him. As defendant he had the right
to question witnesses and he bullied them unmercifully until the turn
came of General von Lossow, the chief witness for the state. Von Lossow
was in command of the Bavarian Reichswehr.
A few days before the Putsch, Hitler had given his personal word of
honor to von Lossow that he would not try a revolution. On the night
of the Putsch, Hitler, brandishing a revolver, forced von Lossow to
join the revolution and yield the Bavarian Reichswehr to the new Hitler
government. But the moment von Lossow was free, he mobilized his troops
and crushed the Putsch. So the two men hated each other, and each
considered the other a double-crosser.
When von Lossow took the stand, Hitler stood up and yelled a question.
Thereupon the General, a tall bony man, with a corrugated shaven
head and a jaw of steel, pulled himself up to his full height and
began yelling at Hitler and throwing his long forefinger as if it
were a weapon at Hitler’s face. Hitler started to shout back, but the
General shouted so much louder, and looked so menacing, that presently
Hitler fell back in his seat as if he had collapsed under a physical
blow. Hitler had his revenge on June 30, 1934 when he had von Lossow
assassinated along with the hundreds of others who perished in the
Blood Purge. In retrospect it is fascinating to reflect that Hitler,
the most successful bully our world has seen, can himself be bullied.
Q. _Do you think that Hitler is personally responsible, or largely
responsible, for this war? Is it possible to ascribe that much
importance to one individual?_
A. I do ascribe that much importance to the individual Hitler. We would
no more have had this war, in the form it has taken, and at the time it
has taken place, without Hitler, than we would have had the Napoleonic
wars without Napoleon. Without Hitler, Germany would either have forged
slowly ahead as she was doing under the Weimar Republic, or she would
have come under some other leader of Pan-German Imperialism who would
have attempted on a lesser and not so successful scale something like
the thing Hitler has attempted. It is extremely unlikely that anyone
else could have been found with Hitler’s genius. It is more likely that
the Weimar Republic would have persisted. Remember, when Hitler was
sentenced to fortress confinement for his 1923 Putsch, his National
Socialist German Workers Party practically disappeared, but immediately
upon his emergence from prison it began to grow until by 1928 he had 12
seats, and in 1930, 130 seats in the Reichstag.
You may say this growth of a radical party would have been inevitable
under the circumstances of economic crisis, unemployment, and so on. I
agree that the growth of radical votes would have been inevitable, but
it was far from inevitable that so many of these radical votes should
be canalized into one great, super-efficient, terroristic, militaristic
party. This was the accomplishment of one man, Adolf Hitler.
I was a correspondent in Germany from 1923 on, and during that
particular decade, 1923 to 1933, when Hitler took power, two-thirds
of the German electorate voted consistently in favor of some form
of collectivism, either Social Democracy, or National Socialism, or
Communism. I contend that it was solely the genius of Adolf Hitler
which eventually brought the whole country under his particular brand
of collectivism. Without him the votes given the Nazis would have
been split in half a dozen ways, and the probability is that the
conservative parties representing one-third of the votes, with the
Social Democrats who wanted a democratic republican collectivism, would
have won out in the long run, and we should have had a republican
Germany today and no war. This is sheer retrospective speculation, but
it is useful to point out the importance of the personality of Hitler.
The Marxists have always insisted that individuals do not count; that
history is made by economic and social forces which in the long run
accomplish their destiny no matter who lives or dies. The longer I
live the less I believe in this explanation of history, at any rate as
it applies to our span of life.
Over centuries it may be that the great forces carry mankind
irresistibly along no matter what leaders it has, but within a single
generation we are bound to feel that the history of our nation
would have been quite different if this or that individual had not
existed. Objectively it may be true that over long periods of time
the individual leader counts for little. But subjectively, for short
periods of time, the individual leader counts for nearly everything.
What a difference it would have made for the Jews of the whole world,
if a Hitler had not obtained control of the collectivist movement in
Germany.
There was nothing inherently anti-Semitic in the German yearning for a
_Gemeinschaft_, a collective. Anti-Semitism need not have played any
part in National Socialism any more than it did in Communism or Social
Democracy. Yet, because Hitler from his early youth had been infected
with this curious kind of psychic sickness, anti-Semitism became a part
of the German state religion, and from this accident of history has
grown the tragedy of twelve million people.
Q. _Is Hitler really the boss of Germany, or is there not someone
behind the throne?_
A. There is nobody behind the throne. Hitler is the whole regime, its
author, its parent, its spirit, its brains, and its boss.
Q. _What about the men around Hitler; are any of them of the caliber to
succeed him?_
A. None of them is of the caliber to succeed Hitler, but Hitler has
publicly announced Goering as his successor, and he would automatically
take the position if der Fuehrer should die now. In the Party there
is nobody to compete with him. The bloodthirsty Himmler, head of
the SS Elite Guards and the Gestapo, is merely a policeman, one of
great ability, ranking perhaps with the notorious Fouché of the
French Revolution, but out of the question as Fuehrer. Goebbels, the
advertising director, is the cleverest man in the Party, but he would
be lucky to remain alive twenty-four hours after Hitler’s protective
hand was removed. He and Himmler are rivals in unpopularity. Who are
the rest? Minor figures, as Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, the upstart
“Bismarck” of the champagne trade, who if anything is more widely
disliked and despised than Goebbels. Hess, of course, has fled. Dr.
Ley, the head of the Labor Front, is the type of drunken, racketeering
labor gangster who in this country would have gone to the penitentiary
under the lash of Westbrook Pegler. Alfred Rosenberg, the Party’s
“brain,” could no more succeed Hitler than he could take Joe Louis’s
place.
The more one scrutinizes the German scene the more one realizes that
the war has moved all the big party figures far into the background,
leaving only Goering a modest place miles beneath the Fuehrer. The
outside world has believed Goering would be an improvement on Hitler,
in that he would be more amenable to reason, less aggressive. He would
be an improvement only in that he would be weaker. His instincts and
intentions are not more Christian than Hitler’s. He would have neither
Hitler’s magic hold on the German people nor Hitler’s genius in action,
but he is as cruel a man as ever exercised power in a modern state.
At the same time he has all the sentimentality which is an almost
invariable accompaniment of brutality in this type of German. During
the period of the worst Terror, the active Nazi revolution in 1933,
Goering was over Himmler in charge of the concentration camps, and at
the moment when the Nazi sadists and criminals in charge of the camps
were beating to death and torturing and hanging scores of men daily,
Goering decreed the severest law against cruelty to animals ever to be
passed anywhere.
Goering’s most marked characteristics, aside from his high animal
spirits, his callous cruelty, and his sentimentality, are his energy,
courage, and will power. He looks too fat to be self-disciplined, but
he twice cured himself of the morphine habit, which he had contracted
after his wounding in the World War, and again after his wounding on
the Odeon’s Platz during the Munich Putsch. A glandular derangement
resulting from his wounds made him monstrously obese, but appears to
have endowed him with an excess of energy which he demonstrates by
doing the work of half a dozen men. He works incomparably harder than
Hitler who by any ordinary standards is a fitful worker, given to long
spells of dreamy idleness.
Everybody else in Germany quails before Goering, but Reichs Marshal
Goering becomes a trembling, whipped child when Hitler yells at him,
despite fanciful newspaper stories about Goering’s disputing with der
Fuehrer. The Army prefers Goering to any other Nazi leader except
Hitler, because Goering is the only soldier and the only gentleman by
birth among the Nazi chiefs. Yet when one has reviewed all the points
in favor of Goering’s position, it becomes more and more obvious that
the war has made a successor to Hitler almost unthinkable. Hitler has
the power now more than ever, but the power now is the Army; it is no
longer, as it was until September 1939, the Party. If Goering were to
take over automatically, after Hitler’s death, how long could he keep
the apparatus running; what would the Army do; how would the German
people and the people of Europe respond to their new and obviously so
immensely inferior master? The more one considers the condition of
Germany today the more it seems that Hitler is indispensable to German
success. His successors would probably succeed one another with Blitz
speed.
Q. _What about Karl Haushofer, who is said to be his one-man brain
trust?_
A. Haushofer is one of the men Hitler consults. Hitler likes
Haushofer’s theory of what they call _Geopolitik_ because it fits
in with Hitler’s own theory that politics should always go ahead
of economics, which is his particular way of proving the Marxists
wrong. But Haushofer has no more influence than perhaps half a dozen
of Hitler’s advisers. Hitler hates experts, because they advance
objections to his projects. The only experts who have a chance with
him are yes-men, except in the Army. He listens to technical advice
from generals he respects, although even from them he would tolerate no
shadow of opposition to his grand strategy. You may be sure Haushofer
has never said no.
Q. _Is Hitler also in the military sphere the real war lord? Does he
actually direct his battles as did Napoleon?_
A. Hitler is the nearest thing to Napoleon since Napoleon. I remember
just before the beginning of the war, in August 1939, I asked a Colonel
of the French General Staff if they had heard that Hitler had taken
over active command of the Army, in fact, and that when war began he
would direct the fighting. The French Colonel said yes, that the French
General Staff knew that was true. Then he surprised me by saying that
they did not like it.
I had expected him to rub his hands and exclaim over French good
luck in having an amateur at the head of the German Army. Not at
all. This French Colonel went on to explain that Hitler had already
demonstrated the most miraculous sense of timing, and this was perhaps
the most important talent a field marshal could have, and that with
the technical advice of his generals, Hitler might prove a formidable
adversary indeed. Less than a year later the French Colonel who had
foreseen so well was one of the vast army of military refugees fleeing
before the New Napoleon.
I do not mean to say that Hitler blueprints each battle and determines
where each division is to go. He simply determines the grand strategy,
names the objective, and sets the time. For instance, in the case of
Poland, some time before the German attack, Hitler called his General
Staff together and said, “Gentlemen, I want you to work out a plan for
the crushing of Poland as swiftly as possible. The problem is how to
knock out Poland before the French and British can bring any help or
alleviation by attacking in the West. Now, how many divisions can we
have fully mobilized within a month? So, and how many do we need to
hold the French? So. That will leave us so and so many for the Polish
campaign. Now, gentlemen, at how many different points can we attack
Poland, from every available entrance? You say five, including East
Prussia. All right, now within forty-eight hours I want you to bring me
a sketch plan of attack, with the outline of the number of divisions to
attack at each point.”
With these data in hand Hitler orders the general disposition of the
troops. Then he waits, and takes into account each of a score or
hundred other factors besides military factors that may enter into
the supreme decision to choose the exact time to strike. He considers
the attitude of all the powers involved, the British and French
morale, their military strength, the weather, the attitude of Poland’s
neighbors, the Polish preparations, and finally when he is ready he
gives the fateful order to march at 2 A.M. on September 1, 1939. Before
the order reaches the commanding generals probably not more than half a
dozen men in the world know the time.
He may meet technical criticism from his generals; he often does. But
unlike Mussolini, whose staff is so subservient and sycophantic that
they say “Yes” when the Duce has outlined some impossible campaign such
as his fiasco in Greece, the German generals voice their objections.
If the objections are valid, Hitler may change his plans. As a rule,
however, Hitler’s grand strategy is seldom affected, because the great
sweeping decisions are based upon Hitler’s appreciation of the problem,
the campaign, the scene as a whole. His generals will be thinking of
the local problem, and their opinion in this respect carries weight.
But Hitler will be thinking in terms first of the whole war, second of
the whole campaign, as against Poland. To these great decisions the
generals invariably bow.
Q. _Why? How has this man who was able to become only a corporal in
the last war suddenly obtained such an ascendancy over the German Army
and in particular over the General Staff? I always understood that
the General Staff of the German Army was one of the proudest, most
professionally capable, and vain and exclusive organizations in the
whole world._
A. How has Hitler done it? By being always right. Well, nearly always.
He has so far made two mistakes, either or both of which may prove
fatal, or not, as destiny will have it. The first was when, instead of
launching an all-out assault on Britain immediately after Dunkirk, he
pursued the crumbling French Army, which as he later learned, could not
have been a danger to him; thus he postponed too late his attack on
Britain.
Q. _Why didn’t he attack England at that time?_
A. Because Hitler did not expect France to collapse as speedily as she
did. Neither he nor anyone else in the world expected it. He may say
he did but the best proof that he did not is the fact that he failed
to take advantage of it. When the German armies broke through the
Low Countries, and began to press upon the French line at the famous
“hinge” at Montmedy, they were like a man who is pressing hard on a
locked and bolted door when suddenly the bolt breaks, the door flies
open, and the man pitches forward into the room.
So the German armies pitched forward into France when they broke across
the Meuse and staggered on, almost losing their balance for lack of
the opposition they had expected to find. They lurched on until at the
end of five weeks the French Army had dissolved; the French government
had surrendered; the nation of France had ceased to exist. Then Hitler
pulled his army together, turned it around, started it for the Channel
ports. But it takes time to turn an army around; it takes time to
establish air bases and collect the thousands of flat-bottomed vessels
to ferry an army across the channel.
The time required was fifty-five days from June 17, the day the French
asked for an armistice, to August 8, when the Germans made their first
mass air attack on Britain as preliminary to invasion. It was those
fifty-five days which saved Britain. I arrived in London on June 20,
full of the apprehension that Hitler’s army was about to sweep the
world. After all it is impressive to have believed all your life that
the French Army was the best in the world and then to witness it
disappear in thirty-seven days of fighting.
It is more impressive to become a refugee. I had established in Paris
the first home I had had in twenty years of vagabond newspaper work.
As the German armies came closer to the French capital I congratulated
myself that I could now live at home and motor daily to the front. Then
one night around midnight the American military attaché, my old friend
Colonel Horace M. Fuller, our wisest professional observer of the war
abroad, and Lieutenant-Commander Hillenkoetter, our naval attaché,
veteran submarine expert, called on me and said: “Knick, you must leave
tonight; the Germans will be here by morning.”
In Edgar Mowrer’s overfull Ford, followed by Lilian Mowrer valiantly
driving her tiny Simca, we left Paris about three o’clock in the
morning, passing through empty streets, the great boulevards stretching
wide and forlorn without so much as a policeman in sight, while fog
eddied above the paving. We passed through the gates of the city where
not even a sentry stood.
Paris was already broken, already humiliated. We fled on down, stopping
with the demoralized government at Tours, and then on to Bordeaux
where with 1,600 other refugees I found a place on the British India
Line S.S. _Madura_, built to accommodate 160. On the way from Paris
to Bordeaux we had traveled with six to eight million other refugees,
the largest number of fugitives ever to assemble on the roads of the
Western World. Flight, flight, flight! Anything to get away! That was
the panic spirit which had gripped the whole population of France, as
of the Low Countries.
The German Army could not even come in contact with the main body
of refugees, except in the contact of murder when the Luftwaffe
machine-gunned the roads. From the moment, eleven days after the grand
assault began, when the Germans reached the sea at Abbeville, May 21,
from that moment on French resistance disappeared. But Hitler could
not begin to attack England until the British Expeditionary Force and
the Northern French Army were destroyed. Actually the B.E.F. escaped
from Dunkirk June 4, and from that date on Hitler was free to turn in
either direction, and many observers believed he would drive straight
at England.
Instead, he chose to pursue the French Army another thirteen days,
until it surrendered. If Hitler, immediately after Dunkirk, had
concentrated every resource on invading England, nobody can say what
would have happened. Dunkirk had shocked the British more deeply than
anything in 100 years, but the French capitulation shocked them worse.
By the time I arrived at Falmouth, after four days on deck with my
fellow refugees, the British were still dazed, dismayed, not panicky,
but desperately aware that they stood closer to national destruction
than ever in 1,000 years. The truth was they had no army, or rather
their army had no weapons. The B.E.F., which had possessed about 75 per
cent of all the weapons possessed by all the British Land Forces, had
been compelled to leave behind at Dunkirk all their tanks, cannon, and
most of their machine guns and even their rifles. It was terrifying to
stand on the curb in London and watch battalions of the Guards march by
with only half a dozen rifles to a battalion.
The British Land Forces immediately after Dunkirk were practically
weaponless. The R.A.F. which was soon to give so gallant an account of
itself, needed reorganization; all the units which had been in France
had to be brought back and reintegrated for the defense of the island.
If ever the German invasion could succeed, it could have succeeded
then, but Hitler did not move until the night of August 8, when he sent
over his first mass of 400 bombers and fired the docks of London in a
blaze so high I was able to read a newspaper by its light on the roof
of the Ministry of Information building, eight miles from the fire. Had
that attack been launched June 8 or even June 18, instead of August 8,
who knows what the result would have been? By August 8 the British had
been transformed.
Three things had happened to them which had not happened for over 100
years, since the time of Napoleon. First, they had become frightened;
second, they had become angry; third, they had been forced, again I
repeat, for the first time in 100 years, forced to go to work. Until
the fall of France the British had been as easygoing as we are now,
despite the fact they had been formally at war for eight months; but
after the fall of France every able-bodied human being in the United
Kingdom went to work at the rate of ten to twelve hours a day seven
days a week.
In a miraculously short time they tripled their production of weapons,
planes, ammunition; meanwhile we sent them 1,000 cannon, many machine
guns, and 750,000 rifles. The R.A.F. trained, reorganized, expanded,
laid out new fields. In short, when Hitler attacked he struck a new
Britain, aroused as never since 1066. It was a dazzling example of what
danger can do to a people. The British of August 1940 were not the
British of June 1940.
Historians will wonder why Hitler did not move earlier against England.
I suppose they will go on wondering why for centuries, even after
Hitler has explained it in his memoirs, for his own benefit, and to
the satisfaction of few. My estimate is that he simply overvalued the
French Army and undervalued the British spirit. Surprised by the French
collapse he was carried along by the momentum of his drive to destroy
the possibility of further French resistance before trying to invade
England. He lost thereby what may prove to have been his greatest
chance when he failed to throw his whole air force, army, and navy at
England in the moment of her greatest weakness.
Q. _What was Hitler’s second mistake?_
A. His second mistake was when he went into Russia, apparently
expecting the Red Army to fold up at least as fast as the French Army,
probably hoping to be able to turn around and launch a second attack
on Britain in 1941 before American aid became effective. The initial
effect of the invasion of Russia was a disappointment to Hitler,
however it may eventually end. So was the First Battle of Britain, but
the final outcome of both battles must be awaited to determine how they
will affect Hitler’s reputation as a master of war.
Meanwhile his generals have not had reason to change fundamentally
the judgment they formed on the basis of their experience with him
since 1933. That experience began when he took over the Presidency and
obtained the oath of allegiance which, as we have seen, laid at least a
legal foundation for his ascendancy over the armed forces. Then he set
out to build out of the 100,000-man Reichswehr the mightiest military
machine the world has ever known.
He denounced the military clauses of the Versailles treaty, and thus
relieved the Army of its crushing sense of being condemned forever to
inferiority. He boldly announced the creation of an Air Force, and
assigned to it the explosive energies of his first Paladin, Goering.
Thereafter, all the resources of the nation were poured into the armed
forces. Nothing was too good for the troops. They were given barracks
such as no European army had ever had, as good as anything the United
States Army has ever known. The food of the army and navy and air force
was improved until it was on the average far better, even in peacetime,
than anything the German soldier had to eat at home.
Discipline was kept at its highest point, but at the same time a new
spirit of comradeship came into the German armed forces. For the first
time in the history of the German Navy, officers and men would eat at
the same table. All this was bound to have its effect upon the services
and to make them think at any rate gratefully of Hitler, but of course
the test had still to come. What would this commander in chief order
his troops to do? Would he lead them into some impossible adventure
prematurely? Would this amateur after building his beautiful machine
sacrifice it in some vainglorious maneuver? It seemed as though he
would do just that.
The first test of Hitler’s fitness to command his army came on March 7,
1936, when he ordered it into the Rhineland to reoccupy that portion of
Germany adjoining France which had been demilitarized by the Versailles
treaty. France had insisted that Germany should promise never to
quarter troops on the right bank of the Rhine. This was to make up
for the fact that France had been prevented from occupying the right
bank of the Rhine, and for the fact that the United States in 1919 had
refused to join the proposed tripartite pact of France, England, and
the United States, to guarantee the French from invasion by Germany.
As long as the Germans kept out of the Rhineland, France was safe. If
the Germans ever reoccupied the Rhineland, it meant that they intended
sooner or later to use it as a jumping-off-place from which to attack
France. France therefore had insisted upon and had obtained this clause
in the Versailles treaty, and had thereafter frequently announced that
its violation would mean war. Nevertheless, Hitler toward the middle
of February 1936 informed his General Staff that in the first week of
March he intended to reoccupy the Rhineland. At that moment Hitler met
his first opposition from the Army. The generals protested that they
could not be responsible for what would happen, because if the French
mobilized and fought, the German Army was not strong enough--it would
have to retreat. Unspoken was the conclusion that if the German Army
retreated, it would mean the end of the Nazi regime, the end of Hitler.
Hitler replied that it was the duty of the Army to obey orders; it was
his duty as Fuehrer to give orders which could be successfully obeyed.
“I know,” he told them, “that the French will not mobilize. I know the
French will not fight. I know the English don’t want them to fight.
Don’t ask me how I know. I know. It is my business to know.”
When I was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, I learned under
unusual circumstances something of what went on inside the German
General Staff during those days of March 1936, which were to decide
the history of the continent. At Burgos, headquarters of Franco’s
government, I met Major von der Osten, who was ostensibly in charge of
certain economic investigations or negotiations, but as a matter of
fact was the chief of the German Gestapo in Spain. He was an agreeable
fellow, father of eight children, highly intelligent, amusing, and
it did not matter to me that some months before, his organization,
the Gestapo, had had me arrested and thrown into a death cell in San
Sebastian for thirty-six hours, whence I escaped by the determined
vocal and political efforts of my friend and fellow correspondent,
Randolph Churchill.
The Major knew that I knew that he was chief of the Gestapo and he knew
that I would do all I could to get information from him of value to me,
as I knew he would do likewise with me. So we got along famously, and
one day he included me in a picnic with several other correspondents.
There, on the banks of a clear stream while the Major’s soldier
servants served us grilled frankfurters and Rhine wine, I led the
conversation into discussion of what the Army thought of Hitler. The
theme reached the reoccupation of the Rhineland, and at this the Major
became enlightening.
“I was assigned to the Bendlerstrasse [headquarters of the General
Staff] then,” the Major said. “I can tell you that for five days and
five nights not one of us closed an eye. We knew that if the French
marched, we were done. We had no fortifications, and no army to match
the French. If the French had even mobilized, we should have been
compelled to retire.” He confirmed that the opinion of virtually the
entire General Staff was against Hitler; they considered the move
suicidal, and when they did move, it was only to obey orders, not
because they were convinced it was right.
“And what did they think after the thing was all over and Hitler had
been proved right? Did they think that Hitler had proved himself a
genius or that he just had extraordinarily good luck?”
The Major smiled. “We thought there was a good deal of kind fortune
concerned,” he said.
That was Hitler’s first brush with his army, and his generals may
well have put him down as lucky. He won, and later events proved how
tremendous his victory was. For the occupation of the Rhineland enabled
Hitler to build there his Siegfried line, and the Siegfried line
enabled him eventually to hold France until he was ready to fall upon
and destroy her as he did in 1940.
This first demonstration that he was “always right,” strengthened
his position with the General Staff enormously. The second test was
accordingly easier. It was Austria.
Just as in the case of the Rhineland, so in the case of Austria, France
had often declared that any German attempt to annex Austria would be a
cause of war. This made good sense, just as it had made good sense for
the French to have said they would go to war to prevent reoccupation
of the Rhineland. Once the Germans had the Rhineland and began to
fortify it, they made it difficult for the French to defend Austria.
Once the Germans had Austria they made it difficult for the French to
defend Czechoslovakia. Once the Germans had Czechoslovakia they made it
difficult for the French to defend France.
The German generals understood this series of steps as well as or
better than the French, and therefore they could not believe that the
French would allow each step to be taken without trying to stop it.
Therefore, as Hitler ordered each step taken, his generals protested,
since like all generals they did not want to start a war without the
certainty of winning.
They protested vigorously over the decision to go into Austria, but
once again Hitler said: “Gentlemen, it is your business to take the
action I direct. It is my business to direct only action which will be
successful. I can assure you now, as I assured you on the reoccupation
of the Rhineland, that now also France will not move, the British will
not move; we can do as we like.” He was right again, and now with two
major victories to his credit, he could face his generals with an even
more momentous and critical order--to occupy Czechoslovakia.
This third move, against Czechoslovakia, was the most critical,
because here France was pledged by her solemn word of honor to fight
for her ally, and because the possession of Czechoslovakia would make
it possible finally to attack France herself. These two facts were of
course amply known to the German generals and once more they assumed
that the French generals and the French government would now awaken
and fight for the life of their country.
So, in spite of the two lessons Hitler had given them, the German
generals once more pointed out the dangers. Their Siegfried line was
not nearly complete. If they threw crushing weight at Czechoslovakia,
they would have to weaken their West Front so badly that the French, if
they wished to plunge, might break through. Hitler this time was beside
himself. He not only knew the French and British would not fight if the
Czechs asked them to fight, but he believed, and I think he was right,
that the French and British would not have fought even if the Czechs
had fought.
So he wanted above all things at this juncture to meet a little
opposition to blood his sword. He wanted the Czechs to fight, and
knowing he would have them alone, he longed for a chance to show what
his vast army and air force could do with overwhelming odds on their
side. In my opinion it is just the opposite of true to say that Hitler
wanted another bloodless victory. He did not. He wanted a bloody one,
the blood of course, to be shed by the hopelessly outnumbered enemy.
It seemed to him absolutely idiotic that any of his generals should
object. They did, but feebly.
Once more Hitler overrode them, with the same arguments. “France will
not fight. The British will not fight. We can do as we like with the
Czechs. I only hope they do fight.” Hitler this time got everything
he wanted but one thing. The Czechs, brutally betrayed by their ally
France and bullied by England, did not fight. Hitler was cheated of
his desire to do violence. At Munich the bad temper he displayed when
Chamberlain and Daladier gave in to him on every point was caused by
the fact that he realized these good gentlemen were going to make the
Czechs surrender. He was not going to be given the chance to drop one
bomb. He had to wait a whole year for his bloodshed.
If you doubt this analysis of Hitler’s bloodthirstiness, recollect that
he never gave Poland a chance to imitate Czechoslovakia’s surrender.
Would it not be a matter for wonderment if the German generals
had failed to be impressed by this third example of the Fuehrer’s
infallibility?
Yet when he proposed to destroy Poland even after the British and
French had “guaranteed” her, some of Hitler’s generals still cautiously
offered objections on the grounds that this would inevitably mean
the Great War and maybe they could not win the Great War. For the
fourth time Hitler overcame constantly lessening opposition of “timid”
generals. He explained that he would knock out Poland before the French
or British could strike, if indeed they intended to strike at all.
There was some doubt whether the Allies would really fight. Ribbentrop
insisted Britain was through, and although they might declare war and
mobilize, the British would do so only to save face, and would take
the first opportunity to quit with a negotiated peace. But even if the
British and the French did go to war, Hitler explained, he would finish
Poland swiftly, and then turn such heat on France, bring such terrific
forces to bear on the Western Front, that she would probably also be
ready to negotiate peace, and if not he would knock her out also.
_That_ he was sure he could do, and once he had done that, the British
would capitulate.
If there was any opposition lingering among the generals, it
disappeared upon the signature of the Russo-German Pact, August 23,
1939. This most brilliant of all Hitler’s foreign political coups
convinced his generals first that they would not have to fight a war on
two major fronts, second that they were in the hands of an invincible
military-political genius of the first category.
How gloriously right Hitler seemed to be. At first everything appeared
to depend upon the speed with which Hitler could knock out the Poles,
whether he could finish them off before the French could mobilize for a
great offensive on the West. Optimistic Poles said they could hold out
for three years; pessimistic Poles said one year. The French thought
the Poles could hold for six months. The German generals thought it
would take three months to break the Poles. Hitler gave them six weeks
to do the job. They conquered Poland in eighteen days!
Then came Norway and then came France!
No matter what the German generals had thought before, by May 1940 they
had the feeling Hitler was another Napoleon. Sure enough, on May 10,
they attacked and on June 17 the French Army, the mighty French Army of
4,500,000 men only three generations from Napoleon, surrendered. The
Germans, led by Hitler, had accomplished the greatest victory in the
history of the German Army, and had inflicted upon their age-old enemy
the most colossal defeat in the history of France. Indeed from the
point of view of the numbers of men involved, and the issues at stake,
it may be said to be dimensionally the greatest victory of military
history.
How can anyone now wonder that after the fall of France the German
General Staff with all its professional vanity would be proud to take
and if necessary blindly obey orders from Corporal Hitler?
Hitler had brought his General Staff to this position of unquestioning
obedience when he gave the orders to attack Russia. Here was truly the
place for caution. If Hitler was another Napoleon, here was the same
Russia. It meant a two-front war. It would give time for United States
aid to become effective. At the best it meant lengthening the war by
years.
“No,” Hitler ordered, “we shall conquer Russia before the summer is
out, and conquer England before the year is out and before the United
States can do anything about it. _Vorwaerts!_” Only the prestige built
up by Hitler’s uninterrupted series of victories from the Rhineland to
Crete could have won the acquiescence of the German General Staff to
the Russian adventure.
Q. _Is Hitler personally brave?_
A. It is hard to say. I could put it this way: Hitler is not the sort
of man about whom one would unhesitatingly say that he is personally
brave, as one would say about Churchill, for example. Perhaps we shall
not count the story he told me about his winning the Iron Cross in the
last war, since many Germans say it is not a true story. Yet it is an
interesting one. He told it to me the night of March 11, 1932 on the
eve of the Presidential election when he ran against Hindenburg and
scored eleven million to Hindenburg’s eighteen million votes.
I asked him how he had won his Iron Cross. He always wore it but his
political enemies declared there was no record in the army archives of
its having been awarded him and neither in _Mein Kampf_ nor elsewhere
could there be found any account of how he got it. I was afraid when I
asked the question that it might irritate him, but he seemed amused,
and even pleased.
“You know,” he said, “I was a dispatch bearer in the war. One day,
toward the first of June 1918, I was ordered to take a message to
another part of the front, and had to traverse a section of no man’s
land. Presently I passed a dugout which I thought abandoned, but
suddenly I heard French voices below.
“Being alone, and armed only with a pistol, I stopped a moment, then
drew my pistol and shouted below in my very bad French, ‘Come up,
surrender!’ Then I shouted in German as though to a squad of soldiers,
orders to ‘Fix bayonets! Draw your hand grenades!’ First one French
soldier, and then another, and then another came up with their hands
in the air until there were seven. I marched them to the rear and
turned them over as prisoners of war. Now,” he paused, and smiled at
Tom Delmer of the London _Daily Express_, who was with me, “if they had
been English soldiers, or,” turning to me and continuing to smile, “if
they had been American soldiers, I am not sure I should have been able
to make them surrender so easily, and perhaps I would not have my Iron
Cross or be here today.”
This is the only time I have observed a sense of humor in Hitler,
and of course if his story is correct, it proves that he had on that
occasion a considerable amount of personal bravery.
Then there is the time when, during the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch,
he threw himself down when the Reichswehr armored car began to fire its
machine gun at him and Ludendorff and Goering and the rest of them.
I was about a hundred yards away, jammed in the crowd, when I heard
that machine-gun fire, the first I had ever heard in my life. That
one whiff of fire killed sixteen of Hitler’s men including the body
servant of Ludendorff standing next to the General whom he had served
throughout the war. Hitler was injured because he had thrown himself
down so violently that he broke his collarbone. Would you consider that
a sign of cowardice? I do not know. It was the proper reaction for a
front-line soldier.
Nevertheless, Ludendorff not only refused to take shelter but
contemptuously stalked across the Odeon’s Platz and, in his uniform
of a Lieutenant General, gave himself up to the Reichswehr Lieutenant
in charge of the armored car, with the words: “Arrest me, Lieutenant.
I shall never wear this uniform again.” Now there was a man about
whom one would unhesitatingly say he is a brave man. You remember how
Ludendorff, then a Colonel, took the fortress of Liege singlehanded,
simply drove in his staff car to the Belgian lines, by amazing luck got
through, drove straight to the entrance of the fortress, knocked, and
walked in. When the Belgian commander saw before him a German Colonel,
he assumed the game was up and surrendered. That won for Ludendorff the
Pour le Merite, Germany’s Victoria Cross.
There was a time when Hitler displayed indubitable personal courage.
That was when he arrested Captain Ernst Roehm, the head of his
2,500,000 Storm Troops, on the famous June 30, 1934, the day of the
Blood Purge. Roehm had been Hitler’s close, if not closest, personal
associate. I cannot use the word friend, because Hitler has never had
a friend. He was the only man in the party, in the world, as a matter
of fact, with whom Hitler exchanged the intimate “Du” or “Thou.” We
Americans can never understand the significance of this continental
custom. If you are on “Du Fuss” or “Thou Footing” with another man, it
means you are brothers, and it is taken very seriously indeed by all
except the proletariat, who in the informal brotherhood of the working
classes, call each other indiscriminately “Thou.” But this intimacy of
Hitler and Roehm did not prevent Hitler from cold-bloodedly ordering
his friend’s execution when once Hitler had convinced himself Roehm was
plotting treason. Cold blood is one of Hitler’s chief characteristics.
It reminds one of Robespierre.
Roehm was hiding out with his staff at the hamlet of Wiessee, not far
from Munich. His guards, heavily armed, had strictest orders to stop
everyone, but _everyone_, and by that underlining emphasis in the
orders, _everyone_ was meant to include Hitler himself. Nevertheless,
on the fateful morning, Hitler with two automobiles containing among
others the canny Goebbels, several high SS officers, and a handful of
SS gunmen, drove into Wiessee at daybreak, and when Roehm’s guards saw
the All-Highest, instead of stopping him they saluted “Heil Hitler!”
There was at least some bravery in Hitler’s daring to go personally to
arrest Roehm, surrounded by his bodyguards. Once he had penetrated the
sentry lines, there was not much for Hitler to fear, especially not in
his personal encounter with Roehm. He found Roehm in bed with what they
call in German a _Lust Knabe_.
Roehm was a barrel-chested, scar-faced desperado whose only two
weaknesses were his homosexuality and drink. He had grown potbellied,
and invariably woke with a hangover. He slept in a nightgown. When
Hitler flung open his bedroom door at daybreak and routed him out
of bed, Roehm must have been distinctly at a disadvantage. There he
stood, bleary-eyed, nightgowned, potbellied, before his Fuehrer roaring
charges of treason, yelling that he was under arrest, ordering him to
dress and be quick about it.
I passed through Munich on my way from Rome to Berlin to cover the
Blood Purge the next night. From SS officers who boarded my train at
Munich, via the good-looking Italian Wagon-Lit conductor who had been
from time to time propositioned by Roehm, I learned that Major Buch,
Hitler’s chief SS executioner, had that evening gone to Roehm’s cell
where a revolver had been left to let him commit suicide, and had shot
Roehm as he cried, “Tell Adolf to come kill me if he has the nerve!”
Q. _Is it true that Hitler is a homosexual?_
A. No, it is not true. He came seriously under suspicion because of
his intimacy with Roehm, and because for so many years he tolerated
the blatant homosexuality of Roehm and his cohorts. This was a scandal
so colossal that it surely has no counterpart in history. Roehm as
the head of 2,500,000 Storm Troops had surrounded himself with a
staff of perverts. His chiefs, men of the rank of Gruppenfuehrer or
Obergruppenfuehrer, commanding units of several hundred thousand Storm
Troopers, were almost without exception homosexuals. Indeed, unless a
Storm Troop officer were homosexual, he had no chance of advancement.
All this was known to every intelligent observer in Germany and of
course was known in every detail to Hitler. His moral indignation when
he made his Blood Purge and cleaned out this “nest of immorality” was
one of his more brazen pieces of hypocrisy. He purged Roehm not on
account of his distasteful habits but because Roehm was plotting to
seize power, make himself head of the Army, and form what would have
been, incidentally, a homosexual government.
Nobody knows whether he intended to do away with Hitler or merely
force Hitler to go along with him. At any rate Hitler would have
no part of it, and Roehm was killed, though not for his abnormal
love life. Thereafter Hitler passed the most stringent edicts
against homosexuality and this odd feature of German life was driven
underground. It remains, nevertheless, characteristic of the Germans,
that they, outwardly the most brutally masculine of all European
peoples, are the most homosexual nation on earth.
Naturally because Hitler never showed any sign of interest in women,
he came under suspicion, but prolonged observation has convinced all
the witnesses I know, including Germans and foreigners, that Hitler is
simply asexual, has no sex life at all, or rather has sublimated it in
his “marriage to the German people.”
Q. _How do you mean, “marriage to the German people”?_
A. That is precisely the relationship Hitler conceives himself to have
with the Germans, and I must say millions of Germans appear to feel as
though they constituted his wife. Incidentally it was Lord D’Abernon,
long-time British Ambassador to Germany, who remarked that the world
did not properly understand the meaning of masculinity and femininity
as applied to nations, and that in his opinion the Germans were the
most feminine people in Europe and the French the most masculine.
Whether D’Abernon would today be of the same opinion, I do not know.
At any rate Hitler certainly obtains from his contact with the German
people a more than adequate surrogate for normal sex life.
Just imagine what his feelings must be when he stands, as in peacetime
he used to stand, on the platform at the Tempelhofer Field in Berlin,
and before him are a million Germans. This is the largest crowd that
any man has ever had before him in person. You could never assemble
such a crowd in a democracy, because it takes them twelve hours to
march into place and twelve hours to march away.
On the night before the first of May, which the Nazis stole from
the Communists and Socialists and made their own Labor Day, the
Berlin population is herded into line and marched off in battalions.
Everything is meticulously arranged by a General Staff, so that by the
time Hitler appears one million persons, no less, are standing to hear
him. When Hitler appears, from a million throats roars the cry “Heil
Hitler! Heil! Heil! Heil!” time and time and time again.
Then he speaks and at every possible opportunity comes again the bellow
from a million German voices “Heil! Heil! Heil!” Sounds silly? Oh no,
not any more than the German goose step is silly. It looks silly only
in the movies. In real life it is tremendously impressive--ten thousand
steel-shod boots striking the ground with all the force ten thousand
muscular legs can put into it. They shake the ground, and when the
million Germans shout “Heil!” they make the firmament quiver. I defy
anyone to hear such a mass yell without trembling at the sheer brute
power of it.
Suppose you were the recipient of this ovation! Hitler obtains his
life’s satisfaction from this sort of power orgasm. Now, of course, he
has the whole continent of Europe to trample upon. Every man who loves
power for its own sake as Hitler does, has a strong streak of sadism,
of enjoyment in the infliction of pain or humiliation upon others. So
now Hitler has a double stream of enjoyment in which to wallow. I do
not think he will ever marry.
Q. _Are women attracted to Hitler?_
A. Soon after he came to power he had to pass an edict forbidding
German women to crawl out of the crowd and attempt to kiss the hem of
his raincoat as he passed by. This was forbidden partially for the
same reason as the _Verbot_ against throwing flowers, which was issued
because it would be easy to conceal a bomb in a bouquet. Whenever he
appeared in public, scores of German women tried to get near enough to
him to touch his raincoat or come into some kind of personal contact
with him.
It is, regrettably, impossible to record that this is a purely German
phenomenon. An American woman distinguished herself at the Olympic
Games, and incidentally brought about a disciplinary shake-up among
Hitler’s bodyguards, by brushing past his gunmen and kissing him on
the cheek. All this is, perhaps, only evidence of the traditional
regard women have for strength, whether exhibited by the champion prize
fighter, wrestler, chess master, millionaire, or by the Fuehrer of
Germany.
Q. _I have heard scores of you fellows, foreign correspondents and
others, say they “know the truth about Hitler,” and constantly
recommend that we find out what he means, but that seems to be a pretty
complicated business, and we cannot all live in Germany long enough to
find out about it. Can you tell us in a few words just what he does
mean, for us?_
A. Yes, in the fewest words: Hitler means exactly what he says. He
says the German people are a master race, destined to rule the world.
He says the German people have the power to enforce their rule on the
world. He intends that they shall rule the world during his lifetime.
He includes the United States in the world he intends to rule.
Finally, he does have the power to carry out his world conquest unless
we fight him in time. That is the shortest way to put it. The reason
you think it hard to understand or find out what Hitler means is that
you refuse to believe these things because they upset you, and if
you believed them then you might have to work harder, or sacrifice
something such as your automobile, or blood, or maybe your life. Read
_Mein Kampf_. It is all there.
Q. _What kind of public speaker is Hitler? Is he truly a great orator?
How does he compare with others?_
A. He is probably the greatest spellbinder of all time. He literally
talked himself into power in Germany and thereafter he talked the great
German nation into becoming his blindly obedient and fanatically loyal
Herculean slave. With his slave he has laid a continent in chains. But
he never delivered an oration in his life, because an oration according
to Webster is “An elaborate discourse, delivered in public, treating an
important subject in a formal and dignified manner,” and that Hitler
never did. In this respect, Goebbels is incomparably his superior.
An oration by Goebbels has a beginning, a middle, and a crescendo
end; it has form, style, and the language is chosen, the gestures
sparing but effective, the voice clear and only now and then distorted
by passion. Hitler begins any old way, rambles, digresses, becomes
excited, rants, shouts until his voice is hoarse, and frequently breaks
into a falsetto scream.
The quality of Hitler’s voice is unpleasant. It is thick in the middle
register, guttural in the low, and its high notes are rasping. In
every speech at some time he becomes angry and then the tone is either
terrifying or embarrassing to the listener, depending upon his relation
to Hitler’s power. I speak, of course, of the foreign listener, as
it would affect you if you understood German. His anger frequently
overpowers him, but he never splutters, he roars. I sometimes felt as I
listened to him, and I have heard him fifty times or more, as though he
were a wild beast.
Then he can shift in a twinkling to the tone of irony, contemptuous,
derisive. Much of his speech is ungrammatical; many of his sentences
do not “read,” do not make German. He pays apparently no attention to
the structure of his speech. He sometimes ends so abruptly that his
audience is shocked, having expected him to finish his thought, or even
complete a sentence. His gestures are extravagant, and resemble those
of an old-fashioned camp-meeting preacher. He mimics well, and delights
in ridiculing his opponents by caricaturing them.
There is scarcely a rule of oratory he does not ignore. He is
seldom dignified. All of this, of course, is in reference to his
extemporaneous public speaking which brought him to power, not to the
speeches he reads, as he has read nearly everything since he took
power. As Chancellor of the Reich he can read a speech with dignity,
as he read the funeral oration over Hindenburg, which I heard in
Tannenberg.
Yet with all the criticism one can bring to bear on his public
speaking, he remains the most effective mob master ever to step on a
platform. He sweeps his audience with him. Sometimes they are slow to
come along, as the time when after seven days of slaughter in Germany
he rose in his own uniformed Reichstag to explain the Blood Purge of
June 30, 1934. That time he spoke for twenty minutes before he received
a single handclap. He had just killed more than a thousand people
including leaders of his own party, Ernst Roehm, his closest friend
and head of the 2,500,000 Storm Troops; Gregor Strasser, one-time
rival for leadership of the Nazis; General Kurt von Schleicher, former
Reichs Chancellor, and his wife; Karl Ernst, head of the 250,000 Berlin
and Brandenburg Storm Troopers; General von Lossow and former Reichs
Commissar von Kahr of Bavaria, who had defeated his first effort at
seizing power in Munich, and hundreds of others.
The nation was stunned; the Nazi Party itself was partially paralyzed
with fear. Hitler had turned his SS (_Schutzstaffel_) Black Guards
against his SA (_Sturmabteilung_) Storm Troops, and hundreds of Brown
Shirt officers had died before the Black Shirt firing squads, many of
them shouting “Heil Hitler!” as they fell. Most of the members of the
Reichstag, that curious gesture of Hitler before democracy, were active
or honorary officers in the Storm Troops. A score of seats were empty.
Their lawful occupants were dead. The survivors were appalled and not
less bewildered than the public. Nobody knew what had happened; what to
expect. When Hitler began to speak, for the first time in his life he
was received in silence.
As I sat in the press gallery of the Kroll Opera House, I noted this
with amazement, but I felt the silence was that of stupefaction, not of
indifference and certainly not of rejection. The listeners were simply
stricken dumb. Yet the silence continued, for five, ten, fifteen,
twenty minutes. By then I began to think that Hitler might have made
a mistake, that perhaps his dummy Reichstag was actually disapproving
their idol. Many of them had close friends among the dead. Then came
the breaking point. I think it was the most dramatic moment in any
speech I have ever heard of Hitler’s.
In his intolerably repetitious way he had started with a description
of Germany’s suffering under the Versailles treaty, and under the
“fourteen years of servitude to the traitors of November,” then
sketched the events leading up to the Blood Purge, described his
discovery of the plot against the State, and then with a leap he
shifted into his most passionate style. He had come to the moment of
ordering the executions. Raising his right hand, forefinger pointed on
high, he stood on his toes and roared: “_Meine Herren_, at that moment
_I_ was the Supreme Court of Germany; _I_ was the Supreme Judge of
Germany; _I_ was Germany!”
The silence in the Reichstag broke, and as though hypnotized, the 500
Brown-Shirted members roared: “Heil! Heil! Heil!” There, they had
recognized their master. He had spoken as a master. He had consented
again to be their master, and from a mood of bewilderment and fear they
burst into the joyful acknowledgment of their abasement. Forgotten were
the friendships with the dead, blotted out in the keen pleasure of
hearing the crack of the lash. From then on his lengthy accounting was
constantly punctuated by the traditional applause.
Incidentally it might be pointed out here that there is after all a
very significant difference between the tyrants of long ago and the
tyrants of today. It is a fact that the tyrants of today exercise
greater power over the lives of their subjects than any we can
recollect from former times. Historians have to search to find a
Ptolemy, a Caesar, or a Mongol Khan who had so complete a discipline
over their populations, so profound a control over the individual lives
of their subjects as have the despots of the modern totalitarian states.
But all the modern despots find it necessary to report to their
subjects, to speak and explain, to take them into their alleged
confidence, however mendacious the report may be. They find it
expedient, no matter how they spurn the principles of democracy, to
pretend to treat their subjects as free to exercise a judgment. Why
else does Hitler constantly come before his people to talk? In the
western tyrannies of antiquity and the Middle Ages, in the European
monarchies of divine right and in the Oriental despotisms, the rulers
considered it unnecessary to deliver an accounting to their people.
The conclusion is that the short experience the world has had with
democracy, not yet two hundred years in duration, has left with the
most imperious ruler a sense of responsibility to the ruled, or is it
merely fear? Hitler despises the masses, I know. But he fears them
also. If Louis XVI had possessed a fraction of Hitler’s speaking
talent, or King Charles of England, or Czar Nicholas of Russia, perhaps
they might have had a different fate.
In the preface to _Mein Kampf_ Hitler indicates the paramount
importance he attaches to the art of political speaking. He wrote: “I
know that one is able to win people far more by the spoken than by the
written word, and that every great movement on this globe owes its rise
to the great speakers and not to the great writers.” He then wrote a
book of 1,000 pages which is said by now to have been distributed to
eight million people, but it was still the spoken word. He dictated
every line of it. You ask, what kind of public speaker is Hitler? I
answer, read _Mein Kampf_.
It reminds me of a man named Korff. Korff was the brains of the
Ullstein Verlag, pre-Hitler Germany’s greatest publishing concern.
Korff originated the _Berliner Illustrierte_, first of the world’s
great picture weeklies, forerunner of _Life_, and _Look_, and the
French _Match_. He raised his _Berliner Illustrierte_ to more than two
million circulation, undreamed of on the continent before. His salary
was record breaking, his prestige likewise.
One day in 1931, more than a year before Hitler came to power, Korff
came before his board of directors and said, “Gentlemen, I’m through.
I am going to resign. I wish you to release me and to make your
arrangements accordingly.” Astounded, the board asked why. “Because
I’ve read the book, gentlemen,” replied Korff. “What book?” they asked.
“_Mein Kampf_,” Korff said, and began to explain, but couldn’t on
account of the laughter. Dear old Korff had to have his joke. But no,
it was not a joke. Korff resigned, liquidated his property, got out
of Germany and in 1933 when Hitler came to power the Nazis bought out
Ullstein’s at forced sale.
The laughing members of the board and stockholders--those not yet dead,
shot attempting to escape, or hanged by their belts in concentration
camp--received a fraction of one per cent of the value of their
holding. Of all the house of Ullstein, only the man who read the book
escaped. I advise you to read the book.
As an orator, Hitler has many superiors. I have mentioned Goebbels in
Germany. Trotzky was certainly better. I heard Trotzky speak in Moscow
the last time he ever appeared on a Russian platform. It was in 1926.
He had been in disgrace for more than a year, but was allowed to speak
on the innocuous theme, “The United Sates of America and Siberia,” a
lecture with paid admissions. The proceeds were to go to the benefit
of needy students of Moscow University. Why Stalin allowed it I do
not know, but he never permitted a return engagement, for Trotzky’s
popularity proved so great that the mounted police had to be called
out to move the crowds which, despite the exorbitant admission price,
jammed the street before the lecture hall.
I paid thirty roubles for a balcony seat. It was worth the price.
Trotzky appeared, dapper in a light-gray whipcord suit, and for an hour
and a half in Russian which I only faintly understood, moved me and the
three thousand other listeners to intense appreciation of his forensic
talents. I was surprised to hear Trotzky’s voice, a clear high tenor.
I had expected a deeper, more rotund tone. They said, however, that
the clarity of his delivery and its carrying power were such that he
alone among Bolshevik orators could speak in the Red Square and without
a microphone be heard by half a million listeners. Without being able
to understand more than one word in ten, as at that time I had been
in Russia less than a year, I was nevertheless convinced by this one
hearing of Trotzky that he was one of history’s greatest orators.
Q. _What sort of eyes has Hitler? Are they magnetic? What color are
they?_
A. It seems to depend on who is looking at them. I noticed that Francis
Hackett in his useful book, _What Mein Kampf Means to America_, cites
three descriptions of Hitler’s eyes, all different. Otto Tolischus
calls them “small, greenish brown and almost poetically introspective
eyes.” William D. Bayes calls them “faded blue eyes between colorless
brows and puffy sallow cheeks.” John McCutcheon Raleigh wrote: “The
fanaticism in his eyes was the most commanding thing about him ... they
possess a hypnotic quality that can easily persuade his followers to do
anything the mind behind the eyes desires.”
These differences evoked from Mr. Hackett the remark: “If you want
to feel discouraged about the art of reporting, consider these three
accounts of Hitler’s eyes.” But what about these additions? Dorothy
Thompson says in her interview, reprinted in _Dictators and Democrats_:
“The eyes alone were notable. Dark gray and hyperthyroid, they have
the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics and
hysterics.” In the same book Lothrop Stoddard writes: “His eyes are
very dark blue.” Likewise, in the same compilation, I have reported
that “He fixed his flat, non-magnetic, China-blue eyes on me....” I
will stick to my version. His eyes were certainly not magnetic as far
as I was concerned, though I am convinced they would be highly magnetic
to any German. As for the color, they are of such an intermediate,
shifting shade that it may well be they could show in different lights
all the way from greenish brown, faded blue, dark gray, dark blue, to
China blue.
Q. _Is Hitler really the tough man he claims to be? I remember he was
reported in a recent speech to have remarked: “I am the hardest man
ever to rule Germany.”_
A. When a man talks too much about his strength, it may mean he is not
so strong after all. Francis Hackett sorted out in his index of _Mein
Kampf_ all the references to “Qualities, concepts or practises Hitler
approves,” and to the ones he disapproves. The two lists throw a good
deal of light on Hitler’s character, or rather on what he thinks his
character ought to be.
The things Hitler approves are: First, “Advance by sections,” by which
he means that to achieve, one must concentrate upon one goal at a time,
as he has brilliantly exemplified in his conduct of the war so far.
Then in alphabetic order, Hitler approves: “Brutality; Discipline;
Executions for Treason; Faith; Fanaticism; Force; Hardness; Idealism;
Joy in responsibility; Loyalty; Obedience; Passion; Perseverance;
Ruthlessness; Sacrifice; Self-preservation; Self-sufficiency, national;
Silence and discretion; Social justice; Social responsibility;
Terrorism; Toughness; Will power and determination.”
Hitler condemns: “Cowardice; Eroticism; Half measures; Humaneness;
Liberty; Pacifism; Passive resistance.”
My impression is that of the qualities he named, Hitler possesses
brutality, discipline, faith, fanaticism, force, hardness, idealism,
joy in responsibility, passion, perseverance, ruthlessness, sacrifice,
discretion, terrorism, will power and determination; but that he does
not possess loyalty or a true sense of social justice, or social
responsibility, or toughness. He is hard without being tough. That
is, I believe he will one day prove brittle. As for loyalty, he is
notoriously able to discard a lifelong friend, and if necessary kill
him, as he did Roehm, without visible compunction.
Q. _What is the secret of Hitler’s power?_
A. That is a question that has interested me for eighteen years,
since I first saw Hitler and heard him speak. During all this time I
have heard hundreds of explanations of his power and have thought of
some myself. But the most interesting and plausible discussion of his
personality I have ever heard was given me by Dr. Carl G. Jung, the
great Swiss psychiatrist, when I visited him in his home in Zurich
to ask him to diagnose the dictators. It was in October 1938, and
I had come directly from Prague where I had witnessed the death of
Czechoslovakia.
Dr. Jung’s analysis of Hitler has been remarkably confirmed by the
events since that time. He had been personally fascinated by the
problem of Hitler’s personality, and had studied it for years. He said:
“There were two types of strong men in primitive society. One was the
chief who was physically powerful, stronger than all his competitors,
and another was the medicine man who was not strong in himself but was
strong by reason of the power which the people projected into him. Thus
we had the Emperor and the Pope.
“Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. His
body does not suggest strength. The outstanding characteristic of his
physiognomy is its dreamy look. I was especially struck by that when I
saw pictures taken of him in the Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in
his eyes the look of a seer.”
I asked, “Why is it that Hitler who makes nearly every German fall down
and worship him, produces next to no impression on any foreigner?”
“Exactly,” Dr. Jung assented. “Few foreigners respond at all, yet
apparently every German in Germany does. It is because Hitler is the
mirror of every German’s unconscious, but of course he mirrors nothing
from a non-German.
“He is the loud-speaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the
German soul until they can be heard by the German’s conscious ear. He
is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and
feeling all along in his unconscious about German fate, especially
since the defeat in the World War, and the one characteristic which
colors every German soul is the typically German inferiority complex,
the complex of the younger brother, of the one who is always a bit late
to the feast. Hitler’s power is not political; it is _magic_.
“To understand magic you must understand what the unconscious is. It is
that part of our mental constitution over which we have little control
and which is stored with all sorts of impressions and sensations;
which contains thoughts and even conclusions of which we are not
aware. Besides the conscious impressions which we receive, there are
all sorts of impressions constantly impinging upon our sense organs of
which we do not become aware because they are too slight to attract our
conscious attention. They lie beneath the threshold of consciousness.
But all these subliminal impressions are recorded; nothing is lost.
Someone may be speaking in a faintly audible voice in the next room
while we are talking here. You pay no attention to it, but the
conversation next door is being recorded in your unconscious as surely
as though the latter were a dictaphone record.
“Now the secret of Hitler’s power is not that Hitler has an
unconscious more plentifully stored than yours or mine. Hitler’s secret
is twofold; first, that his unconscious has exceptional access to his
consciousness, and second, that he allows himself to be moved by it.
He is like a man who listens intently to a stream of suggestions in a
whispered voice from a mysterious source, and then _acts upon them_.
“In our case, even if occasionally our unconscious does reach us
through dreams, we have too much rationality, too much cerebrum to obey
it--but Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is always _led_.
“We can see it work in him. He himself has referred to his Voice.
His Voice is nothing other than his own unconscious, into which the
German people have projected their own selves; that is, the unconscious
of seventy-eight million Germans. That is what makes him powerful.
Without the German people he would be nothing. It is literally true
when he says that whatever he is able to do is only because he has the
German people behind him, or, as he sometimes says, because he _is_
Germany. So with his unconscious being the receptacle of the souls of
seventy-eight million Germans, he is powerful, and with his unconscious
perception of the true balance of political forces at home and in the
world, he has so far been infallible.
“That is why he makes political judgments which turn out to be right
against the opinions of all his advisors and against the opinions
of all foreign observers. When this happens it means only that the
information gathered by his unconscious, and reaching his consciousness
by means of his exceptional talent, has been more nearly correct than
that of all others, German or foreign, who attempted to judge the
situation and who reached conclusions different from his.”
I remarked that if Hitler’s Voice continued to be always right, we were
in for a very interesting period. This was five months before Hitler
swallowed the whole of Czechoslovakia, and eleven months before he
launched the Second World War by assaulting Poland.
Dr. Jung gravely answered: “Yes, it seems that the German people are
now convinced they have found their Messiah. In a way the position of
the Germans is remarkably like that of the Jews of old.
“Since their defeat in the World War the Germans have awaited a
Messiah, a Savior. That is characteristic of people with an inferiority
complex. The Jews got their inferiority complex from geographical and
political factors. They lived in a part of the world which was a parade
ground for conquerors from both sides, and after their return from
their first exile to Babylon, when they were threatened with extinction
by the Romans, they invented the solacing idea of a Messiah who was
going to bring all the Jews together into a nation once more and save
them.
“The Germans got their inferiority complex from comparable causes. They
came up out of the Danube Valley too late, and founded the beginnings
of their nation long after the French and English were well on their
way to nationhood. They were too late for the scramble for colonies
and for the foundation of empire. Then when they did get together and
made a unified nation, they looked around them and saw the British, the
French, and others with rich colonies and all the equipment of grown-up
nations and they became jealous, resentful, like a younger brother
whose older brothers have taken the lion’s share of the inheritance.
“So the Germans slept through the division of the world into colonial
empires and thus they got their inferiority complex which made them
want to fight the World War; and of course when they lost it their
feeling of inferiority grew even worse and developed a desire for
a Messiah, and so they have their Hitler. If he is not their true
Messiah, he is like one of the Old Testament prophets; his mission is
to unite his people and lead them to the Promised Land. This explains
why the Nazis have to combat every other form of religion besides
their own idolatrous brand. I have no doubt but that the campaign
against the Catholic and Protestant churches will be pursued with
relentless and unremitting vigor, for the very sound reason, from the
Nazi point of view, that they wish to substitute the new faith of
Hitlerism.”
I asked Dr. Jung: “Do you consider it possible that Hitlerism
might become for Germany a permanent religion for the future, like
Mohammedanism for the Moslems?”
“I think it is highly possible,” Dr. Jung replied. “Hitler’s ‘religion’
is the nearest to Mohammedanism, realistic, earthy, promising the
maximum of rewards in this life, but with a Moslem-like Valhalla into
which worthy Germans may enter and continue to enjoy themselves. Like
Mohammedanism, it teaches the _virtue_ of the sword. Hitler’s first
idea is to make his people powerful because the spirit of the Aryan
German deserves to be supported by might, by muscle and steel. It
is not a spiritual religion in the sense in which we ordinarily use
the term. But remember that in the early days of Christianity it was
the church which made the claim to total power, both spiritual and
temporal. Today the church no longer makes this claim, but the claim
has been taken over by the totalitarian states which demand not only
temporal but spiritual power.
“Incidentally it occurs to me that the religious character of Hitlerism
is also emphasized by the fact that the German communities throughout
the world far from the political power of Berlin, have adopted
Hitlerism. Look at South America.”
Dr. Jung said he had closely observed Hitler at his meeting with
Mussolini in Berlin. “I was only a few yards away from the two men and
could study them well. In comparison with Mussolini, Hitler made upon
me the impression of a sort of scaffolding of wood covered with cloth,
an automaton with a mask, like a robot or a mask of a robot. During the
whole performance he never laughed; it was as though he were in a bad
humor, sulking. He showed no human sign.
“His expression was that of an inhumanly single-minded purposiveness,
with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be a double of a real
person, and that Hitler the man might perhaps be hiding inside like
an appendix, and deliberately so hiding in order not to disturb the
mechanism.
“With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a
medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better,
a myth. With Hitler you are scared. You know you would never be able to
talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but
a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation. I take it
to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you talk
intimately with a nation?”
Finally Dr. Jung delivered a prophecy which was to prove woefully
accurate just five months later. “England and France,” he said, “will
not honor their new guarantee to Czechoslovakia any more than France
honored her previous pledge to Czechoslovakia. No nation keeps its
word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A
nation has no honor, it has no word to keep. That is the reason why
in the old days, they tried to have kings who did possess personal
honor, and a word. But you know if you choose one hundred of the most
intelligent people and get them all together, they are a stupid mob?
Ten thousand of them together would have the collective intelligence
of an alligator. Haven’t you noticed at a dinner party that the more
people you invite the more stupid the conversation? In a crowd, the
qualities which everybody possesses multiply, pile up, and become the
dominant characteristics of the whole crowd.
“Not everybody has virtues, but everybody has the low animal instincts,
the basic primitive caveman suggestibility, the suspicious and vicious
traits of the savage. The result is that when you get a nation of
many millions of people, it is not even human. It is a lizard or a
crocodile, or a wolf. Its statesmen cannot have a higher morality than
the animal-like mass morality of the nation, although individual
statesmen of the democratic states may attempt to behave a little
better. For Hitler, however, more than for any other statesman in the
modern world, it would be impossible to expect that he should keep the
word of Germany against her interest, in any international bargain,
agreement, or treaty. Because Hitler is the nation.”
Q. _Isn’t there anything constructive about Hitlerism? Is it all
destructive? Won’t they get over their period of madness and settle
down and make good world citizens?_
A. In 1934 I talked with President Thomas G. Masaryk of Czechoslovakia
in the old Hradzin Palace in Prague. The venerable statesman was
eighty-four years old, but he was still able to deliver measured
philosophical replies. One of them was to the question: “Aren’t you
as head of the Republic of Czechoslovakia which Hitler and his Nazis
threaten so violently, afraid he may some day attack you?” The old
man slowly replied, “No, because every revolutionary movement such as
the Nazis’ has its period of ecstasy, and the Nazis are going through
theirs now, but in a little while more they will subside and we will be
able to get along peaceably with them.”
I went away with my first example of the fact that no man over seventy
ever seems to be able to understand Hitler. I beg the pardon of the
grand exception, Senator Glass, whose early and persistent advocacy of
effective action against Hitler has distinguished him among Senators,
some of whom approach treason in their imbecilic refusal to comprehend
the life-and-death issue facing America.
Just five years after the founder of Czechoslovakia had expressed
his faith in the fundamental normality of the Nazis, his conviction
that they were after all like other people, and that their revolution
would follow the natural course of other radical movements and become
stabilized, Hitler sat at the very desk in the Hradzin where Masaryk
had sat. Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist precisely because Masaryk
and all the other heads of states in Europe blindly refused to see
that in Hitlerism the world was faced with a brute which always had to
move forward, steadily became bigger and hungrier as it was fed, and
would never cease to destroy and devour until stopped by force. To the
German there is something mystically attractive about this Nazi Wave
of Destruction. They feel their fate is being achieved by violence so
fierce that it intoxicates them, as the young Nazi Shock Troops are
intoxicated by battle lust when they fling themselves upon the enemy.
It is the Nazis’ ability to combine this berserk, mystic rage with cold
scientific mastery of the intricate instruments of mechanized war that
makes them so formidable. They even loot scientifically, as witness the
way they have bled France. I know an amusing and typical example of the
German’s aptitude for plundering profitably.
In Spain I met a young German Nazi machine gunner serving with Franco.
His name was Franz, and he had been an SS officer in Duesseldorf. He
had come to Spain, he declared, for idealistic motives, to fight the
Bolsheviks, and now after three months’ service his idealism had been
rewarded with a small fortune. I asked him how he had been able to make
any money serving as a noncommissioned officer.
“Oh,” he explained, “I have the advantage over these Spaniards and
Moors of having an academic education. I did not finish school but I
had enough _Naturwissenschaft_ to know my way about in a physics or
chemistry laboratory. Now what do these poor ignorant Spaniards and
Moors do when they enter a town we have just taken. They go busting
around breaking into homes and offices, looking for cash and jewelry
and such things, but nobody ever leaves cash and jewelry lying around.
What do I do? I go straight to the _Kino_, the motion picture theater,
and straight to the projection room, and there I remove the lenses
which are worth from ten to twenty thousand pesetas, and I put the
lenses in my suitcase when I get back, and now I have two suitcases
full of lenses. They are worth a fortune. You see the beauties of
education?”
Q. _How has Hitler run his show without money, without gold, without
foreign exchange? Can the Nazi economy continue to run indefinitely on
its present basis?_
A. The Nazi economy can continue to run only as long as the war lasts.
This is the economic compulsion on Hitler to go on fighting. The Nazi
economy is one of scarcity. There are not enough workers, since most
able-bodied men are in the army; not enough food, or clothing, or
fuel, or manufactured articles. Everybody not in the armed forces has
to work very hard, very long hours in order to feed the colossal war
machine and produce the minimum necessary for the civilians to subsist.
Scarcity would normally shove prices upward; but not in the Nazi
economy where the Terror makes price control really work. The Gestapo
is a more potent backing for the currency than gold. The workings of a
totalitarian economy seem queer to us only because we continue to think
of Adam Smith’s “economic man,” and because we still believe that man
will always act freely in accord with the law of supply and demand.
But man under the Nazis is not free, does not act according to the law
of supply and demand but according to the Nazi law. This compulsion by
Terror makes a different kind of economic unit of him; our economic
laws do not apply to him any more. In our bourgeois society when civil
law condemns a man to go hungry, appetite is likely to make him break
the law. In the totalitarian state the punishments of the concentration
camp subdue almost every impulse to rebel.
For foreign trade the Nazis use an infinitely flexible, complex system
of barter, often three-way. They confidently assert they have outgrown
the use of gold; although one of the reasons Walther Darre advanced
for a Nazi conquest of America was to lay hands on the American gold
reserve at Fort Knox. The Nazis have demonstrated that they can do
without gold, but this is no proof that gold is not more convenient
than barter; it is proof only that anything can be used for money
as long as the people believe in it, by natural inclination or by
compulsion--wampum, cows, brass, paper, or the muzzle of a Gestapo
pistol. It is one of our commonest fallacies to believe that financial
considerations affect very much the beginning or the middle or the end
of a war. Can you recall any war that had to stop because one side ran
out of money? In wartime a nation becomes a collective and money a
mere bookkeeping item. Only after the war when accounts are presented,
does bankruptcy become real. Hitler inherited a bankrupt, bourgeois,
peacetime economy and turned it overnight, from the moment he came to
power in 1933, into a wartime economy. Real peace would mean the total
collapse of Hitler’s totalitarian economic machine.
Q. _Why do the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich?_
A. Historically the First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, the second
was the one founded by Bismarck, and the third is Hitler’s. When I
discussed this once with Dr. Jung, he pointed out deeper meanings.
He said, “Nobody called Charlemagne’s kingdom the First Reich, nor
William’s the Second Reich. Only the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich,
because it has a profound _mystical_ meaning.”
Dr. Jung said the Nazis feel a parallel between the Biblical triad,
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the _Third_ Reich, and that in fact
many Nazis refer to Hitler as the Holy Ghost. “Again,” Dr. Jung
continued, “consider the widespread revival in the Third Reich of
the cult of Wotan, God of Wind. Take the name _Sturmabteilung_,
Storm Troops. The swastika is a revolving form making a vortex moving
ever toward the left--which means in Buddhistic symbolism sinister,
unfavorable, directed toward the unconscious. All these symbols of a
Third Reich led by its prophet under the banners of wind and storm
and whirling vortices point to a mass movement which is to sweep the
German people in a hurricane of unreasoning emotion on to a destiny
which perhaps none but the seer, the prophet, the Fuehrer himself can
foretell--and perhaps not even he.”
This psychiatric explanation of the Nazi names and symbols may sound
to a layman fantastic, but can anything be as fantastic as the bare
facts about the Nazi Party and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much
more to be explained in them than can be explained by merely calling
them gangsters. They are products of that most hysterical, illogical,
emotional mentality in Europe, the German.
Q. _But I thought the Germans were stolid, phlegmatic, sensible people.
How can you describe them as hysterical?_
A. The commonest mistake the outside world makes about the Germans
is to describe them the way you have done. We Americans seem to
have judged most European nations exactly opposite from what they
really are. We consider the Italian to be emotional, easily swayed,
the Frenchman to be volatile, the Spaniard passionate, and so on.
Well, all the Latin races are models of calm, common sense and
middle-of-the-road, essentially stable people compared with the
Germans. As Dr. Jung put it, “The Italians are stable. Their minds do
not roll and wallow and leap and plunge through all the extravagant
ecstasies which are the daily exercise of the German mind.” The Germans
carry everything to excess.
What other nation in Europe would have been inundated in one decade by
a wave of hysteria which was to sweep them into idolatrous worship
of a former building-trades laborer and corporal and lift them into
conquest of the entire continent of Europe and promise the conquest of
the world? Surely this is the most extraordinary yielding by a great
people to a mass emotion ever observed in our so-called civilized world.
It is not, however, the first time that similar things have happened
in Germany. Hitler has had some notable predecessors in the turbulent
period of the Reformation.
The Anabaptists of Munster were forerunners of the Nazis, and their
Fuehrer, John of Leyden, was a figure comparable to Hitler in ambition
and in his mystic hold over his followers. Leyden and his associates
seized the city of Munster in Westphalia in 1532 and, establishing a
totalitarian theocracy, set out to conquer the world and make Munster
its capital. Is that any more or less fantastic than Adolf Hitler,
setting out to proceed from Munich to the conquest of the world?
John of Leyden differed in one respect, however, from Hitler. He
not only encouraged polygamy as Hitler’s Black Guards encourage
promiscuity, but he had four wives of his own, one of whom he, in a
typically Hitlerian fit of rage, beheaded with his own hand in the
market place. Munster for three years was the scene of excesses,
profligacy, and inhuman tortures committed upon the foes of the
medieval Nazis, until they were finally overcome by a coalition of
outraged neighbors, comparable in a smaller way, one might say, to the
present coalition against the Third Reich.
Q. _Doesn’t the life of Hitler, as far as we know it, show that he
suffered very much from poverty in his youth and then when Germany was
defeated, he suffered along with his fellow Germans so deeply that we
ought to be able to understand and forgive instead of hating and making
war upon him?_
A. That seems the equivalent of appealing for sympathy and
understanding for a mad dog, because the poor dog had been bitten and
given rabies without wanting it. It was not his fault, and he had
suffered from it, so why shoot him? Hitler, we know, did suffer as a
youth from many disabilities, including extreme poverty, and we ought
to be sorry that he did, not merely as Christians from love of our
neighbor, but because Hitler is causing us such infinite trouble and
misery, partially perhaps, on account of these early discomforts.
But we can do nothing to correct Hitler’s personal history. By the time
he came into our lives his character was fixed in rigid, implacable
hatred for every human being on earth not willing or suitable to help
him place Deutschland in command of the world with himself the globe’s
supreme ruler. He is as little susceptible to reformation today as a
rattlesnake. As for the German people and their sufferings after the
defeat in the last war, there are several things to say.
First, they did not suffer nearly so much as a nation usually suffers
after losing a four-years’ war. I can testify to that from personal
observation of the Germans from 1923 on, a period including the most
desperate months of the inflation. It is simply not correct to say
as Hackett says about the Germans after the war, “They were just as
unhappy, as despairing and as demoralized, in the midst of their
Reconstruction Period, as the old South in the years after the Civil
War.”
The old South was physically devastated by the war. Germany surrendered
before the enemy reached her territory; she came off materially
scot-free. The people of the old South felt permanently beaten and for
a long time hopeless because they had failed in their attempt to defend
their right to be independent. The people of Germany felt temporarily
frustrated of their ambition to dominate the world; just twenty years
later they set forth to try it again. Do you think the old South, if it
had wanted to do so, would have been able physically or economically
to have resumed the struggle with the North in 1885, twenty years after
the end of the Civil War, as the Germans did with the Allies in 1939,
twenty years after Versailles?
My second point about the German suffering is that before Versailles
they demonstrated their intention in the treaties of Bucharest and
Brest-Litovsk, to inflict upon their enemies terms incomparably more
severe than Versailles.
Third, in the course of the present war the Germans have proved that
the sort of peace they intend to grant the countries they vanquish now
will make the Versailles treaty appear to be a dispensation from Heaven.
Fourth, although these facts do not of course excuse the flaws in
the Versailles treaty, none of its defects could possibly excuse the
bestial behavior of the Germans toward the especial objects of their
pathological antipathy, the Jews, Czechs, and Poles, nor provide a
reasonable basis for their desire to inflict vengeance upon the entire
world.
Finally, it makes no difference what the reasons for present German
behavior are, that behavior threatens to destroy us and unless we check
it by force, we shall perish.
Q. _What should we do with Hitler after we beat him? Will he be allowed
to escape to a lifetime of comfort the way Kaiser Wilhelm did?_
A. When this question is asked I am reminded of an old Texas recipe for
cooking rabbit. It begins, “First catch your rabbit.” I do not know
what will be done with Hitler. There are many people who say he will
never be taken alive; that he will commit suicide. I do not believe
that. My guess is that Hitler would either “do a Hess” and escape to
England or seek death in battle as the Kaiser once claimed he would do.
If he remains alive, our people being incurably sentimental, we should
probably treat him the way the Allies treated Napoleon after Leipzig.
They sent him, as you may remember, to Elbe, and gave him an annual
income of 2,000,000 francs, which was about $400,000 and equivalent to
$1,000,000 in purchasing power today. Perhaps we would not, though,
especially if the American people have to live through a great deal of
hardship and bloodletting on account of this man. Maybe we will become
like the British, who, after all, are going to have something to say
about the fate of Hitler if and when he is ever caught.
The _Daily Mail_ of London ran a questionnaire asking its readers what
they thought should be done with Hitler after the war. The largest
number, twenty-five per cent, wanted him shown about the country in a
cage. This is an idea which had been suggested for the former Kaiser,
and it shows a surprising insight into the source of the deepest
emotions for extremely vain men of the type of Hitler and the Kaiser;
they certainly would suffer more from such public humiliation than from
any other punishment.
Another twenty per cent wanted him executed by hanging, shooting, or
beheading, in that order. Fifteen per cent wanted him exiled to remote,
unpleasant places, as Devil’s Island, the Andaman Islands, Ascension
Island, Arctic wastes, and the African desert. Another fifteen per cent
wanted him condemned to lifelong solitary confinement. Ten per cent
wanted to make him live the rest of his life under the same conditions
the English are living under now, with bombs, rationing, and so on.
Five per cent wanted to hand him over to the Poles or Jews. Five per
cent would have him treated as a certified lunatic.
Five per cent suggested all sorts of miscellaneous treatment, including
confinement under precisely the same conditions as normally obtain
in a Nazi torture chamber. There were no suggestions at all that he
should be treated well, as Napoleon was treated. The question is not
trivial and the answers of the British are really important, because
they throw light on the temper of the British people after the brutal
manhandling they have received from Nazi bombers. The most constructive
suggestion I ever heard on the subject of what to do with Hitler came
from my brilliant friend, Edgar Mowrer, who had a decade of experience
in Germany. He suggests that after we have defeated Hitler we put him
in a cage and send him about Germany to explain to the Germans how
wrong he had been.
Q. _What would happen if Hitler were to be killed?_
A. It would reduce the German war effort by one-half, and would
guarantee that Germany would lose. Hitler is irreplaceable, unique, and
if he were to be killed, or died, or anyhow left the scene, Germany
would not collapse but she would be as an automobile going at top
speed, suddenly run out of gasoline. The momentum of the car would
carry it forward a certain distance, but it would eventually stop.
That, in my opinion, is what would happen to Germany if deprived of
Hitler. It is not his technical ability that would be missed so much,
nor his administrative brains, nor even his incredibly accurate,
intuitive knowledge of his enemies, nor even his uncanny sense of
timing. What would be missed would be his inspiration to the German
people. If they lost their medicine man the faith in his name would
flicker on, but the confidence in his infallibility which now upholds
the civil population in the hardships of war and promotes the courage
of the troops in battle would disappear. The effect would be disastrous.
Q. _Why doesn’t somebody kill Hitler?_
A. For the last two years that has been the question most frequently
asked me on the lecture platform all over America. Sometimes a fourth
of all the written questions sent up would be this one. An average
of twenty-five persons out of every thousand in the audience would
put this question and they have been doing that ever since Hitler’s
victory over the Allies in Munich in September 1938. This itself is
an interesting light on the American attitude. Most of the time the
question was framed, “Why doesn’t some Jew, or some Britisher, or some
Frenchman kill Hitler?”
It is bewildering to reflect that up until September 1939, any young
man, Jew or Gentile, British, French, or of any of the thirteen nations
Hitler has conquered, any brave, intelligent man could have killed
Hitler within two months of making the resolution to do so. Only one
requirement was essential--that the assassin be willing to give up his
life. Now, however, it may cost the lives of millions of young men on
the battlefield before this author of evil is destroyed.
Q. _But wasn’t he always too closely guarded to be killed?_
A. Not at all. Now it is another matter. Since the war began he is so
well guarded that it might be impossible to get at him. Before the war
began it would have been easy to kill him. It might even have been
possible for a bold and shrewd assassin to have killed him without
being captured. I give you one instance.
At every Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg there are hundreds of
thousands of strangers in the city. The Gestapo with all its resources
cannot possibly check on them all. A resourceful foreigner, speaking
German and posing as a German, could obtain a room in a hotel facing
the main street down which the parades pass. During the course of the
Congress Hitler appears in at least one parade a day down this street.
He always uses a long black Mercedes car and he stands in the front,
next to his chauffeur. Hitler stands there holding on now and then with
his left hand, and giving the Nazi salute with his right.
In the rear of his car are four SS men, and on the running boards are
two others, and behind Hitler’s car is another identical Mercedes with
six to eight more SS men. The SS men, who are the best pistol shots
in Germany, lean out of their cars, peering at the crowds, and they
keep their right hands always on their pistols. You say that sounds as
though he were well guarded? Not at all. The crowd in Nuremberg is so
great that it encroaches on the path of the automobiles until they are
slowed to a walk. That means Hitler passes underneath your window at a
walking speed.
An assassin could lean out of his window and toss a bomb into Hitler’s
car with absolute accuracy. He could not miss. I have often leaned out
and looked down at Hitler and remarked in a whisper to my comrades,
“How easy it would be, wouldn’t it, to drop a grapefruit?” And if you
think a bomb is too uncertain, why not try a sub-machine gun? That
would be 100 per cent sure. You would have him at a distance of about
thirty yards. With one burst you could riddle him, put perhaps twenty
bullets into him before the guards could turn around.
You ask how the assassin could get the sub-machine gun or the bombs
into the hotel? The Gestapo is good, but it is a long way from being
perfect. They overlook a great many things. We were in Vienna when
Hitler marched in. The Gestapo had been in control of the city for
days. But on the very day Hitler came to Vienna my wife borrowed a
radio set from Tess Shirer and had the porter carry it into the hotel
and up to our room. It was the size of a large thick suitcase. Nobody
stopped her, or asked to investigate it. It might have contained two
or three sub-machine guns with sufficient ammunition and a few hand
grenades.
You object that the assassin would certainly be caught and executed. I
agree. Political assassins almost never escape. But political assassins
must always and nearly always are willing to take this chance. You
can take it as a rule of political assassination, however, that if
the assassin is bold enough, he can always get his man. Remember the
Macedonian gunman, Vlada Georgiev, who killed King Alexander and Louis
Barthou in Marseilles, October 9, 1934? He was a husky fellow who
waited behind the police line until the royal automobile came opposite
him and then burst through the line like a football player and with one
leap was on the running board of the automobile pumping bullets from
his automatic into his two victims. It was all over in thirty seconds.
The police had no chance to intervene before Alexander was dead.
General Georges, later the unhappy second in command of the French
Army, cut down the assassin with his saber.
This is the classic street assassination, resembling in every detail
the killing by Gavril Princip of the Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand in
Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, which touched off the first World War. But the
Nuremberg situation would give an assassin a chance for his life. You
see, the SS guards are constantly watching the crowds in the street.
None of them pays attention to the windows of the houses and hotels
along the street. The crowds are so thick that between our hotel and
the path of Hitler’s automobile would be standing twenty to thirty
thousand people.
Now suppose the assassin drops his bomb or fires his machine gun, or to
make assurance doubly sure, drops bombs _and_ fires his machine gun.
Hitler falls. The crowd panics. How long would it take the SS men or
other police to get through the crowd to the hotel entrance, climb the
stairs, and search for the assassin? It would take several minutes at
least. And in the midst of that howling mob of panic-stricken people
it would take minutes more before the police could surround the block.
Meanwhile the assassin would have plenty of time to run upstairs to the
roof, across to another building, and down a rear fire escape to mingle
with the crowd. Whatever the later details of escape, there would be
a chance of his getting away from the scene of the shooting if he had
laid his plans carefully in advance.
Q. _You haven’t told us yet why nobody ever tried it?_
A. Yes, it has been clumsily tried, but without the proper preparation.
Four or five attempts were made on Hitler’s life during his first
two years in office, 1933 and 1934, while I was in Berlin. They were
all hushed up so closely that we never had more than the skeleton of
the story. They were hushed up because the Nazis and especially the
Gestapo, and especially its chief, Heinrich Himmler, know that there is
nothing so infectious as the idea of political assassination.
The news of an attempt at assassination will set off a series of
imitative attempts. Therefore Himmler gave up his original idea which
was expressed in his announcement through the German press a few weeks
after Hitler took office. Himmler declared in a formal proclamation
that if anyone were to assassinate or attempt to assassinate the
Fuehrer, there would be, and these are his exact words, “a massacre
such as the world has never seen.” He specified that the Gestapo would
massacre all of the Nazis’ opponents, and implied they would kill every
Jew in Germany.
Himmler’s announcement was calculated to deter assassins, but he never
meant to put it into effect unless Hitler were actually killed. We
correspondents, however, heard of several attempts on Hitler. One was
said to have taken place the day before the great Blood Purge of June
30, 1934, and was believed to have contributed to Hitler’s decision
to exterminate his enemies. In this case the assassin fired with a
rifle at Hitler’s automobile. Another time his car was narrowly saved
from crashing into an obstacle supposed to have been placed in the
road with the purpose of killing him. Other attempts were even more
vaguely rumored. Himmler took care that the public should learn nothing
about these attempts, not only because of the infectious nature of
the news of the assassinations, but because the Gestapo considered it
undesirable to reveal that anybody in Germany could want to kill the
Fuehrer.
Q. _That’s all right about Germans, but why not a Britisher, or a
Frenchman, or a Jew?_
A. The question why doesn’t a Jew, or why didn’t a Jew, kill Hitler is
one that I have often heard asked of my Jewish friends, and the answer
usually is that if a Jew killed Hitler the Nazis would slaughter every
Jew in their dominions. The Nazis now have under their despotism in the
Reich and the fifteen conquered countries perhaps five or six million
Jews still. I agree that it is perfectly possible that the Nazis
might try to slaughter them all if a Jew were to kill Hitler, but if
Hitler is not defeated these unfortunate victims of Nazi hatred will
ultimately perish anyway.
Nevertheless, even the very courageous young Jews who used to operate
an organization to counter Arab terror argued the same way with me when
I was in Palestine, that if they killed Hitler they would doom hundreds
of thousands if not millions of Jews to death. It seems that they can
believe rationally that Hitler does intend eventually to exterminate
all the Jews in Europe, and so it would not make much difference
if they were all or many of them killed as a result of Hitler’s
assassination, but emotionally they cling to the subconscious hope that
something will happen to save them. Of course, the only thing that can
save the Jews of Europe is for Hitler to be defeated before they all
die.
As for a young Britisher or Frenchman killing Hitler, before the war
began, as I have said, it would have been easy, but consider if a man
had killed Hitler before the war, what would the world have said?
What sort of judgment would the world have delivered on the assassin?
Would he have been considered a hero, a savior of mankind? Not at all,
because Hitler up to that time was only a potential menace to Britain,
France, and the other peaceful states. If he had been killed, his
assassin would have been declared a madman, and his act would have been
condemned by all save the small group of persons who perceived the
inevitability and the catastrophic course of the war Hitler planned
against the world. No assassin kills out of pure idealism. A man who
killed Hitler would want a little credit for it, and until the war
began he would have received none.
Q. _He would receive plenty of credit now. Why doesn’t the British
government organize the killing of Hitler? Haven’t they plenty of
agents in Germany?_
A. I have no doubt the killer of Hitler would be decorated by
fifteen governments or more, but there are still millions of muddled
sentimentalists in this country who would shudder at the thought of
assassination. There were few, I suppose, who objected to the G-men
shooting the rabid Dillinger, but millions denounced the little doctor,
Weiss, who shot the far more dangerous criminal, Huey Long. So it would
have fared with anyone who would have assassinated Hitler. Imagine how
different the history of Germany and of the world might have been if
Hitler had been among the victims of the machine gun which fired on him
on the morning of November 10, 1923, on the Odeon’s Platz in Munich.
Before this war there were just as many sentimentalists in England, but
you would have to look a long time to find one now. During an air raid
in London I asked an old English lady, one of the gentlest creatures I
have ever known, what she would do if she were driving an automobile
and suddenly Hitler were to appear in front of the car. Would she turn
and save him, or would she drive ahead and hit him? “I would press the
accelerator and drive straight over him,” she said firmly.
Q. _What was the explanation of the bombing attempt on Hitler in the
Munich Beer Hall?_
A. It bore every earmark of being an admirably well thought-out and
executed plan by the British which just failed by a few minutes. I
should think the British government has done all it could to have
Hitler killed. Certainly the British know how supremely important it
would be to do away with the heart and brains of Nazidom. The bomb
attempt on Hitler in the _Buergerbraeu Keller_ in Munich, November
8, 1939, the anniversary of the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch, nearly
succeeded. To refresh your memory: Hitler and his “Old Fighters” left
the beer hall twelve minutes before a time bomb exploded, killing seven
persons and wounding sixty-three. The Germans blamed it on the British
secret agents, and announced they had captured two such agents, a Mr.
Best and a Captain Stevens, on the day after the bomb explosion.
The Gestapo had gone over into Holland to kidnap the two Britishers who
incautiously made a rendezvous close to the frontier.
Some persons analyzed this affair thus: The Gestapo itself arranged the
bomb to go off after Hitler left. The Gestapo did it for one of two
reasons. Either Himmler wanted to kill Hitler, or Hitler wanted the
bomb attempt in order to arouse sympathy for himself among his people,
and hatred of the English. Neither of these explanations makes sense to
me. No Nazi leader in his right mind wants Hitler to be killed, because
every Nazi is aware that his party, his job, and his very life are
dependent upon the continued existence and leadership of Hitler. I will
not say anything further about the plain fact that most of Hitler’s
subordinates literally worship him. Just on the basis of individual
self-interest, it would be unlikely that any Nazi leader should wish to
weaken the Nazi position so disastrously.
I do not believe Himmler or any other Nazi was behind the attempt. Nor
is it credible that Hitler planted the bomb to arouse sympathy for
himself among the German people. He has all the sympathy he needs, and
German hatred for the English is quite adequate. Neither of these two
reasons could balance the danger involved in the infectious quality
of a public attempt at assassination such as this was. This attempt,
which took place before a large public, could not be concealed.
Finally, it seems that the German capture of the two British secret
agents crippled the British Intelligence Service in Germany for many
months. They were men high in the service and could be presumed to
have known a good deal about the whole Intelligence Service setup
in Germany. With the Gestapo at work on them in the approved style
recently made so vivid and bloodcurdling by Jan Valtin in _Out of the
Night_, it is not likely that many British Intelligence agents in
Germany remained unidentified. At any rate there have not been any
further attempts on Hitler, at least none that we know about.
The time-bomb attempt was compared by some correspondents to the
Reichstag fire, but I fail to see the basis for comparison. The
Reichstag was set afire by the Nazis for the specific, rational purpose
of blaming it on the Communists, suppressing their party, jailing
their deputies, and thus obtaining for the Nazis a majority vote in
the Reichstag. These purposes were achieved to the great profit of
the Nazis. What profit could the Nazis have had in staging a near
assassination of Hitler? When the Reichstag was burned, my cabled
report was censored, the first censorship I had experienced in eight
years of work as a correspondent in Germany.
The freshly appointed censor cut out a paragraph in which I had pointed
out that police when seeking the perpetrator of a crime, always try to
find out first who would have profited by the crime. So in the case of
the Reichstag fire it was only necessary to look for the persons who
would profit by the fire. The answer was as plain as daylight. Only the
Nazis would profit by the fire. The censor deleted this commonplace
but accurate observation. Who would profit by the death of Hitler? The
Nazis? Of course not. The British? Of course! If they had succeeded
they would have earned the thanks of a thousand million beneficiaries
throughout the world.
The fact that Hitler and his staff saved their lives by leaving the
_Buergerbraeu Keller_ earlier than had been their custom in former
years is the basis of the peculiar claim that the whole thing was a
Nazi plot. Why, it is argued, should Hitler have not stayed as usual to
chat with the comrades of the early days? Why indeed? Because this was
wartime, the first anniversary of the Putsch to be celebrated since the
war began. Hitler has not been known to waste much time since the war
began. He could be assumed to have had a number of things to do more
important than chatting with his Beer Cellar veterans. This time his
industry saved his life.
Q. _Why is it there are so few assassinations or attempted
assassinations in any of the totalitarian states? You would think their
cruelties would lead many desperate men to seek revenge._
A. Yes, you would, and this is a matter that many of us in Russia used
to discuss. How odd it was that in the history of the Soviet Union
there were only three known assassinations or attempts at assassination
of Soviet leaders.
Lenin was shot and seriously wounded in 1918 by Dora Kaplan, a Social
Revolutionary; Uritzky, police chief of Leningrad, was killed at the
same time; and sixteen years later, December 4, 1934, Sergei Kirov,
political boss of Leningrad, was shot by a half-demented former
Communist, Nikolaev. I shall not forget the Kirov killing because I was
in Moscow at the time and saw Stalin, in the bitter cold of a Moscow
December, help carry barehanded the coffin of Kirov to its grave on the
Red Square, and then hurry back to his office to plan his revenge, the
most colossal ever enjoyed by a human being since the prophet wrote
that vengeance was reserved to the Almighty.
It was the Kirov killing, of course, which touched off Stalin’s great
purge. It illustrates perfectly the first of several reasons why
assassinations are rare in the totalitarian states. Let me say here
that one of those reasons is not the one most popularly believed. It
is not due to the impenetrable guard kept around the tyrants. There at
the funeral of Kirov, we in the press box were not more than twenty
yards from Stalin as he stood on top of Lenin’s tomb, and when he
walked to the grave he came within almost touching distance of me.
Granted that the correspondents have unusual facilities, and that the
G.P.U. checks all of them to be confident none of them is dangerous.
But there in the Red Square hundreds of thousands of men and women
marched past Stalin, the nearest only a few feet away. Any one of them
could have shot at him or hurled a hand grenade at him before any of
the police surrounding the tomb could have intervened.
Likewise, Stalin could have been killed any time during the two decades
by any person with the initiative to attend the Bolshoi Theater when
Stalin was there, sitting in the rear of his first floor forward box.
He could have been shot from a score of seats in the first two rows of
the orchestra. It would have been even easier to wait for one of the
big Communist meetings in the Bolshoi Theater when Stalin was there
with all the leaders of the party. I have seen him with the entire
Politburo and forty or fifty others, sitting bunched together on the
stage of the Bolshoi Theater, while we in the Press box in the Gallery,
almost overhanging the stage, leaned over the rail and quietly observed
how easy it would be to drop something in Stalin’s lap.
A single bomb small enough to be concealed beneath an overcoat would
have killed Stalin and perhaps the entire top rank of the Communist
Party. Why hasn’t anyone tried it? Stalin surely has more enemies who
would like to see him dead than any man in the world except Hitler.
Stalin probably has more personal enemies than Hitler, because Stalin
has executed more people. When you think of the millions who died as
victims of the Revolution, and of the millions who died in the famine
of 1932-33, when Stalin ordered the peasants of the Ukraine to be
stripped of all their food to teach them a lesson, it seems singular
that no bereaved survivor should have lifted his hand against the
tyrant.
The first reason, however, why a modern despot enjoys relative security
is the character of totalitarian terror. In a normal democratic country
an assassin has to fear only the loss of his own life, and the lives
of his immediate conspirators, if any. In Russia, after Kirov’s death,
Stalin executed in this wise:
First, 103 persons who were not even accused of having had anything
to do with the assassination but had been held in jail for various
political offenses. This was simply the first gesture of the Terror,
intended to shock the country. Then as the police rounded up Nikolaev’s
family, friends, and acquaintances, and read his diary, they came to
know virtually every human being Nikolaev had known during his whole
life. Every one of these persons was arrested and after being squeezed
dry of information was executed; at any rate they all disappeared.
But that was only the beginning. The purges which were occasioned, not
caused, by the Kirov killing lasted about four years, from 1935 to
1938 inclusive. The Purge became so huge that Nikolaev was forgotten,
but before the G.P.U. finished with the Nikolaev complex, they had
liquidated in this wise: Every relative of Nikolaev to the third
cousins; every acquaintance of Nikolaev and every acquaintance of an
acquaintance of Nikolaev, and every acquaintance of every acquaintance
of every acquaintance of Nikolaev. You think this is an exaggeration?
Not at all. The number of executions ran into thousands.
Now what would be the effect upon a would-be assassin, if, as he
contemplated his deed, he reflected that as a consequence of his
killing Stalin, not merely would he himself be executed, but every
human being in the world with whom he had ever come in contact? Man
experiences the world largely as a series of contacts with other men.
Suppose the assassin knew by just such an experience as the Russian
people had in the case of the killing of Kirov, that his entire world
would be blotted out if he went on with his plans. Would not this deter
almost any man?
He might be motivated by the highest idealism, and would plan to give
his own life in order to rid his country of a cruel despot, but if he
were thinking of helping the people in his own world he would be bound
to admit that far from helping them, he was about to condemn to death
everybody on earth he had ever known. This surely is the most important
deterrent to assassination in despotic states and it is corroborated by
the experience of Italy.
Mussolini’s Fascist state is the least terroristic of the three
totalitarian states. The terror is so mild in comparison with
the Soviet or Nazi varieties, that it almost fails to qualify as
terroristic at all. The best proof I know of this is the experience of
an Italian friend of mine who before Fascism came to Italy was chief
correspondent of one of Italy’s greatest newspapers.
He occupied a position which might be compared with that of chief
Washington correspondent of the _New York Times_. When Mussolini took
power this friend, whom I may call Luigi, was dismissed from his
newspaper because he refused to become a Fascist. If he had wished to
serve Mussolini, he would have been made a Senator, and would have
become a rich man. But no, he was a courageous, passionately sincere
liberal. He used to declare, “I would approve of nearly all Mussolini’s
program (he doubtless would not say that now), but as long as he wants
to compel me to approve, I disapprove. I shall only approve when I am
at liberty to disapprove.”
Now what would have happened to this sort of man in Soviet Russia? A
leading journalist under the Czar defies Bolshevik power! You know
as well as I what would happen to him. He would be shot at once.
They would not even waste on him food for a day’s extra meals. He
would have been shot the moment the Cheka noticed him. And what would
have happened to Luigi in Germany? He would have been sent to a
concentration camp and there he would have been tortured and either
gradually killed or turned out a broken emasculated creature, not a man
any more.
But what happened to him in Italy? First, his newspaper, with which
he had a contract, bought off the contract for a sum sufficient for
him to live on in a modest way the rest of his life. At the same time
the police established a twenty-four hour surveillance of him. Three
detectives working in eight-hour shifts were assigned to watch him.
Mind you, he wasn’t arrested, and was even allowed to become the
correspondent of a foreign newspaper.
The detectives were there all the time. Luigi came to know them well.
If they behaved decently and he liked them, he never gave them any
trouble. But if one of them was rude, this is the way Luigi would
do. He would get all his newspapers, a dozen or more to read in the
morning, and though ordinarily he would take a taxi or walk to his
office, now to discipline the detective, Luigi would get on one of
the streetcars which circle Rome and he would sit there, going around
and around the city for a couple of hours, reading his papers. The
detective had to follow him. The detective rode a bicycle. Two hours
of hard road work usually corrected the manners of the worst of them.
Think of that kind of police “Terror,” and you have a fair idea of the
comparative mildness of the Italian kind of totalitarianism. We used to
take delight in counting up how many hundreds of thousands of lire it
had cost the Italian government to keep three detectives employed for
fifteen years.
What has this to do with our theme of assassination? Just this, that
during the first twelve years of Mussolini’s dictatorship he was
attacked twelve times, and several of the attempts only failed by the
narrowest margin.
One of the earliest and most serious attempts was by a former general
who hired a room a couple of hundred yards away from the Palazzo
Chigi, equipped himself with a sporting rifle fitted with telescopic
sights, and waited for Mussolini to come out on the balcony to speak.
This event may have inspired Geoffrey Household’s _Rogue Male_. The
general was betrayed at the last moment, arrested, and sentenced to
life imprisonment on the Lipari Islands. That is another index of the
comparatively mild character of the Italian despotism. At that time the
Fascist legal code still had no provision for the death penalty for a
plot against the life of the head of the State.
Q. _In spite of everything you say it still seems difficult to see why
some person half-demented by persecution or the cruelties inflicted
upon his family and friends should not have tried to take vengeance
against the tyrant. There must certainly be among the victims of Nazi
or Bolshevik brutality many persons too tortured in mind to be able to
remember all those considerations you have advanced?_
A. Undoubtedly there are, but these persons are generally too
demoralized to act. If they are sufficiently distorted by their
suffering to forget the consequences to their family and friends of an
attack on the tyrant, they are too enfeebled to move. Fear paralyzes
them. The modern totalitarian tyranny, as the German and Russian, by
reason of the ideology of the ruling party and superior organization
of its police force, ferrets out, identifies, and disciplines a larger
percentage of its opponents than any tyranny was ever able to do in the
past. The ideology of the party makes an ex-officio police agent out of
every Communist in Russia and every Nazi in Germany.
The G.P.U. and Gestapo are superior to the police systems of former
modern tyrannies because this is the first time that tyrannies have
not been ashamed of their political police, but acknowledge, boast of
them, and coerce the population to cooperate with them. The amorality
of Bolshevism and Nazism, or rather their rejection of the Christian
standard of behavior, is best illustrated by the exceptional position
of the political police systems. Under a regime such as the Czar’s,
the political police, the Okhrana, was likewise an instrument of
repression, and as such the regime showed constant evidence of being
ashamed of it.
The efficiency of the Okhrana suffered correspondingly. Today, in view
of our experience with the G.P.U. and the Gestapo, the Okhrana seems
like a benevolent association for the benefit of wayward Russians.
It is instructive now to go back and read the memoirs of that great
opponent of the Czar, the noble revolutionary, Prince Kropotkin.
To note the comparative triviality of the offenses charged by the
revolutionaries against the regime, and then to note the comparative
leniency of the punishments inflicted by the Czar upon his enemies is
to measure the chasm which the Bolshevik Revolution and the Red Terror
dug between our New Dark Age and the imperfect, liberal, easygoing
Past, the like of which no one in our generation shall ever see again.
Under the Okhrana the number of political assassinations in Russia
culminating with the killing of Alexander the Second, reached an
all-time high. This fact, like the attempts on Mussolini’s life,
corroborate the thesis that mild Terror is ineffective, while extreme
Terror may be completely effective. It seems to me to be useful to
stress this fact about the Nazi or Bolshevik Terror, because one of our
American democratic illusions to which we cling most fondly is that
good will always triumph, liberty will eventually win over tyranny, and
despots will ultimately be overthrown by their oppressed victims.
This doctrine is not only false, but one of the most harmful of our
wishful thoughts, since it leads us to believe that all may come right
with this very wrong world without our having to do anything about it.
Another instructive pursuit is to get a copy of the old _Who’s Who of
the Russian Communist Party_ and observe that there was not a single
leading member of the Party who had not been at one time or another,
and frequently many times, under arrest by the Okhrana. Stalin,
supreme butcher of the lot, was five times in the hands of the men whom
he later was to help exterminate. One can conservatively say that if
the Okhrana had been operated on the principles of the Soviet Police,
not a single leader of the Bolsheviks would have been left alive, and
there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution as we know it, and no
Soviet Union with its melancholy record of life-taking failure, and
perhaps no Nazi party in Germany, and who knows, perhaps no World War
now.
Absolute Terror not only physically removes the more dangerous
opponents of the tyranny but it reduces the survivors to morbid
obeisance, to a sort of unwilling, servile, unconscious idolatry of
the tyrant. The tyrant, when he attains the stature of Hitler or
Stalin, becomes the Omnipotent Father in the subconsciousness of all
his subjects, including those hostile to him. This makes it all the
more difficult for the rebel to raise his hand in patricide. Those who
insist that the modern tyrants are mere gangsters overlook the aura
of mystic power which is created around the figure of a ruler daily
greeted by choruses of adulation and abasement from tens of millions of
his people. It is no more to be resisted than the rhythm of tom-toms.
When the Lion of Judah, Emperor Haile Selassie, declared formal
mobilization of his ragged soldiers, he had two batteries of war drums,
one in major, one in minor key, beating their defiant message all day
and all night from his palace in Addis Ababa. The pulsations of the
drums at the Ghibi more than two miles away came to me in my room in
the stables of the Imperial hotel with a mesmeric force that made me
long to follow their rhythmic directions. The same effect is obtained
in the great tyrannies by the mass salutations of the tyrant worshipers.
Never in history have there been such vast numbers of people to add
the influence of the multitude to the herd instinct to conform. The
greatest tyrannies of long ago, when the human tribe was a fraction
of its size today, the Roman Empire, the Mongol Khanates, or even
the Indian Mogul Kingdoms, disposed of power over small populations
compared with the more than 250,000,000 now ruled by Hitler or the
200,000,000 by Stalin. In this day of electric communications the
huge bulk of such aggregates does not become unmanageable. The more
territory Hitler conquers, the more loot he has, the more permanent
resources to exploit, and the more people to enslave at work useful for
the Nazis. Our only hope against him is for his military defeat at the
hands of ourselves and our friends.
Q. _You have made discouragingly plain why there are so few political
assassinations in Germany, but couldn’t somebody like the fellow who
killed King Alexander and Barthou in Marseilles be found?_
A. I do not think so. That fellow, Vlada Georgiev, was a member of
the famous Imro, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization,
which had the only system I ever heard of to guarantee that their
members carry out assigned assassinations, no matter what the police
terror might be. The Imro’s object was to unify and obtain the greatest
possible degree of independence for Macedonia, divided among Bulgaria,
Greece, and Jugoslavia. Their chief weapon was assassination, and
when the Imro decreed a person’s death it was about as certain to be
carried out as any human decision can be. The procedure was to appoint
a killer and provide that he be killed unless he fulfilled his task. To
make this principle work it was necessary that the appointed assassin
realize he would more surely die if he failed than if he succeeded and
risked legal execution. A long tradition of killings within the Imro
made this fearful compulsion effective.
The mechanics of the system were simple. Like the Russian Nihilists
under Boris Savinkov, the Imro used to try and formally condemn their
victims to death. Thereupon the committee would draw beans from a bag.
The man drawing a black bean was the appointed assassin. He was _A_.
He had to leave the room. The others drew again. The man drawing the
second black bean, _B_, was appointed to kill _A_ if _A_ didn’t kill
the chosen victim. _B_ then left the room and a third black bean, _C_,
was appointed to kill _B_ if _B_ failed to carry out his assignment,
and so on until the whole committee had lined up, each with a gun
in the back of another. No one knew who among his comrades was his
potential executioner, but each knew that death was certain if the
decisions of the committee were not obeyed. Now this sort of system
would work, I believe, even in Nazi Germany, but the democracies are
far too squeamish to indulge in such practical methods.[1]
FOOTNOTE:
[1] A German statistician objected to this description of the Imro
system on the ground that the second to the last man would know that it
was the last man who was delegated to kill him if necessary; and the
last man would not have a gun in his back. True enough mathematically,
but the Imro system was run by practical assassins, not mathematicians.
They never let it get to the last man; the existence of the chain,
incomplete though it had to be, guaranteed that the originally
appointed assassin performed his duty.
Q. _Did the Nazis or the Bolsheviks practice assassination?_
A. They both rather looked down on individual killings as dilettante.
They preferred to do away with their victims en masse; especially the
Bolsheviks. I remember at the time of the Blood Purge of June 30, 1934,
when Hitler had murdered one thousand or more of his opponents, a
Polish correspondent in Moscow was expelled by the Soviet authorities
because he commented in a dispatch from the Russian capital that the
Bolsheviks regarded Hitler’s purge with the same disdain a wholesaler
would have toward the operations of a retailer. One thousand dead would
be retail business for the Bolsheviks. The Communists, however, stood
programmatically on the platform of no “individual terror” as they put
it, because they considered that assassinations of single persons were
ineffective, time and energy wasting.
The Nazis spurned no weapon, and so they murdered right and left from
the beginning. It was their type of young men, whether yet organized
in the Nazi Party or not, who committed most of the political
assassinations of postwar Germany from Rathenau and Erzberger until
Hitler came to power. Meanwhile, they deliberately provoked battles
with the young men of every other faction, Democrats as well as
Communists, in assemblies and on the streets, and the deaths from these
clashes numbered hundreds yearly.
After Hitler came to power you might have expected individual
assassinations to cease. But no, the murders by individual Nazis of
individual enemies, business rivals, or of anyone they happened to
dislike, continued through the year 1933 and it was not until 1934 that
the Gestapo took over the monopoly of murder. No claim of Hitler’s is
more ridiculous than his boast that the Nazi revolution was bloodless.
There is no record of how many Germans perished at the hands of the
uniformed bullies of the Nazi Party for strictly personal reasons, but
the numbers surely ran into thousands. I was a correspondent in Berlin
during that bloody year and I can testify as an eyewitness.
Q. _But weren’t those stories about atrocities exaggerated? You know
we were fed so much propaganda in the last war that later turned out
untrue, like the Belgian baby’s hands being cut off--how much can we
believe of the atrocity stories we hear now?_
A. No, the atrocity stories of today and of yesterday and of the last
war were not exaggerated. The truth is that we shall never learn of
more than the tiniest fraction of the atrocities committed by the
Germans, and I am sure we never learned about more than a fraction of
their atrocities in the last war.
Now by all means let some earnest young man arise and declare that the
British and the French and the Americans also commit atrocities. Do
they? Perhaps, because among our troops as among the troops of every
nation are some exceptionally brutal men, who when they are possessed
of the fury and license of battle become criminals. But only among the
Germans was and is atrocious behavior, torture, and murder, an official
policy, calculatedly carried out upon the authority of the government
to terrorize or exterminate the vanquished. When I came to Germany
I was intensely sympathetic with the Germans and refused to believe
any of the atrocity stories of the last war. It took many years of
residence in Germany and the experience of living through the bloodiest
period of the Nazi revolution to realize that there was almost no
atrocity charged against the Germans which could not have happened.
What a beautiful example of German propaganda the Belgian baby atrocity
story was. Dr. Goebbels must often have jealously admired the person,
whoever he was, who thought up the Belgian baby. Do we wish to cast
in doubt reports about the atrocities our people are committing?
Very well, let us plant a monstrous charge against ourselves, which
we can prove untrue, then we can claim (and many of our softheaded
opponents will believe us) that all other charges are untrue. This was
the effect of the charge that German troops had cut off the hands of
Belgian babies. Strangely enough, it was Northcliffe’s _Daily Mail_
which obliged the Germans by first picking up the story of the Belgian
baby, and then offering a reward for proof, and finally printing as
a journalistic scoop the fact that no proof could be found that the
Germans had ever cut off a Belgian baby’s hands. Thus in the minds of
millions of simple British and Americans the Germans were exculpated of
_any atrocities_. The bombarded British are not likely to make such a
mistake again.
Was there anything in the first World War to equal the deliberate
machine-gunning by German warplanes of the fleeing populations on the
roads of Poland, France, and the Lowlands? I do not believe it has a
counterpart in modern history, and only Genghis Khan and Tamerlane
could have matched it in earlier days. There were thousands of children
including babes in arms among the dead along the roads scarified by
the Luftwaffe. An American diplomat in Paris estimated that in France
and the Lowlands 100,000 civilians, two-thirds of them women and
children, were killed thus by the Germans, or approximately the same
as the number of French soldiers who died in battle. The slaughter of
civilians in Poland surpassed this figure many times.
I do not know why I should boggle at the lopped-off Belgian baby’s
hands, except that nobody could ever find an authentic example, and
I cannot imagine what good it would do the Germans, nor believe that
even Nazi Germans like to torture babies. The machine-gunning of the
roads in Europe had a military object, to cause panic and to clog the
movements of the Allied troops. But I have seen enough purposeless acts
of brutality committed by the Nazis to know what they are capable of
doing.
I wish Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose sensitivity as a poet I sincerely
admire, could have been with me one day in the women’s ward of a Berlin
hospital as I listened to a woman explain to me why she lay there
bandaged from head to foot, with the blood still oozing through. It
was in the spring of 1933, and the Brown Terror was getting into its
stride, but the Nazis had not yet learned to bar correspondents from
hospitals. After this story they were all barred.
The woman was Frau Marie Jankowsky, forty-eight years old, mother of
five sons. She was a Social Democratic welfare worker. “Night before
last,” she related to me, pausing only when pain made her gasp, “a
group of Storm Troopers came to our flat. One of them backed my husband
and sons into the kitchen and held them at the point of his revolver.
The others took me away to a Storm Troop barracks on the second floor
of a building not far from my house. There they stripped me naked. In
the middle of the room was a table, and covering the table a flag. They
asked me what the flag was.
“I answered it was the Black Red Gold flag of the Republic. They said
‘No,’ and commanded me to repeat that it was Black Red Ordure. I
refused and four Storm Troopers pulled me face down over the table, the
fifth pushed my face into a bundle of rags to stop me screaming, and a
sixth began beating me across the back with a light steel rod.
“It cut the skin and made blood come with every blow. The Storm Troop
Captain said, ‘Give her twenty blows, the Jewish sow.’ I am not Jewish
but that did not make any difference. Then they jerked me off the table
and said, ‘You stole shoes from your welfare section, didn’t you?’ I
said, ‘No,’ and the Captain said, ‘Give her another twenty.’ I was
bleeding badly when they pulled me off the table again and yelled at
me, ‘What’s this?’ and showed me our flag of the Iron Front with three
arrows. I told them, but they demanded that I say it was a manure fork.
I refused and the Captain ordered another twenty blows.
“That made sixty, and I was very weak, but finally when they pulled me
off the table again and yelled at me, ‘You served Communists in your
soup kitchen,’ I still had enough strength left to say, ‘You ought to
be ashamed to say that because I served you and you and you, but no
Communists.’ This made them angrier than ever and the last twenty blows
were the worst, and when I rolled off the table they picked me up, and
the Captain struck me across the face with his riding crop, and then a
Storm Trooper hit me on the jaw with his fist and knocked me across the
room so that I fell and wrenched my knee.”
The livid scar of the riding crop flamed across her face, and the
dressing on her knee confirmed that injury. I asked the medical
attendant to describe her injuries as they were when she arrived and he
confirmed that her back had been cut deep into the musculature. Yes, I
wish Anne Morrow Lindbergh had been with me to see and hear this story,
although it is only one of hundreds of thousands which could have been
related first by German victims of the Nazis and now by the vanquished
of the entire continent.
Mrs. Lindbergh says the “Wave of the Future,” by which she means the
wave of collectivism, the wave of Nazism, is irresistible, and hence we
would be wrong to try to resist it, because by resisting we would only
increase the casualty list. She dismisses the brutalities, atrocities,
inhumanities of the conquering Nazis as merely the “scum” on the wave,
something which will pass away and leave the clear blue water of the
New Order. But she has not viewed this Wave of the Future at firsthand
and so she has not been able to perceive that the scum reaches all the
way from the top to the bottom of the Nazi wave; that there is no clear
water beneath the surface brutality of the New Order, that from its
beginning until today and until it is destroyed it has been, is, and
will be unqualifiedly evil.
Atrocities? I assure you there are more atrocities being committed
this very moment by the hosts of the Gestapo, the Black Guards, the
Storm Troops, and all the other ruffians of Hitler throughout prostrate
Europe than you have ever dreamed about. If only we could arrange to
have all our isolationists, our weasel-worded noninterventionists,
and our complaisant converts to the Wave of the Future take a trip to
Europe and let them observe the fate of the 150,000,000 under Hitler’s
heel. The Wave of the Future is a wave of blood and tears. What
American in his right mind can wish to live if this wave engulfs our
world?
Q. _You mentioned Jan Valtin’s book_, Out of the Night. _Do you
consider the book authentic?_
A. It is the most accurate description of Nazi and Bolshevik Terror I
have ever seen in print. Valtin tells from the inside of the G.P.U. and
the Gestapo what an American newspaperman working in Russia and Germany
could observe in fragments from the outside. There is not an incident
in the book, however gruesome, which could not have happened, no matter
how improbable it may appear to a reader far away from the horrors of
totalitarian police methods. I recommend the book to every American,
because these two evil weapons of the tyrant states are operating today
in our country and Valtin has given us the most authoritative picture
of their activities we have ever had. Whatever he was in the past, this
strange young German has done more for democracy by writing these grim
memoirs than most democrats who have been democrats all their lives.
Q. _Since Hitler attacked Russia, don’t you think it is no longer
correct to say Nazism and Communism are the same? Hasn’t Hitler proved
now that he is really an enemy of Bolshevism and is protecting the
world against it?_
A. That would be the equivalent of saying that one monarchy would not
attack another or that you could not have war between two republics.
The war between Hitler and Stalin is a war between two terroristic
collectives. The collectivist form of their economy is almost
identical, both of them being a form of state capitalism; both are
supported by police terror and both found their principle motive power,
the fuel to run their society, in hatred.
Both avowed that the end justifies the means and both thereupon
employed every conceivable form of fraud, deceit, and violence to
attain their ends. Pagan, atheistic rejection of Christianity,
deliberate denial of even the desirability of the principle of
universal brotherly love was common to the two totalitarian creeds.
The fact that the two monsters of malevolence finally turned their
hatred upon one another actively only emphasizes the identical
character of the fratricidal twins. What of their essential features
has changed since they warred upon each other? Nothing whatever. Does
the Russo-German war prove Hitler’s thesis that he was an implacable
enemy of Bolshevism? Nonsense! Hitler’s brand of Bolshevism is
infinitely more menacing to us all than any produced in Russia. The
bibles of the twin regimes, _Mein Kampf_ and _Das Kapital_, preach
identical doctrine: Here, hate everybody of a different race; there,
hate everybody of a different class. Since Jesus Christ was on earth
the Communist Party and the Nazi Party and the states they founded are
the first institutions of such dimensions to be built avowedly and
officially on hatred.
In Russia they began by saying they had to hate and kill in order to
clear the land of all classes hostile to a socialist world, in order
to make room for a happier life. But hatred becomes a habit, grows,
expands monstrously until it cannot find enough victims. Before the
Bolsheviks even gained a far-off glimpse of a happier life their hatred
had become an end in itself. They began, by hating, as they thought,
rationally; they finished by hating and killing themselves.
The proletariat and peasantry, instructed by the Communists, began by
hating the Czar, the aristocrats, bankers, factory managers, engineers,
technicians, schoolteachers, dentists, undertakers, physicians,
lawyers, priests and policemen, everyone who occupied any position
noticeably superior to that of the masses. It took them about ten
years to slaughter this lot, and then they began hating and killing
the better-off farmers. I was there during the final mopping up of the
first victims and again for the extermination of the second group, and
as the last of the identifiable enemies of the Bolsheviks disappeared
in the cellars of the G.P.U., or in the wastes of Siberia, we in Moscow
used to discuss quite seriously what these furious haters were going to
do when they ran out of “classes” to hate.
It was no joke. It had become indispensable to Bolshevik life to have
an object of hatred and when the object was exterminated another had
to be found. We guessed they would have to begin hating and killing
themselves, and we were right. To us it was not surprising. When you
lived among them, you realized that Communist “class hatred” is hatred
of anyone who gets along better than oneself and there is just as much
hatred of Communists by Communists as of capitalists.
In no organization has there ever been more back-stabbing, poisoning,
strangling, murderous mutual hatred of one another than in the
Communist Party, from the malignant Russian Central Committee through
all its verminous offspring in the Comintern. They used to boast of the
“monolithic” character of the Russian Communist Party. It was like a
block of granite without a crevice. The Russian Jacobins declared they
would never commit the error of their French forebears who found they
could not stop killing when once they had started to kill one another.
For years the outside world observed this Bolshevik self-restraint and
there was much fear of it.
Then suddenly the prodigious store of hatred within the Bolshevik
breast burst the bounds of self-preserving sanity and the apostles of
Marx fell to killing each other with bewildering ferocity. Howling
“Wrecker,” “Saboteur,” “Trotzkyist,” “Bukharinist,” “Rightist,”
“Leftist,” “Nazi,” “Fascist,” they shot their own Soviet-reared
professional men, generals, admirals, government officials, in a
whirl of self-destroying madness which left even persistent Soviet
sympathizers unable to explain what was going on because nobody,
possibly including Stalin, understood it. It was like a mad dog biting
himself, tearing out his own viscera. What could be the fate of the
eviscerated animal?
Even before the war, in both Germany and Russia, the omnipotent,
omnivorous State had devoured all but a vestige of happiness. As the
two regimes of hatred went forward along their respective paths each
lost gradually even the desire to promote the happiness of anybody,
even of its own people.
In the land of the Bolsheviks, the bigoted struggle against men of
another class became a struggle against men of another view. The
internal political conflict impaired production, hampered the campaign
against poverty, and protracted the wretchedness of the population.
Nobody ate, drank, slept, lived even decently, much less comfortably,
and there was no security. They had given up liberty for security. Now
security was gone, for to their dismay the Bolsheviks saw that the one
thing for which everything had been sacrificed, the defense apparatus,
was inadequate.
In the land of the Nazis, the attempts of the Supermen to rule the
world led the Germans to forget individual happiness as completely
as the Bolsheviks. The Nazis believed that if they gave up butter
for guns today, they could tomorrow win with their guns more butter;
but the Nazi chief never had any intention of stopping for butter.
In comfort-loving, once-bourgeois Germany, food, clothing, fuel,
transportation deteriorated until it was impossible to find even a
physically happy person outside the young armed forces for whom the
nation sacrificed all. These favored youths found their chief pleasure
in the exercise of a technical skill and lust in combat which enabled
them to crush a continent with playful ease.
Now from the Atlantic to the Pacific, across the greatest continuous
land surface on the globe, from the English Channel to the Sea of Japan
there exists not one comfortable, secure, happy family. Not among the
more than five hundred million persons now in Europe with its neighbor
states could be discovered a trace of the happiness, imperfect though
it was, which used to exist. The Nazi Bolsheviks had achieved triumph
as far as Europe was concerned. The Wave of the Future had swept
happiness from its path.
2. RUSSIA
Q. _What is the best way for the United States to help the Russians
fight the German Army?_
A. The best way for the United States to help the Russians fight the
German Army is for us to go to war against Germany. Our declaration
of war against Germany would be of more value to Russian resistance
than all the war supplies we shall ever be able to send to the Soviet
Union. We ought to try to send the Red Army as much as we can spare
of airplanes and arms and anything else it needs to help it hold the
Germans, but all such aid would be trivial compared with the effect of
our declaration of war.
Q. _Why? What practical effect on the Russian war effort would we have
by going to war with Germany?_
A. It would have the moral effect of convincing the Russians that they
would win in the long run; hence it should obviate any chance, however
faint, of Stalin’s capitulating. As we have said before, it would
convince the Germans they would lose the war and hence would halve
their determination to go on. It would triple our war effort overnight,
and result speedily in a vast increase of production here of the
materials the Russians as well as the British need to carry on the war.
It would enable us to base our Pacific Fleet on Singapore and other
British bases in the Far East, and our Air Force, if it were found
expedient, on Russian bases in Kamchatka and near Vladivostok within
bombing distance of Tokyo. This would not only check the Japanese from
advancing farther south but from indulging in any military adventure,
such as attacking Siberia, while the danger existed of our immediate
intervention against them. This would relieve pressure on the Far
Eastern Red Army and permit it to send urgently needed reinforcements
to the troops fighting the Germans in European Russia.
The use of our Atlantic antisubmarine vessels in complete cooperation
with the British Navy in all the war zones would help break the
German counter-blockade and permit a greater quantity of supplies to
reach the British armed forces. It would enable us to seize those
positions we need off the west coast of Africa and on the coast, and
thus provide the first step toward establishing another take-off
place for an expeditionary force against the Reich. The example of
America’s entering the war could lead Weygand, or other authorities in
Morocco, to consider collaboration with us instead of with the Germans;
the north African coast has long been kept in mind as a possible
springboard for invading Europe. America’s entry into the war would for
the first time enable the British to attempt invasion of the continent.
Until now the British have had to keep at home more reserves than they
would need if they knew the American Army would soon be at their side.
Even with our Army in its present state of semi-preparedness, we have
enough completely trained Regular Army and Marine units to be able to
send abroad for active service an important contingent which would
either take its place immediately in an invasion force or replace
British units assigned to that task. The first effect upon the Germans
of the intelligence that the British were seriously preparing to
attempt an invasion would be to compel them to send back troops from
Russia to threatened points in Europe.
Finally, from the broadest strategical standpoint, the entry of the
United States would turn the tables on the Germans who until now have
had the advantage of initiative and surprise. Throughout the world
until now Hitler has kept the world wondering “where is he going to
strike next?” With the United States in the war, it would be the turn
of the Axis powers to wonder where the Anglo-American-Russian forces
were going to strike next, and Hitler would be forced to keep large
numbers of troops stationed at every point where our forces could
possibly attack.
Q. _The Russian resistance to the German attack seems to have surprised
nearly everybody. How do you explain it?_
A. There are many reasons for it. It is true that almost every expert
expected the Russians to collapse within a few weeks after Hitler began
his drive. Walter Duranty is the only one I know who said from the
outset that the Red Army would hold much longer than the outside world
seemed to expect.
The first reason for Russian resistance is that this was the first
time Hitler ever tackled a country with _lives to waste_ and _miles
to waste_. Its 200,000,000 population lived almost like animals, but
most of them flourished like healthy animals on their black bread
and cabbage and made sturdy fighting material. They claimed around
12,000,000 soldiers in their standing army and reserve. Thus they could
lose as many men as the entire German Army and still have left an army
as big as the former French Army. In fighting against the Germans
they could afford to lose two to one and still have superiority in
numbers. Their high command knew this and wasted lives with abandon but
sometimes to advantage. The same advantage in size held with respect to
terrain. They could afford to retreat over distances equivalent to the
width of many European countries and still have room to live in, just
as the Chinese did.
The second reason for Russian resistance is that this was the first
time Hitler had ever struck an army and a generation untouched by the
humanizing influence of Christianity, immune to any form of pacifism,
unsoftened by Western civilization. It was the first time Hitler had
ever struck an army that had been taught that all life is struggle,
that to fight for the Soviet Union was the noblest thing a man or woman
could do, the first time the Nazis had met a fanaticism sharper than
theirs. The Bolsheviks invented totalitarian fanaticism; the Nazis only
copied it.
It was the first time the Germans had come up against a people more
savage than themselves. The Bolsheviks were ahead of the Nazis in
pronouncing that the end justifies the means, and the oriental Russians
surpassed the occidental Germans in cruelty. The Germans have known
Hitlerism only since 1933 and until that time they had normal contacts
with the outside world. The Russians have known nothing but Bolshevism
since 1918 and from that moment on have been hermetically sealed from
the outside world.
For war-making this savage insularity has its uses. The Red Army is
even more fanatically homogeneous in its political faiths and hatreds
than is the Nazi Army. Everybody under the age of forty in Russia today
has experienced either throughout life or in adult life nothing but
the Soviet regime. The Russians have the advantage that they have been
practicing totalitarians all their lives and are used to it. For the
civilian population not immediately in the path of the battles there
was less change in the move from peace to war in the Soviet Union than
in any other belligerent state, because the Russians have been living
on a war footing since 1918.
During this generation of hardships their Asiatic characteristics have
been deepened, their fatalistic contempt for death increased. They are
content to let the Party guide their emotions. There are no Hamlets
among them. The Russians Dostoevsky wrote about, who dreamed and
sorrowed and could not act--all these have long been eliminated. Also
no living inhabitant of the Soviet Union has been corrupted by ease or
luxury! Yet because they are completely cut off from the outside world
the Russians think the Soviet Union superior to any other country. This
is an advantage in war.
Isolated and youthful, the Russians after twenty-three years of
suffering and historically unparalleled loss of life through
revolution, famine, and terror, still were not disillusioned by a
political, social, and economic system which had given them a standard
of living and culture beneath that of any large white community in the
world. There were no ideological divisions to rend the nation, since
all who differed with the ruling clique were liquidated the moment
the difference became apparent. Hence there was no Fifth Column in
Russia. Since Soviet justice or Stalin policy goes on the principle
that it is better to execute a hundred innocents than to let one guilty
escape, the purge of 1934-1938 probably did eliminate important Fifth
Columnists, together with many valuable military and industrial leaders.
A third reason for the strength of the Russian resistance is that the
Red Army for the past twenty-three years has received a larger share
of the national income in peacetime than any other defense force of
any nation has ever enjoyed, including Germany. Though Russia starved,
the Red Army ate well. On the four occasions--1925-1927, 1930, 1934,
and 1937--when I visited the Soviet Union and worked there as a
correspondent, I noticed that no matter how poorly the rest of the
population was dressed, Red Army soldiers always wore good uniforms
and strong leather boots. This was because ever since the Soviet Union
was born, every leader from Lenin and Trotzky to Stalin was profoundly
convinced that “the capitalist world will never permit the Socialist
State to exist and some day will seek to destroy us.”
Of course this attack of Hitler’s is not the attack of the capitalist
world upon the Socialist State, and the Socialist State now finds
the capitalist world its only ally. Nevertheless the unshakable and
correct Bolshevik belief in inevitable war led the regime to impose the
greatest sacrifices upon the people for the sake of the armed forces,
and even though the Soviet economy was most backward, the enormous
amounts expended were bound to have effect.
Even in American terms the Soviet defense budget was large. In 1940 it
was the equivalent of $11,000,000,000, and represented one-third of the
national expenditure. Measure this against the fact that the infinitely
richer United States will approximate the expenditure of that much
yearly only in 1942 after two years of our greatest defense effort.
Most of the money spent on the Red Army and Air Force went for machines
of war. Twenty-three years ago when the Bolshevik revolution took place
there were few machines in Russia. Marx said Communism must come in a
highly industrialized society. The Bolsheviks identified their dreams
of socialist happiness with machines which would multiply production
and reduce hours of labor until everyone would have everything he
needed and would work only as much as he wished. Somehow this has not
come about, but the Russians still worship machines, and this helped
make the Red Army the most highly mechanized in the world, except
perhaps the German Army now.
Like Americans, the Russians admire size, bigness, large numbers. They
took pride in building a vast army of tanks, some of them the largest
in the world, armored cars, airplanes, motorized guns, and every
variety of mechanical weapon. Their quality was seldom the best. Few
things produced in the Soviet Union have attained high quality, but the
attempt is made to compensate by quantity.
Bolshevik love of novelty, eagerness to experiment and try new things
(they invented parachute troops), their willingness to discard
traditional methods, and their liking for youthful leadership all were
advantages. The Red Army apparently was the only one to learn from
the lessons of the German campaign in Poland--which were open for the
instruction of the French, British, Dutch, Belgians, and every other
country in Europe, but were ignored by all of them. Stalin’s purge of
the Red Army wherein he executed or otherwise eliminated one-fourth of
the senior officers was believed at the time to have done unmitigated
harm, but besides the probability that it disposed of some real Fifth
Columnists, it destroyed nearly all the older generals, and left the
field for men under fifty. Voroshiloff and Budenny were vestigial
exceptions. In this day of brand-new warfare youth has an advantage.
We have to include here also the fact that the Russian is an excellent
pilot. He has reckless courage, keen eyesight, abounding health,
contempt for the enemy, and fanatical belief in his cause. The Russians
have a word they like to apply to themselves, _Shirokaya Natura_,
meaning broad-natured, lavish-tempered. That is a characteristic of all
the good pilots I have ever known. It means they are ready to spend
themselves, their lives, as readily as they spend their money. The
R.A.F. has it, Udet has it, Goering has it, the American and Canadian
pilots have it, and the Russians have it. I dare say Lindbergh must
have had it once. There are millions of boys in Russia of pilot age.
The fourth set of reasons for Russian resistance is based upon the
immense benefit the Red Army won through the occupation of the Finnish
Mannerheim line, the Baltic states, Eastern Poland, and Bessarabia
during the time Hitler was busy conquering the rest of Europe. This
action of Stalin’s was typical of the principle that the end justifies
the means. If you believed in this principle and in the righteousness
of the Soviet cause, you would now have to admit that the end did
justify the means in this case, since the creation of this screen of
territory enabled the Red Army to defeat the Blitz.
The term Blitzkrieg, frequently misused, technically means the
destruction of your enemy by action so swift that he is not able to
mobilize, or bring up his forces to meet yours at the decisive point.
The screen of occupied territory slowed up the Germans long enough for
the Red Army to mobilize fully. Thereafter the great distances, the
bad roads, the unfavorable weather, and the scorched-earth policy
impeded the German advance, while Russian guerilla warfare proved more
effective than anything of the kind the Germans had ever met.
Russian guerilla fighting is not the old-fashioned kind, where a farmer
hides with a shotgun to catch an enemy sentry with his back turned.
During the Russian Civil War, the most ferocious conflict of modern
times until its Spanish equivalent, the Reds especially developed
Partisan warfare. This consisted in deliberately hiding companies of
several score or hundred heavily armed men until the enemy passed
forward. These guerillas would then attack from the rear, usually by
night, and often annihilate whole detachments of the enemy. Their
ambushes, ruses, and surprises were endlessly ingenious. The guerillas
seldom wore uniforms. They were invariably shot if captured. They
also never took prisoners except to obtain information by torture.
They were extremely successful. Heretofore the Germans have been able
to terrorize their conquered populations by the exercise of utterly
ruthless Terror. They will have less success with the Russians than
with any people they have yet tried to break, except perhaps the Serbs.
Q. _But that is a very long list of reasons for Russian resistance.
Can’t you sum them up for us in a word?_
A. Yes, the answer is morale, or better, faith. That word with its
deep Christian connotations may sound blasphemous when applied to the
atheist Bolsheviks, but it is a true faith, in reverse, founded upon
hatred. It may be objected that faith is a positive force and it may
be asked in what do the Russians have faith? In their dogma, their
doctrine, their nation, or faith in themselves, or the faith that lies
in their deep attachment to their soil? Or is it not their faith in the
unspeakably evil character of their enemies? I think it is the last.
The Bolsheviks have taught all Russians to hate the Fascists, as they
generically call the Nazis, with a ferocity which surpasses anything
in our experience. This sort of faithful hatred is a terrific force.
It inspires to limitless valor. It is a priceless asset in war. The
Russians see the Nazi legions as the incarnation of wickedness, led by
the devil himself. They are right. Furthermore they are inspired to
fight by the belief, also correct, that if they lose they will suffer
intolerable punishment. Unlike the French they have no illusions about
the fate that awaits them at the hands of the man who has called them
the “scum of the earth.”
This hatred of their enemies and fear of the consequences of defeat
are probably the strongest feelings animating the Russians in battle,
but they have also an incredible faith in themselves. It makes no
difference that this faith is founded for the most part on lack of
knowledge of the outside world, and the absence of any chance to
compare themselves with other nations and other systems: they are
unshakably convinced that they are what would have been called in
another time and another place, “God’s anointed.” An American general
defined morale as “when a soldier thinks his army is the best in the
world, his regiment the best in the army, his company the best in the
regiment, his squad the best in the company, and that he himself is
the best blankety-blank soldier man in the outfit.” This is what the
Red Army soldier thinks. The Red Army was not impressed by the German
victory in France. After all, the defeated were “just Frenchmen, just
_bourgeoisie_.”
The average Russian has a strong conviction, unspecified and
unsupported by evidence, but forming a subconscious background for all
his thinking about the war, that the citizens of the outside world, in
“capitalist-imperialist” and “capitalist-fascist” states alike, are
composed of two classes, depraved slave drivers and spiritless slaves.
He even looks down on the proletariat abroad which has gone these
twenty years without making the revolution the Russians made. It was
a bitter revelation to many an American and other foreign Communist
leader on visiting Moscow the first time, to be assigned a cubbyhole
in the old Lux Hotel, and to be forced to wait hours for an audience
with a Russian official who scarcely troubled to conceal his contempt
for the inferior foreign communist.
We are surprised that the Russians, after all these years of starving
and pain and suffering, should still possess the morale to fight, but
we overlooked the fact that faith thrives on tribulation. The British
had no faith and no morale until they were threatened with death and
punished with fire. Today they have a faith in their cause such as
they have not had since they became a nation, and now they announce
they will scorch the earth, and if necessary burn London before the
advance of an invader. Today the British are poor in food and clothes
and lodgings, but rich in spirit. The Russians are likewise, and though
it is painful to say it, so are the Germans. We alone among the nations
are still rich in material goods and poor in spirit, for we lack faith.
Where are those among us furious to fight for liberty and democracy?
Q. _Do you mean to say the Russians have more faith in their cause than
we do in ours?_
A. I do.
Q. _How can you say such a thing, how do you mean it?_
A. I think you are surprised because you confuse faith and morality.
They have nothing to do with each other.
The morality of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks is abhorrent. That has
nothing to do with the fact that their faith was strong enough to
make them great warriors. The best fighters in the Spanish Civil War,
Ernest Hemingway testifies, were the Moors. Those skinny brown men,
who looked so insignificant and whose behavior was so abominable, were
always chosen, if available, to be the shock troops, as when they
relieved the Alcazar. They fought with the bravery traditional of the
Mohammedan warrior from the Ottoman Turks to the Afghans. Their morals
were criminal. They butchered, looted, raped with neither compunction
nor discrimination.
I have seen them walking down a village street laden with sewing
machines, women’s clothing, surgical instruments, and chicken feed to
set up shop in a Cathedral underneath the image of the Saviour whose
head they had hacked off. Decent folk on Franco’s side were appalled,
but Franco could not do without them. They had a faith that only the
Catholic Requetés on the one hand and the Communists on the other could
equal, and when they went into battle the Moors sang. I have heard them
and reflected that good and evil have nothing to do with faith which
moves mountains and wins wars. Are we today in the United States going
into battle singing? We are not even going into battle, although we
admit it is ours.
Q. _Do you mean to say the Moors fought for the Mohammedan faith in
Spain?_
A. I do not. I mean to say that they fought because they believe the
profession of a man is to fight, and in fighting they are upheld in
spirit by their belief in Allah, and their faith in his promises.
Q. _What do the Russians fight for? They have no Allah and believe in
no hereafter._
A. I am not sure that either of those statements is correct. The images
of Lenin, Stalin, and Marx blend in the primitive Soviet Russian mind
together with dim memories of Orthodox ritual to make up a kind of ikon
of Communism. In some minds it may be only the figure of Father Lenin,
now mummified, deified, or at least sanctified, in his glass coffin
on the Red Square, but in all save the minds of the intellectualized
leaders there is some personification of the faith. As for belief in a
hereafter, I have sometimes wondered if even the highest leaders of the
Party are always as sure as their Bezbozhnik Society, the Society of
the Godless, professes to be.
The Bezbozhniks’ battle against God would be meaningless unless they
thought, however subconsciously, that there must be something there to
fight. Twice I have seen Stalin stand at the graveside of a lifetime
comrade, once at the burial of Frunze and once at Kirov’s, and each
time as the final words were spoken and the earth fell and the bells of
the Kremlin tolled, I scrutinized his face for a sign of his thoughts
and under the spell of the moment I always thought I could see the
flicker of a question across his gloomy face. As a matter of fact I
suppose he was absorbed in thinking how to finish the ceremony as
quickly as possible in order to get back to his office and ensure that
a good Stalin man succeeded the dead.
Q. _Is it true that in order to curry favor with the outside world the
Soviet government has restored freedom of worship?_
A. Freedom of worship in the Soviet Union was never frankly and
publicly prohibited; it was merely quietly strangled. Today its public
restoration is a gesture toward the outside world and an effort to
canalize even the religious energies sleeping in the hearts of the
older people, into national defense. All the old shibboleths of
religion and patriotism and nationalism and local pride and mystic
faith in Holy Russia which for two decades had been banned have now
been revived. In the supreme trial of war the Russian people have
returned instinctively to the deep primitive traditions common to man
everywhere. Their Bolshevik masters have apparently recognized the
desirability of kindling fighting energy from any fuel, and have
permitted a veritable carnival of emotions which a short while ago
would have been condemned as “bourgeois” and “counterrevolutionary.”
Who knows what further changes the war may bring?
Q. _American friends of the Soviet Union claim that her present
resistance to the Germans entitles her now to our moral approval, and
that we are obligated to give it to our “Ally.” Is this true?_
A. I am sure Stalin does not care for our moral approval. He would
much rather have our material support. Those Americans who changed
their views of the Soviet Union either when Stalin signed his pact with
Hitler in August 1939, or when the Red Army attacked Finland, or when
it marched into Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia, or again
when the Germans attacked Russia and the Red Army fought back--such
observers only proved that their judgment of Stalin’s system was
founded on mere day-to-day, surface events. When they approved of the
Soviet Union it was for wrong reasons; when they disapproved it was for
wrong reasons.
None of the events just named meant any change in the nature of the
Soviet regime. If one approved of it today for resisting Germany, one
ought to have approved of it in August 1939 for having signed up with
Germany. Both acts had the same motive: the self-interest of the Stalin
regime.
Whether we wish to extend our moral approval to the Stalin regime or
not, we all owe profound gratitude and respect to the Russian people.
It is said that every people gets the kind of government it deserves,
but I do not think this has ever been true of the Russian people; they
have never had as good a government as they deserved. Today they are
demonstrating a spirit on the battlefield which places us forever in
debt to them. Whatever his regime, the Russian soldier is giving his
life to defeat the Germans and every sacrifice of a Russian life means
the possible saving of an American life.
To the Russian people we owe our friendship as well as all our support.
Our support can reach the Russian people only through their regime. Let
us keep the distinction sharp and the supplies moving.
Q. _Aren’t we running a risk if we support the Russians?_
A. Yes, we are compelled to run a risk no matter what we do. The time
when we could have made ourselves secure without risk is long past; our
isolationists saw to that. Today we risk much if we support the Soviet
Union, but we risk more if we do not. If we do not support her, we risk
Hitler’s winning the resources of Russia. If we do support her, we risk
two things, first, that after we have poured supplies and munitions,
airplanes, gasoline, and guns into Russia, Stalin might capitulate and
these war materials would fall into the hands of the Germans.
The other risk is that with our help the Red Army should not only hold
the Germans but actually defeat them and invade and occupy Germany. I
purposely draw this picture crudely. This is a small immediate risk,
for the Red Army has not the offensive power to do it. But suppose the
Red Army were able to hold the Germans for another year, the while
Britain with the United States’ help grows strong enough in the air
to obtain supremacy over the Luftwaffe on the Western Front. Suppose
during this time, with the aid of shipments from the United States the
Red Air Force recovers and also grows strong enough to dominate the
Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front. It is then possible to imagine a time
when the Germans, disintegrating from within, would begin to withdraw
from the East and the Red Army begin to attack.
When once Germany begins to crumble, it is the conviction of all who
know that brittle country that she will fall apart at once. It will be
a miracle, indeed, if she finds a Hindenburg to lead her armies home
and demobilize them in orderly fashion. It will be more of a miracle if
a Prince Max of Baden can be found in Germany to apply for an armistice
or negotiated peace.
The German Army will have been defeated, disrupted, demoralized. For
a time there will be anarchy. Then all will depend upon which forces
reach German territory and the German capital first, the Red Army or
the armies of the West. If we have stayed out of the war, or have
participated only as a naval and air power; if the Western Allies have
conquered Germany on the sea and in the air, but have left the land
to be conquered by the Red Army; then if the Red Army pushes into
Germany before our forces can arrive, it will mean Communist revolution
throughout Europe.
Why has the world not gone Communist long ago? It is because Communism,
or its Soviet version, in the only country it was ever tried, had been
a peacetime failure. Let us not argue the definition of Communism and
whether we ought to call it State Capitalism. The world had made up its
mind that the collectivist system as practiced by the Russians could
not produce enough to make its population as well off as the people
were even under old-fashioned, broken-down, rickety capitalism. Now,
victory by the Red Army would be evidence that Russian Communism could
do what Western capitalism could not do--defeat Hitler. The populations
of Europe would count that power victorious whose land armies were on
the spot to occupy the territory of the defeated. If the Red Army were
to get there first, it would prove to millions of uncritical observers
that the Soviet system had won, that it was a success to be emulated,
and in the circumstances of disorder and unemployment which would
prevail at the conclusion of the war, such a judgment could lead to
continental upheaval.
Q. _How can we prevent this and at the same time see that Nazi Germany
is defeated?_
A. Only by going to war against Germany now. Never since the war began
have we had any stronger reasons for entering the war than now. We
cannot afford to stay out and allow Hitler the possibility of winning
the war by getting Russia. We cannot afford to stay out and allow the
Bolshevik regime the possibility of winning the continent of Europe to
Communism.
Q. _But can Stalin be trusted?_
A. Certainly not. His agreement with Churchill not to conclude a
separate peace is worth even less than the solemn promise the French
government made on March 28, 1940 to make no separate peace, just three
months before it made a separate peace over the protest of its Ally,
Britain.
Q. _Why do you say Stalin’s promise is worth even less than that?_
A. Because Bolsheviks, from whom the Nazis have copied their ethics,
do not believe in keeping their word. I do not mean this frivolously
or cynically. On page 323 of volume XVII of the collected works of
Lenin, the father of Bolshevism wrote: “Morality is that which serves
the destruction of the old exploiter’s society ... which creates a
new society of communists. Communist morality is that which serves
this struggle.... We do not believe in eternal morality and we expose
the deceit of all legends about morality.” As the end justifies the
means and the end is the State, so treaty breaking is justified when
it serves the State. For a Bolshevik or a Nazi, one of the most absurd
phrases in the Bible is the reference to the obviously bourgeois
simpleton who sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not. For both
Bolshevik and Nazi the theory is that individual honor must always
be sacrificed if necessary to the State, and the State itself has no
obligation of honor to any other State, or individual.
You may say that the only difference between a Bolshevik’s or Nazi’s
breaking his word and a bourgeois’ doing the same is that the Bolshevik
or Nazi would be proud of it and the bourgeois would not. True enough,
and that makes all the difference between a moral world and an amoral
world. It is the difference between the recognition of morality and the
defiance of it--the difference between civilization and the jungle.
This jungle attitude we hope to eliminate by defeating Hitler.
Q. _How do you expect to eliminate this jungle by fighting on the side
of the Bolsheviks?_
A. We would not be “fighting on the side of the Bolsheviks.” We would
be fighting disease with disease. As a youth I studied medicine for a
while in Vienna, and one of my professors was the great Wagner-Jauregg,
the discoverer of the malaria treatment for the tertiary stage of
syphilis. Wagner-Jauregg observed that some of his paretic patients
who contracted another disease accompanied by high fever would
after the recession of the fever often be almost cured of their
syphilitic disabilities. He began to inoculate his syphilitic patients
with malaria and thus by using one disease against another won a
considerable number of victories over the more dangerous of the two
afflictions. After curing the syphilis it was relatively easy to cure
the malaria. Nazi Germany is at this moment as much more dangerous
than Bolshevik Russia to our world as syphilis is more malignant than
malaria.
Q. _So you think Bolshevism, after it has helped eliminate Nazism, will
be as easy to cure as malaria?_
A. Probably not, but we may entertain reasonable hopes that in case the
Red Army as distinct from the Bolshevik Party is victorious, or even
semi-victorious over the invading Germans, it will have more to say in
the affairs of Russia than ever in the past.
Q. _Do you consider that would be an improvement?_
A. Decidedly. Armies are usually conservative and pacifist. If we want
to get rid of the Communist International and have Russia re-enter
the family of nations, let the Red Army take hold of affairs in the
Kremlin. Stalin is afraid of it.
In the purge of 1934-1938 Stalin arrested no less than 30,000 officers
according to an estimate quoted by Louis Fischer. He started by
executing the head of the army, Tukhachevsky, and seven other of the
highest generals, then three more, and so on until there were left of
the original staff only Voroshiloff and Budenny. Some may have been
guilty of wishing to cooperate with the Nazis, but most were killed
because Stalin feared they were plotting against him.
Stalin’s principal instrument of espionage against his own army is the
system of political commissars, whereby a Stalin party man is allocated
to each Red commander, with the prime duty of watching his every move,
listening to his every word, and if possible trapping him into an
indiscretion. This obviously hinders military efficiency, and in times
when Stalin feels safe or when he wants military efficiency more than
an immediate sense of personal security, he gives it up.
When he attacked Finland, for example, he felt strong enough personally
to give it up, and the Red Army improved sufficiently to win. There was
much boasting among Communists that the Red Army now no longer would
need political commissars again, but to their disappointment, shortly
after the German attack on Russia, Stalin reinstalled his commissars.
This at the moment when the Soviet Union was more gravely threatened
than ever in its history meant that Stalin felt himself less menaced
by the defeat of the Red Army than by the Red Army itself.
Is it farfetched to imagine that since Stalin has played the part of a
super-Robespierre, the time may come when he will suffer Robespierre’s
end?
Q. _If you say, as you did, that Stalin would make a separate peace if
it suited him, despite his agreement not to do so, what was the use of
Britain’s offering and entering into such an agreement?_
A. It was useful to make the agreement in order to convince Stalin
that Britain, for her part, intends to keep on fighting no matter
what happens. This might encourage Stalin to fight a little longer
than he might have done if he thought that at any moment he might be
deserted by his Ally. You remember the _New Yorker_ anecdote about the
suburbanite who met the town Communist soon after Germany attacked
Russia, and twitted him about the German-Soviet pact, but without
results.
The Communist said blandly that it was only to be expected, that it
proved Russia was the dominant figure on the international scene, and
so on. Then he added: “The only time I was worried was when I was
listening to Churchill’s speech on the radio. For a minute, at the
beginning, I thought he was going to rat on us.” So the Anglo-Soviet
agreement is strictly one-way, but it has its uses. It may persuade
Stalin that Churchill is not going to rat on him!
Q. _Under what circumstances do you think Stalin would make a separate
peace?_
A. At any time Hitler would let him have peace and remain in power and
retain sufficient of the framework of the Soviet system to promise its
continuance after the Western powers had defeated Hitler. It is plain
now that, once the Germans had attacked, Stalin must have realized
he had to fight or die, for Hitler was evidently sure of quick,
complete victory. If Stalin had tried to capitulate, as some thought
he would, without fighting, he could have obtained nothing better than
obliteration of himself and his regime. Therefore Stalin fought, but
this does not necessarily mean he intends to fight to the bitter end,
with the Red Army backing up to the Urals, to Siberia, and the Soviet
government moving to Sverdlovsk or Novosibirsk, as romantic enthusiasts
would have it.
Stalin probably defines his task to fight Hitler so well, make it
cost the Germans so much, that Hitler will finally offer a peace
Stalin could afford to accept on the basis of his expectation that
Germany would in the long run lose the war. The Bolshevik surrender
at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 was based on similar reasoning, that the
Bolsheviks’ enemy, Germany, would eventually be removed by world
revolution and that good Bolshevik strategy would seek first to
preserve the structure, if only a skeleton structure, of the Soviet
Socialist State, at any cost of immediate humiliation and suffering.
The Russians have proved now by their destruction of the great dam at
Dniepropetrovsk that they mean truly to scorch the earth before Hitler
even if it means the destruction of their most precious possessions.
The destruction of the Dnieper dam was to my mind the most important
single event of the Russian-German war.
Q. _Why was the blowing up of the Dnieper dam so important?_
A. Because Dnieprostroy was an object almost of worship to the Soviet
people. Its destruction demonstrates a will to resist which surpasses
anything we had imagined. I know what that dam meant to the Bolsheviks.
I visited it in 1930 when it was being built under the supervision
of the American engineer, Hugh Cooper. It was the largest, most
spectacular, and most popular of all the immense projects of the First
Five-Year Plan. It was the principal source of hydroelectric power for
the Ukraine.
During all the years under the Soviet government the Russian people
had to do without romance, until the Five-Year Plan was begun. Then
they began to find glamour in statistics. They glorified in figures
showing that this or that project in the Soviet Union was the largest
of its kind in the world. The Dnieper dam when it was built was the
biggest on earth and so it occupied a place in the imagination and
affection of the Soviet people difficult for us to realize. I remember
standing in the middle of the mile-long dam and listening to a young
Soviet engineer rhapsodically exclaim: “You see there, that forest
of cranes, that army of excavating machines! There is more machinery
concentrated on this construction site than was ever concentrated
anywhere in the world! Look at those gravel mixers. We are pouring here
five thousand cubic meters of gravel, more per day than any body of men
ever poured in the history of the world! See those immense snail-shaped
turbo dynamos! They are the biggest ever made. We will supply more
electricity from a single point than ever....” And so he went on
endlessly, and back in Moscow people would eagerly scan the newspapers
for the latest bulletins on Dnieprostroy.
Stalin’s order to destroy it meant more to the Russians emotionally
than it would mean to us for Roosevelt to order the destruction of the
Panama Canal. Suppose our troops defending the canal were to have been
driven back by the invading Japanese until it became evident they would
capture the canal if we did not destroy it. If our troops then blew up
the locks, it would be an act of determination which could be compared
to that of the Russians in blowing up the Dnieper dam.
Q. _Well then, doesn’t this prove that the Russians will fight to the
bitter end and never make a separate peace?_
A. Perhaps, but not necessarily. They may fight to the bitter end but
even the Dnieper dam does not prove it. The task of Stalin, it appears
now, is by just such a demonstration of stubborn courage, to whittle
down Hitler’s demands until they reach Stalin’s ability to accede to
them. If he can get Hitler to offer to keep the Soviet government and
bureaucracy in power and to withdraw the bulk of the German troops, and
not to demand too much in the way of demobilization of the Red Army,
the two tyrants might once more get together.
Q. _But why should Stalin quit? Why should he ever be willing to make
such a compromise peace if in the long run he believes Germany will be
beaten?_
A. Because the Soviet Union is not strong enough economically to go on
fighting indefinitely, particularly if the industries and mines and
agriculture of Southern Russia are cut off by the Germans. It would be
a miracle if the Russians could endure a long war. Most peoples have a
surplus they can do without in wartime. The Soviet Union has no surplus.
Q. _What about the Chinese? They didn’t seem to have a surplus either,
but they have gone on fighting the Japanese now for over four years._
A. That is true and important, but the Chinese economy was
decentralized. The Chinese lives locally. Chinese communities could
be cut off from the outside world and live almost normally. The
Soviet economy is centralized, a closely knit system of collective
farms-mines-factories, which if ruptured at one point would tend to go
to pieces. Nevertheless there is a significant similarity between the
primitive character of the Russian and the Chinese peasants, and their
ability to improvise a living and keep on fighting when more highly
civilized folk, as the French, would give in.
Q. _Under what circumstances do you think Hitler would offer Stalin a
compromise peace?_
A. The moment he believes he has defeated the Red Army sufficiently
to force Stalin to accept a peace which would include substantial
demobilization of the Red Army--enough to ensure that it could not
be used for a sudden attack on the German Army after it had returned
its attention to the West. It is probable that Hitler had much more
totalitarian goals in view when he first attacked Russia; but the Red
Army has probably made him content for the moment with less.
Q. _Isn’t there some evidence that Hitler is after an all-out victory
over Russia and intends no compromise, but complete conquest?_
A. Yes, the most direct evidence we have of such an intention is
contained in his speech of September 12, 1936 at Nuremberg, when he
said: “If the Ural mountains with their immeasurable wealth of raw
materials, Siberia with its rich forests, and the Ukraine with its
immense grain fields, were lying within Germany, this country under
National Socialist leadership would be swimming in wealth. We would
produce so much that every single German would have more than enough to
live on.”
This does not sound as though he intended to stop short of anything,
but the fact still remains that unless he believes he can make
peace with the West (and he cannot have much hope for that after
the Roosevelt-Churchill proclamations of peace terms), his most
advantageous solution of the war would be compromise, with Stalin or
some other Russian leader as his Gauleiter.
Q. _Wouldn’t Hitler obtain more supplies if he took them than if he
trusted to the Soviets to deliver them, even if they promised to do so
after having been conquered?_
A. Not for a very long time, probably several years. If Hitler,
completely defeating the Red Army, were to try to replace the Soviet
system with something of his own devising, imagine the chaos! There are
several million employees of the Soviet bureaucracy. Suppose they all
sabotaged as the Czarist bureaucracy sabotaged the Bolsheviks when they
seized power. It took the Bolsheviks five years to work back up from
starvation in 1918 to the level of subsistence in 1923.
Suppose the scorched-earth policy is extended to the oil fields of
the Caucasus. Really determined skilled effort can make an oil field
unproductive for a year or more. To pursue the Red forces into the
Urals and beyond and then to hold down the whole country would be a
task which would absorb the energies of even the German war machine.
There would thus be bargaining points on both sides.
Hitler could say to Stalin: “I can utterly destroy you and your system
if I choose.” Stalin could say to Hitler: “Yes, but I can make your
conquest futile as far as supplies are concerned, and if you try to
destroy me and my system I will starve you and tire you until you are
too weak to win in the West.” Stalin’s argument might well run that by
making a compromise peace he could save something, including his own
job, from the wreck; then by waiting patiently for the victory of the
Allies which he probably foresees in the long run, he would win back
everything, just as the Bolsheviks did after they had deserted the
Allies in the first World War.
Hitler, on the other hand, knows that without Stalin’s help he cannot
begin to obtain the materials he needs from Russia in time to serve his
necessity. Douglas Miller points out that in the two summers of 1917
and 1918 when the Germans occupied the Ukraine, they got only 43,000
small carloads of grain, which scarcely paid the costs of occupation.
Only with Stalin as his Gauleiter can Hitler make his Russian
investment pay economically during the critical next two years.
Q. _What would be the effect of such a compromise peace between Germany
and Russia on the United States and Great Britain?_
A. It would be a disaster even worse than the signing of the original
Soviet-German pact in August 1939.
Q. _Why worse? It would be just about the same, wouldn’t it?_
A. No, because this time Hitler would have obtained what he thought he
had obtained but had not obtained from Russia through his 1939 pact. He
would have nearly complete security on the Eastern frontier and would
not have to pin down there more than a fraction of the divisions he had
there from 1939 on.
He would have obtained guaranteed deliveries of the oil and grain and
other products he needs. His guarantee would be the disarmament of the
Red Army to the point where the Germans could march in at any moment
and enforce their demands. He would also have obtained the right to
march his troops across the Ukraine, or sail across the Black Sea and
from the Caucasus drive at Suez, or eventually India. Furthermore
the re-neutralization, or the military emasculation, of the Soviet
Union would free Japan’s rear from the danger of attack, and would
proportionately increase the chances of Japan’s attacking southward in
the area of our vital interests. Such a compromise peace would enable
Hitler to endure many years longer than if he had to fight on to the
complete conquest of Russia, against a nationwide, scorched-earth,
guerilla warfare.
Q. _You make it seem as though a compromise peace were quite possible.
Why then did Stalin fight at all?_
A. You mean, when the Germans attacked? Because he was given no choice.
There was rumor of Hitler’s having submitted an ultimatum or terms to
Stalin, but as it turned out Hitler submitted no demands at all; he
simply attacked.
Q. _Why didn’t Hitler at least make the attempt and demand of Stalin
the things he wanted, including the demobilization of the Red Army?_
A. I suppose he knew that even Stalin could not successfully order
the demobilization of the Red Army without suffering the danger of
revolution. Hitler had successfully brought the armies of several
powers under his control without fighting: Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Rumania, Bulgaria, but they were small states which would never have
stood a chance for more than a few hours or days of resistance against
the Germans. It seemed to many people that Hitler could have done the
same with Russia. The acquiescence of Stalin in every other German
demand encouraged this belief. But Hitler never made the trial.
Q. _I still do not see why he did not try._
A. Perhaps because of Napoleon. This is only a theory of mine, but in
analyzing Hitler’s motives for attacking Russia, it struck me that
his vanity may have led him to wish to impose his will by force upon
Stalin, his only remaining rival on the continent, and to do the
thing Napoleon failed to do, conquer Russia. Hitler is an admirer of
Napoleon. When he first visited Paris he spent half an hour alone
by the tomb of Napoleon, then ordered the remains of Napoleon’s son
brought from Vienna to be re-interred beside his father. Hitler does
not collect ordinary Napoleonana as Mussolini does. Hitler collects the
same countries which Napoleon once collected or tried to collect. He is
not merely going over the same territory, he is consciously emulating
Napoleon.
The French Emperor’s excuse for attacking Russia was that Alexander
refused to join Napoleon’s blockade of England, the “Continental
System.” Historians now agree, however, that Napoleon went into Russia
in 1812 chiefly to satisfy his vanity and his lust for war and to
appease his jealousy of Alexander, his only remaining rival on the
continent. Alexander was willing to do almost everything Napoleon
wanted, but Napoleon wanted to impose his will by force. So with
Hitler. He had even less excuse than Napoleon for attacking Russia.
I share the opinion of many observers that Hitler could have had
anything he liked from Stalin, beginning with the delivery of
all available materials even if it meant stripping the Russians,
and including the permission to pass troops through Russia, and
even including perhaps consent to as much of a demobilization of
the Red Army as Stalin believed he could order without danger of
revolt--possibly enough to have satisfied Hitler that the Red Army
could not attack him. Nor does it seem likely that the Red Army ever
would have attacked the Germans except after they had definitely lost
the war in the West, and then it would have made little difference who
delivered the final blow.
The Russians would probably have behaved toward Germany exactly as the
Italians behaved toward France. In their anxiety to run no risks, the
Italians waited until their intervention made no difference; the French
were already defeated. So Stalin would probably have waited until the
German Army was knocked out before he moved.
Q. _But wasn’t it likely that Stalin would have attacked if Hitler
attempted to invade the British Isles?_
A. Not unless it had become apparent that the invasion had not only
failed but that the German Army had lost practically all its Air Force
and was about to collapse. If this contention is correct, there was no
danger to Hitler from the Russians, and the material supplies he seeks
could certainly have been obtained in greater quantity by peaceful
coercion than by war.
Q. _You have given us quite a number of strong points of the Soviet
Union. Can you outline its weak points?_
A. Without pleasure. It is no pleasure to expose the demerits of a
force which for the time being, at any rate, is fighting against our
major enemy, and has fought gallantly and has lost more blood than
all the other opponents of our enemy put together. Yet it seems to
me useful always to keep our eyes open and to know as much as we can
about the characteristics of friend and foe and especially of the sort
of ally which has the ambiguous role of the Soviet Union toward both
Britain and America, neither friend nor foe, but possessed merely of
the same enemy.
The fundamental weakness of the Soviet Union and the root of all its
evil is the fact that the Bolsheviks believe and practice as their
first rule of political conduct that the end justifies the means. This
rule led to adoption of the Terror as the chief weapon in the struggle
to establish Socialism, and the Terror in turn made it impossible to
establish Socialism. The Terror destroyed democracy. Without political
democracy, the vaunted economic democracy of the Soviet Union became
a farce. Constant coercion of the masses through the Terror benumbed
them. Production was concentrated on war materials and the output of
consumption goods never rose above subsistence level. The Soviet Union
became a permanent pauper state. The level from the standpoint of
culture and comfort remained barbarian, but the Russians showed they
had the virtues of barbarians. When the time came to fight they proved
they could stand up better to their Nazi brother barbarians than any of
the civilized folk of Europe.
The principle that the end justifies the means works in wartime as
it is a barbarous principle and war is a barbarous business, and that
is one reason why the Russians have done as well as they have against
the Germans. In peacetime the principle that the end justifies the
means defeats itself because peaceful processes are not promoted by
violence. The Bolsheviks used the Terror to force every member of the
vast community of Russia into a pattern of National Planned Economy,
but after thirteen years of watching the Five-Year plans, now in the
midst of the Third, we can scan the whole Russian scene and soberly
observe that National Planned Terror plus Bolshevik zeal have not
been able to produce anything like as much for the whole population
as free capitalist economy running on the profit motive with a
competitive labor market. I am not for Hoover capitalism, but even it
is incomparably better than Stalin’s economy.
Q. _What authority have you to speak about Russia?_
A. Possibly no authority, but a good deal of experience. I was for two
years a correspondent in Moscow, from 1925 to 1927--that was during the
NEP--and thereafter made three long trips and visited every part of the
country from Vladivostok to Odessa and Leningrad to Tiflis. I was the
first correspondent to visit the huge industrial plants of the First
Five-Year Plan from the Urals to the Caucasus, and after a 17,000-mile
trip which lasted three months I wrote a series of twenty-four
articles, which were given a Pulitzer prize. That was in 1930, and I
made another study trip in 1934 and another in 1937. I keep up as well
as one can by diligent reading and contact with friends fresh from the
Soviet Union and it appears that the conditions there today, aside from
the war, are about as they were when I was last there. Most capitalist
critics of the Soviet Union oppose it because it has done away with
the institution of private property and of profit, and substituted
a collectivist system. It would not make much difference to these
capitalist critics whether the Soviet collectivist system worked or
not. What irks them is that it has eliminated the form of economic
organization which has enabled them to become well to do.
This is not of any interest to me. The only thing that interests me
about the Soviet collectivist system is whether it works or not. If it
works better than ours, to bring more happiness to everybody in the
community than our system, then let us have it. But the trouble with
the Soviet collectivist system is that it simply does not work to make
men happier. It’s only success has been to make men fight. That is what
we need now, but it is not enough.
Q. _Can you prove that the Soviet system does not work?_
A. I am not going to try to do it with statistics. I have played and
worked and sweated with Soviet statistics as much as the next man, but
if there ever was a country on earth where the old saying, “Figures
don’t lie but liars figure,” is true, it is the Soviet Union, where
avowedly and openly it is announced that the Statistical Office must
consider itself in the service of propaganda for the national good. I
can give you only a reproduction of the impressions I had, and which
you would have had if you had been with me.
The two chief impressions you get from the Soviet Union are its extreme
poverty and the all-pervading Terror. True, the Terror diminishes as
one gets away from Moscow and the large cities, but it is present
in greater or less degree everywhere. The population as a whole is
desperately poor and always afraid. I thought when I read of the German
attack on the Soviet Union, and then of the valiant initial Soviet
resistance, that the war must have come to the Soviet population as a
sort of release.
Although “the NKVD instituted severe police measures to round up Fifth
Columnists,” nevertheless the net effect of the impact of the war
upon the Soviet population must have been very much like the opening
of jail doors. The national emergency and the necessity for all to
get together and fight for their lives, I am sure had an inspiriting
effect even greater than it would have in a less primitive Western
community. That wartime spirit of exaltation is not true of the Soviet
Union in peacetime. In ordinary times, the Soviet population is
surely the unhappiest 200,000,000 ever to live under one flag in one
vast succession of barracks and slums covering one-sixth of the land
surface of the globe and stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Black
Sea and from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Baltic. Think of that immense
area with its huge population and reflect that from one end of the
country to the other there cannot be found a single household (aside
from those of high Soviet officials, and a few artists, journalists,
and other privileged classes--not more than a few thousand out of
200,000,000) possessing the food, clothing, furniture, the necessities
and conveniences of an ordinary workman’s family in the United States.
After two years of warfare and bombing and blockade it would be
difficult to find in all England a workman compelled to live as
uncomfortably, unhygienically, and with as poor food and clothing
as the ordinary Moscow workman. The average family on relief in
America lives better than the privileged Moscow workman’s family. I
particularly emphasize “Moscow workman” because he is the best-off
person in the Soviet Union with the exception of the tiny privileged
group I have mentioned. The revolution was made for the proletariat and
what there is to enjoy goes to the workman.
The peasants on their collective farms live on the whole on a level
beneath that of any large group of white people in the world. The
Soviet peasant’s condition is substantially that of a serf. He is bound
to his collective and may not leave without permission. He is paid
chiefly in kind and his pittance of cash is almost useless, since there
are such small supplies of anything in the stores to buy. He eats day
in and day out, year in and year out, for breakfast, dinner, and supper
black bread and cabbage soup and little else.
The average Russian peasant does not taste meat more than a few times
a year. He is able to live on this diet because his black rye bread
contains everything necessary for complete nutrition save fat, which
he gets from a meager ration of salt pork. His relationship to the
collective is the relationship of serf to master. The serf under
the Czar could be punished by his master; so can the Soviet serf be
punished by the NKVD, without trial, and whereas under the Czar the
landowner had no power of life and death over his serfs, the NKVD has
that power not only over the peasants but over every human being in the
Soviet Union except Stalin himself and his immediate cohorts.
Q. _If the peasant is such a serf, why has he not revolted now that the
advance of Hitler’s armies has given him a chance to do so?_
A. It may sound flippant but it is the sober truth that the Russian
peasant serf does not know that he is a serf; he is convinced that
he lives better than any farm hand in the world. He has utterly no
standard of comparison. He is as incapable of judging his position
in the world as the Eskimos in _Kabloona_ who had never seen a white
man until Gontran de Poncins visited them. The Russian peasant is as
shut off from the outside world as an inhabitant of old Japan before
Perry. Within his world he has no neighbors better off than himself.
This makes him a happier man than if he were able to observe and become
envious of more pleasant ways of life.
Q. _What is the NKVD?_
A. That is the name given the Soviet Political Police in 1934. It has
had three names, first the Cheka, then the G.P.U., pronounced Gay Pay
Oo, and now NKVD, pronounced En Kah Vay Day, which is an abbreviation
for the _Narkomvnudel_, itself an abbreviation of four Russian words
meaning Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Whenever the
Political Police has accumulated too much blood on its name, it is
changed, but its functions remain the same: to administer the Terror.
Q. _Are the people in the collective farms better off than when they
were individual farmers?_
A. I did not know the Russia of the Czars, but the peasant himself gave
a very good answer to that when he refused to go into the collectives,
and rather than enter with his livestock, killed it by the thousands
of head, until within a year more than half the cattle, horses, pigs,
and sheep of the country had been slaughtered. The Soviet Union has
not yet entirely recovered from this animal massacre. The peasants
slaughtered their livestock because once collectivized, the livestock
passed completely out of control of the peasants. Stalin later conceded
each collective farm peasant the right to own one cow and one pig as
his private possession. Otherwise the members of the collective may not
dispose of the product of their own toil.
Q. _But isn’t that precisely the nature of a collective, for all
members to pool their resources and labor and then draw the dividends?_
A. That is the theory, but the dividends for the Soviet peasant consist
of the barest subsistence. They must turn over to the State trusts
a stipulated amount or share of whatever their collective produces,
wheat, or dairy products, beef or pork, and this share is usually so
high that there is nothing left for the peasants to eat but black bread
and cabbage. It is the settled policy of the Five-Year Plans to take
from the soil all its produce except the minimum subsistence for the
peasants and devote it to industrialization, by distribution at high
prices to the workmen, and by export, in exchange for machines from
abroad.
Q. _Then, surely the Russian workman is much better off, since the
whole system is supposed to be for the benefit of the proletariat._
A. He is better off than the peasant, but he is worse off than any
other white workman in the world. In the winter of 1934-1935 I made
a survey of the Russian standard of living and compared it with
the standard of living in capitalist states. In order to make the
comparison as fair as possible I chose the little capitalist states
which used to be a part of Imperial Russia--Finland, Esthonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, and Poland.
First I spent two months in Moscow, studying the standard of living
of the workmen in the best Moscow factories. These workmen were more
favorably situated than any others in the Soviet Union. Then I spent
three months studying the standard of living of typical working-class
families in the little capitalist states. To my surprise I found
that the poorest workmen’s families in the capitalist states lived
considerably better than the Moscow workers, who were the most
prosperous in all Russia.
This was after seventeen years of Communism, and the capitalist states
used for comparison were among the poorest in the world. They had all
suffered more from the World War than Russia as a whole had suffered,
and they began their new national lives from scratch, without capital
or credit. Yet the average workman in Finland, Esthonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, and Poland was living at least twice as well as the best-off
workmen in the Soviet Union.
Q. _How did you get your facts?_
A. By visiting scores of homes and talking with the housewives. I asked
each one fifty to a hundred questions, and found out the total family
income, how it was earned, and how it was spent. Then I made up a
theoretical basket, to contain a week’s supply of food for a workman,
and found out by direct inquiry the number of hours a man would have
to work to earn the basket. I found that in order to buy the basket the
Soviet workman had to spend an average of twice as many working hours
as his fellow worker in the small capitalistic states, while he would
have to spend over three times as many working hours as a workman in
the United States.
The Moscow workers, as the workers in most parts of the Soviet Union,
live in barracks, one or more families to a room, brutally overcrowded.
The Soviet Union has never succeeded in solving its housing problem and
seems, indeed, to be slipping steadily backward, each year jamming more
and more people into tenements fantastically full. It is not unusual
to find four families sharing a single room. Imagine how much privacy
they have, with each family’s quarter of the room partitioned off by a
hanging sheet. In the little capitalist states, many workmen had their
own cottage homes, a thing utterly unknown in the Soviet Union.
The food eaten by the capitalist workmen was incomparably better in
quality and greater in quantity than the Soviet workman’s food. The
clothing worn by the Soviet workmen and their families was pathetically
threadbare, sleazy and cheap, while the capitalist workmen were
well-dressed in comparison. Now these Russian workmen, it must be
remembered, were in the midst of their Second Five-Year Plan, and
were the recipients of the cream of its production. They were the
beneficiaries of that vast scheme of National Planned Economy which was
to produce so much more efficiently than the capitalist system that
before long everybody in the Soviet Union would be living like rich
men in the United States. It was their idea that the time would soon
come when production of every conceivable kind of commodity would be
so prolific in the Soviet Union that everybody could have his every
material want satisfied. “From each according to his ability--to each
according to his need,” the classic Communist ideal would be finally
attained.
Now after twenty-three years of trial it seems certain that in
place of Soviet State Capitalism, any form of private capitalism
under a democracy would have given Russia not only the blessings of
individual liberty, but far greater industrial production, which of
course is the prime measure of any economic system’s success. This is
not a mere speculation. If you take the graph of Imperialist Russian
industrial production before the last war, and prolong it over the
next twenty-three years at the same rate of increase as the years
1900 to 1914, you will find that Czarist Russia would have produced
more in 1940 than the Soviet Union with all its Five-Year Plans. What
Russia could have accomplished under a liberal democratic, or a free
democratic-socialist regime, we can only guess.
Both Lenin and Trotzky once remarked that no matter what else the
Soviet Union did, if it did not succeed in producing more than the
capitalist system produced, the Soviet system must be called a failure.
If it is objected that the Soviet Union had to spend its surplus
on defense, one can reply that a system which is so poor that the
population has to live on a bare subsistence level in order to maintain
its armed services, is a failure also. Twenty-three years is a long
enough trial for any system to show at least some hope.
Q. _What is State Capitalism and what has this to do with the war?_
A. It has a great deal to do with the war, because Soviet weakness
tempted Hitler to attack and Soviet weakness is a direct outcome
of Soviet State Capitalism. This term means that the State is the
monopolizer of all industry, trade, and agriculture. It is the sole
employer. It is the owner and manager of all factories, mines, shops,
farms, fisheries, transport systems, in short of every means of
production and distribution in the country.
No one can work for any other employer except the State and the State
has absolute power to order every minute detail of the daily lives of
its employees, the whole population. The Soviet workman is no less a
serf than the Soviet peasant, for the workman also cannot leave his job
without permission, and he also has no control of any kind over his
employer, no means of bringing pressure on him, because his employer
is the State and the State is not elected, but its representatives are
appointed from the top down, beginning with Stalin.
Q. _You say the State is not elected, but how about the Soviet
elections we hear about?_
A. The voters are presented with a ticket chosen by the Party and they
are allowed to accept the Party candidates. Citizens of the Soviet
Union have exactly as much voice in their government as citizens of
Nazi Germany have in theirs, that is, none at all. It is nevertheless
interesting to note that the tyrant in the Soviet Union still thinks
it worth while to preserve the farce of elections while the tyrant in
Germany has apparently dispensed with them altogether.
Q. _But cannot the Soviet workmen bring pressure to bear on the
authorities by striking?_
A. Strikes have been outlawed _de facto_ in the Soviet Union since its
earliest years. Soviet trades unions are merely the instruments for
helping the State enforce discipline. They are the classic type of
company unions. We can sum up this aspect of Soviet State Capitalism by
saying that whereas this form of collectivism was intended originally
to free the workman from all the disabilities, injustices, and
inequalities suffered by the workman under the individual capitalist
employer, all that has happened is that the workman has exchanged a
comparatively weak, sometimes well-meaning, individual or corporate
capitalist employer for a monster, all-powerful, completely egocentric,
impersonal, soulless monopoly, the State, which has all the faults of
the worst individual employer multiplied a millionfold. It is just as
greedy as the worst individual, but has no check upon its greed, and
it is never as efficient as the least efficient individual. It is Jack
London’s Iron Heel in reverse.
Q. _It was the original Bolshevik theory, was it not, that their
Planned National Economy would be superior to Unplanned Capitalist
Economy because it would prevent the cyclic recurrence of economic
crises, such as 1929-1930? It was to end all booms and depressions by
ending overproduction. Hasn’t the Soviet Union done at least that much?_
A. We cannot tell, because the Soviet Union has never, in the
twenty-three years of its existence, had anything like sufficient
production, much less overproduction.
Q. _Why couldn’t the Soviet Planned Economy succeed?_
A. We can split the total failure into five parts: First, failure
adequately to replace the profit system; second, failure of planned
production; third, failure of planned distribution; fourth, failure
of the monetary system; fifth, failure of Soviet construction to keep
up with deterioration. Behind all these four failures looms the black
father of them all, the Terror.
Q. _Why do you devote so much importance to the Soviet Terror?_
A. From having witnessed its importance in the Soviet Union. Aside
from that, we ought to be able to recognize purely theoretically its
paramount role in any attempt swiftly to transform an individualistic
society into a collectivist society. For thousands of years men have
been living more or less free individual lives. Suddenly it is decided
to create a collective, as the Bolsheviks decided in Russia. At the
time of the Revolution there were said to have been no more than ten
thousand Bolsheviks. Eventually they were to impose their will upon
200,000,000 people and reorganize them into a vast, badly functioning,
but nevertheless authentic anthill. To do this as swiftly as the
Bolsheviks wanted it done required compulsion, applied without stint,
to every unit in the ant heap. Having no say in the matter these
multitudes of human beings were required to change every habit of their
lives; were ordered even to change their instincts. It took unlimited
compulsion to achieve a semblance of the goal. The instrument of
compulsion was the Terror.
It produced an ant heap, but the ant heap never was able to do more
than provide minimum food, lodging, and clothing for its ants. For a
long time outside observers leniently agreed that this must be due
to the strain of reorganizing an individualistic into a collectivist
society, but now that a generation has passed, the tendency is to
consider that more fundamental faults are to blame.
First, it appeared that the motive for work was not so effective in
the ant heap as it was in the outside world, since from the day of
its foundation until this moment the Soviet workman has produced less
per capita per hour than capitalist workmen anywhere in the world.
Furthermore, higher ranks, as engineers, technicians, superintendents,
managers, and directors in the Soviet Union were so notably inefficient
compared with their capitalist colleagues that for a time the anthill
authorities imported and paid highly trained specialists from the
outside world to set an example and teach.
This effort too was a failure, as Soviet production usually declined to
its original level after departure of the foreign specialist. Also the
men of enterprise who in a free society risk their capital and brains
to found factories, dig mines, and sometimes swindle their fellow men,
were assigned in the anthill to the Gosplan, the Government Planning
Commission. There, in the effort to plan production for 200,000,000
people, the anthill failed most dismally. The conclusion was that the
collective with its rigid wage scales, limited incomes, prohibited
labor market, and ban on profits had not provided a motive for work
as stimulating and productive as the profit motive and the competitive
wage system in the free capitalist world.
Q. _How can you call it a free capitalist world? There isn’t any
freedom left in the capitalist world. Look at all the checks on
business here in the United States. Do you consider our farmers free?
They can’t even plant what they want._
A. Yes, I call it free, as free as bird life compared with the Soviet
Union or with Nazi Germany. The trouble with you and with all of us
who complain about the checks on business, on agriculture, and so
on, is that we lack the experience of being really without freedom.
Unless you have lived in a slave state, under a real tyranny, you
simply do not know what freedom means. All these checks about which you
complain are legal checks imposed by law made by representatives of
your choosing and passed upon by courts which are eventually also of
your choosing, and drawn within a constitution which was also chosen
and is now maintained by the people’s free will. If you dislike any of
these checks, you have only to get a majority to agree with you and you
can change it. To compare the lack of absolute freedom in our world
with the absolute lack of freedom in the totalitarian world, whether
Bolshevik or Nazi, is the same as to compare a traffic policeman with
the warden of a penitentiary.
It was precisely this effort at penitentiary production on a
continental scale that broke down the Russian effort at planned
national economy. It proved impossible to plan effectively for so
enormous an aggregate of human beings every detail of their production.
A few of the population, perhaps two per cent, were zealous Communists
who were willing to work harder to make the collective successful than
they would have worked for any amount of profit.
Terror was used to make the other ninety-eight per cent fit in and
work. But the Terror took away from the managers, supervisors, and
technicians the willingness to take responsibility. A mistake, honest
though it might be, could cost a factory manager his life. In the
Soviet Union the man who makes a mistake is automatically suspected and
accused of sabotage. The only way to be safe is to make no decisions,
pass every responsibility to a higher authority. This is the rule today
throughout the Soviet economic apparatus.
Parallel with this effect of the Terror is the benumbing influence of
the unforgiving rigidity of the Plan. Each factory manager is given a
quota to fulfill. Quotas are calculated at a trifle more than normal
maximum capacity. No excuses are accepted for nonfulfillment. In the
chaos of Soviet economic life it is seldom that raw materials, fuel,
tools, and labor can easily be brought together to fulfill a quota,
yet failure may cost the factory manager “liquidation,” which means
anything from dismissal or exile at hard labor to death.
Consequently, nearly all quotas are fulfilled in quantity, but quality
is in practice ignored. The number of units of production is easily
checked; quality is more difficult to check. Hence, Soviet industrial
production is lower in quality than in the capitalist world, and this
is a partial explanation for the divergence between Soviet industrial
statistics which show a high level of production, and the facts of
Soviet economic life which demonstrate to the naked eye how low the
level of production is. Some observers have estimated that at least
thirty per cent should be taken off all Soviet industrial production
statistics to allow for the quantities of entirely unusable goods
produced.
Q. _But we used to prize highly many objects of Russian manufacture,
and you can still see in jewelry and antique stores all kinds of finely
made things, enamel work, and leather goods, wonderfully printed books.
What has become of them?_
A. Nearly all that fine handicraft is gone now. The Russian artisan
used to be one of the best in the world. Home handicrafts formerly
supplied a sizable fraction of Russian consumption goods, not only
the things you mention, but furniture, pottery, textiles--wonderful
hand-woven linen and wool--and lacquer work. Most of these artisans,
or such of them as outlived the hardships of the Revolution, have
been forced into factories today to turn out mass production articles
inferior to any in the world, including the Japanese.
I often wonder what a Moscow citizen would say if he could walk through
an American five-and-ten-cent store. I am sure he would think he was
being deceived. He could not imagine such a wealth of high-grade,
luxurious articles. Once one of the younger members of the Rosenwald
clan visited Moscow and as we looked in the pitiful shopwindows I
remarked that if he wanted to start a revolution in Russia all he
would have to do would be to distribute a few million Sears Roebuck
catalogues among the workers and peasants of the greatest poorhouse in
history. Such a system of nationwide mail-order distribution would be
utterly beyond the comprehension of a Soviet citizen, for one of the
weakest links in the weak chain of Soviet economy is the distribution
of goods.
Poor as the goods are, they are not so poor as the method of putting
them in the hands of the consumers. Since there is always a goods
shortage, the consumer is placed in the permanent position of a
supplicant, glad to get anything even if it is a substitute for a
substitute for the article he wants. Allocation of the scanty supplies
is made from the top down. The local community is not asked what it
needs. The Planners arbitrarily ship certain quantities of shoes, hoe
handles, and seed, and the recipients have learned to be grateful, no
matter if what they needed was kerosene, matches, and cloth.
Q. _But you said something about the monetary system, that it had
failed too. How can a monetary system fail in a completely planned
national economy?_
A. The monetary system under the Soviets seems just as difficult to
handle as it is in the capitalist system. The authorities incessantly
juggle wages against prices, raising the one, lowering the other,
inflating the currency, selling bonds and even lottery bonds, as
blatantly gambling as the old Louisiana lottery. Yet the answer never
seems to be achieved satisfactorily. Always the citizen’s purchasing
power is behind his needs. Fundamentally, of course, the answer is that
there is never enough of anything to go around.
Q. _But isn’t the answer to that the fact that the Soviet State is
taking away from the citizens today in order to invest in productive
industry from which the citizens will draw a dividend tomorrow? At
least I should have thought that was the theory._
A. That is the theory, but one of the tragic aspects of the epic
struggle of the Russian Bolsheviks to make their collectivist system
work is that their investments in factories and machinery wear out
almost as fast and sometimes faster than they can replace them and
build new ones. The bad workmanship of the buildings and the poor
quality and rough handling of the machines results in a speed of
deterioration far beyond the normal in the capitalist world. If they
had given their population slightly better food and living conditions
and had therefore been compelled to limit their investment in new
buildings and machines to something like a capitalist standard of new
investment, deterioration would probably have taken away more plant
than they could replace.
Q. _How do you explain such inefficiency and wastefulness?_
A. For all the reasons given before, and for another which I left for
a different category since it is, so to speak, historical, while these
reasons we have discussed are current. The historical fact of import at
least during the life of this generation is that the Bolsheviks twice
in twenty years exterminated their ablest people in the country, or
rather I should say, the Bolsheviks first killed off the ablest people
of old Russia and then Stalin killed off the ablest Bolsheviks. It has
been so long ago, and the popular interest and sympathy in the Soviet
experiment was at the time so great, that we have almost forgotten what
the Bolsheviks did to their own countrymen.
Their conviction was that they could not establish Communism, or
Socialism, without physically exterminating the persons who had
become, under capitalism, better off than the mass of the people.
They reasoned that no capitalist, and by that they meant any person
who lived a little better than the poorest member of the community,
would ever tolerate willingly the establishment of a Socialist State.
They believed all such people would attempt to wreck the new Socialist
economy. The professional revolutionaries had spent half their lives
attempting to wreck the capitalist system, and they attributed to the
capitalists a similar resolution.
In Germany, the Nazis succeeded in coercing the capitalists into
becoming useful members of the National Socialist Collective. In
Russia, the Bolsheviks set out to destroy the capitalists as a
class, or rather every human being who by his birth, or position, or
accomplishment, had become identified as an active member of the old
system. First, they killed off the aristocracy and landed proprietors,
numbering several hundred thousand, and including of course the
Czar and his family. Then they exterminated the industrialists, not
very numerous, because Russia was the least industrialized of the
great nations. Nevertheless they were important. With them a little
later were exterminated the managers, supervisors and technicians,
the scientists, the professional men, dentists, surgeons, lawyers,
teachers, and judges. These numbered a million or more.
By the time I got to Russia in 1925 all these were fully exterminated.
By extermination I mean just that. They were either shot, or sent
into exile in the Arctic or the deserts of Central Asia, or condemned
to penal labor under such conditions that they died within a few
years. They were nearly all killed. Only the most meager remnant
remained, a few accidents of survival. I shall never forget the man
who peddled cigarettes. I shared a house in Moscow with Theo Seibert,
correspondent of the _Hamburger Fremdenblatt_, today, alas, editor of
the _Voelkischer Beobachter_. Theo and I used to try to get the old man
to talk, but he was too frightened to make much sense. The baldheaded
trembling man who begged us to buy his cigarettes had been a Justice of
the Moscow Supreme Court! His survival was just an accident.
After this initial massacre the Bolsheviks let a pause ensue and
for several years no great killings took place, just the routine
score or so of executions per month. But when the Five-Year Plan was
inaugurated, the decision was made to exterminate the kulaks. A kulak
was the term applied originally to a peasant who had risen sufficiently
above his neighbors to employ labor. That made him an exploiter, a
person who lived from the surplus value produced by his hired hands.
The Bolsheviks, however, chose to amplify this category to include all
peasants who, even if they did not employ labor, had become in the
least degree more prosperous than their neighbors. This prosperity,
based for the most part upon the individual industry and sagacity
of the kulak, might consist in the possession of two cows to the
neighbor’s one. In any case the reasoning of the Bolsheviks was that
they could not afford to tolerate the existence of any peasant who,
forced to join a collective farm, would at the beginning have to live
worse than he had lived as an individual farmer.
Such peasants, the Bolsheviks reasoned, would be just as incorrigible
enemies to collectivism as the aristocrats and industrialists. They
had to die. They did die. This was the greatest Soviet mass slaughter,
because there were a great many more such peasants than there were
aristocrats, or industrialists, or intelligentsia. It took about two
years to do away with the kulaks. Tens of thousands of G.P.U. troops
and agents sought out every family of better-than-average peasants
throughout the entire Soviet Union, and forced them into boxcars
and herded them off to places of exile, down to Kazakstan or up to
Narimsky Krai, to places where it was too hot or too cold to live. It
is a conservative estimate to say that some 5,000,000 of these more
enterprising farm workers and their families died at once, or within a
few years.
This process destroyed what there was left of the originally
non-Communist party talent in Russia. You would have thought that this
ought to satisfy the Bolsheviks. It did, but it did not satisfy Stalin.
There was no more opposition to the Bolshevik program. There was not a
human being left in Russia who had any connection with the old regime.
Not in modern history has there been such a clean wiping of the slate.
The Bolsheviks were left not only as absolute masters, but containing
a country in which every living person was their hopeful or cowed
collaborator. Then came the fatal quarrel between Stalin and Trotzky.
Out of this quarrel came the great purges by Stalin which destroyed for
the second time within a generation the principal talent of Russia.
This may be regarded as the most fateful slaughter of all. Bolsheviks
could argue that the extermination of every vestige of Czarist Russia
could be justified on account of the inefficiency, inhumanity,
unproductivity of the old regime, and the fact that, according to
Bolshevik reasoning, members of the old regime would never cooperate
with the new. But now Stalin was destroying not the old, but the new
regime, all its talents, its best intellects, its best characters if
you like.
Beginning with the politicians, he killed off in the course of four
years of uninterrupted purges, the top fourth or fifth, to estimate it
conservatively, of the Party itself, of the Army, Navy, and Air Force
leaders and then of the new Bolshevik intelligentsia, the foremost
technicians, managers, supervisors, scientists. There is, of course,
enough youth among 200,000,000 for the nation to recover even after
such a purge. The youth whom Stalin spared have proved in battle how
boundless are the forces of Russia, the first country Hitler ever
tackled with lives to waste!
Q. _You have not made it clear, if the Soviet system is so brutal a
tyranny, how it is that the Red Army has been able to stand up so well
to the Germans._
A. The answer is that the Red Army has fought as Russians have always
fought under any regime, bravely, enduringly, stubbornly, gallantly.
Russians have always had to fight despite their government; as they did
in the last war, as they are doing in this war. The general distaste
of the outside world for the Bolshevik system led many to forget that
the Russian soldier retains in the Red Army all the martial virtues he
possessed in the past. And have we forgotten that the Imperial Army in
the last war held the Germans for three years? If the Red Army does as
well we will be eternally thankful. True, the Germans in the last war
had to divide their forces into two fronts, while today the Red Army
has to bear the shock of nearly the full force of the whole German land
forces. The task of the Red Army is accordingly heavier.
But our appraisal of the Red Army’s resistance has been strongly
influenced by an element which has colored and distorted our judgment
of the quality of any army which faces the Germans. That element is
our recollection of the collapse of the French Army, which was due to
a score of causes besides the excellence of the German Army. It was
so overwhelming, bewildering, and impressive that it gave rise to the
involuntary, subconscious feeling that the Germans were invincible.
Now when any troops stand up to the Germans we are inclined to judge it
a miracle of valor and military effectiveness. This is not to take away
one whit of the immense credit due the Russians for holding up Hitler’s
juggernaut but it is fair to point out that if we had not seen France
fall, if for example Germany had attacked Russia before attacking
France, everybody would have expected the Russians to put up just
about the resistance they have put up. After all, Russia is a nation
of double the population of Germany, with incomparably greater natural
resources, and with twenty-three years of unflagging preparation for
precisely this war. If there had been the exceptional virtue in the
Soviet collectivist system which is ascribed to it by its disciples in
America, it should not merely have stopped but should have defeated,
routed, and conquered the Germans.
Q. _Aside from the fact that everybody was influenced by the French
example, most military experts seem to have been deceived about the
fighting ability of the Red Army. Why was that?_
A. It seemed almost as though Stalin wanted the outside world to
think his army less strong than it was. None but the most acute of
professional observers, among them Colonel Faymonville, for years
American military attaché to Moscow, and now a member of the Allied
military mission there, had a correct view of the Red Army. Hitler for
the first time in his life admitted he had “had no idea” how strong the
Red Army was. No outsider was ever allowed to see more than fragments
of it. No newspaper correspondent, for example, ever put foot over the
threshold of a Red Army barracks. Maneuvers were nearly always carried
out in secret without the presence of military attachés. One almost had
the feeling that Stalin had deliberately arranged the initial debacle
of his attack on Finland in the first Soviet-Finnish war in order to
deceive the world into thinking his army inferior to its real strength.
Of course that makes no sense, and the fact was that Stalin had been
led to think he could walk over Finland with ease and hence had not
properly prepared his attack. Nevertheless the net effect of the first
Finnish war combined with the secrecy thrown about the Red Army was to
make even military attachés in observation posts around Russia believe
the Red Army extremely weak. There was always the greatest difficulty
in obtaining the most elementary facts about the Red Army. The Soviet
government published less about its military establishment than any
other great power. It kept concealed the very existence of important
armaments factories; it never published production figures in the arms
industry; it furnished the League of Nations less information about its
vast army than any other members of the League. The G.P.U. Terror made
it possible to envelop the Red Army in an impenetrable blanket which
even the Germans were not able to pierce.
This secrecy emphasized the surprise that many felt at the outbreak of
the war, when the Soviet economy was now indisputably revealed to have
been a totally one-purpose economy, for the single end of making war.
Every student of the Soviet Union had realized the great emphasis laid
upon national defense, but everyone had supposed that at the same time
the Soviet Planners were working primarily, if ineffectively, to create
a thousand-purpose economy for the satisfaction of the myriad needs of
the population. No one had divined what turned out to be the fact, that
this huge economy was being organized for nothing but fighting.
It proved effective, as was to be expected. A brutal, simplified
economy which ignores most of the people’s wants and devotes all its
energy and materials to preparing for war, is better able to prepare
and to make war than a more complete economy devoted to satisfying
its people’s peacetime needs. Sparta was stronger in battle than
Athens, but should we measure the value of a society by the efficiency
with which it makes war? If so, we ought to value the Nazis above
all others, since they are still leading in this activity. Hitler’s
society took Sparta as its model; Stalin’s took Spartacus. The Nazis
met their identical twin when they struck the Red Army in battle.
Hitler wishes us to believe he is crusading against a fundamentally
different regime in a “crusade for civilization.” We shall not be
deceived.
Q. _What would be the result if Stalin were really to try to hold out
indefinitely? Could he do so? Has he the resources in the Urals to
carry on there?_
A. He has almost everything he needs in the Urals except sufficient
oil. If he were cut off from oil in the Caucasus, he would have to
import supplies over the trans-Siberian, already overburdened. If he
really were determined to carry on in spite of all odds, and could make
Sverdlovsk or Cheliabinsk another Chungking, it would compel Hitler to
keep an important fraction of his total forces in action in Russia;
it would probably prevent Hitler from being able to attempt to invade
England; it would lead to a deadlock which could be turned into victory
by our intervention.
Q. _Would it be possible for us to supply the Russians with sufficient
to make up for their losses? Could we enable them to carry on?_
A. Our shipments to Russia are as important morally as materially;
indeed their token strength is greater than their real strength. We
shall never be able to make up for the territory Russia has lost to
the Germans--60 per cent of their steel supply, 45 per cent of their
manganese, 49 per cent of their tire production, and so on. Our
shipments will always be limited by the transportation facilities of
the trans-Siberian railway and the route through Iran, both of which
are long and time-consuming. Actually we can scarcely hope to get
enough American supplies in the hands of the Red Army to make much
real difference before next spring, no matter how hard we try, and
we ought to do our best. It is the publicly announced policy of both
Washington and London that Russia shall have priority on the vital
war materials. But everything is up to Stalin. If he wishes to quit
and announce that he had not received sufficient aid from Britain and
the United States, he will be able to do so any time during the next
several months, and make a case at least among his friends.
If Stalin decides to hold on, we have a two to one chance to beat
Hitler in the long run; if he decides to quit it means we face much
worse odds. There is only one way we can persuade him that we are going
to put our full powers into the struggle. It is our crystal-clear duty
to ourselves, our children, and our national future to keep Stalin in
the war by ourselves going formally to war against Germany. It is a
crime against America to wait.
3. ENGLAND
Q. _What place do you think Churchill will have in history?_
A. If Churchill brings his country victorious out of this war, he
will without a doubt go down as the greatest man in English history.
No Prime Minister of the sixty ministries since Walpole, and none of
the Monarchs when they exercised unlimited power, nor any Admiral or
General has upon his tombstone: “He saved England from death.” Many
have saved England from defeat. Many have added to England’s power and
glory. But only Churchill will be entitled to the supreme rank, for
never before has England been threatened with the supreme penalty of
national extinction. Among the Prime Ministers Lloyd George would have
a place near Churchill, but the alternative to victory in the first
World War was not the alternative in this war. Among the defenders of
England, Nelson, Wellington, and the Great Duke of Marlborough would
rank near Churchill. But the alternative to victory against Napoleon or
Louis XIV was not the alternative England faces now. And no England of
the past ever faced such odds as Churchill and his people faced at the
fall of France. Whatever the decision, Churchill has already achieved
greatness. This man who used to be accused of playing at politics and
acting only for himself has been lifted by his responsibility to forget
himself in the Battle of Mankind.
Q. _Is Mr. Churchill really backed by all the British people?_
A. Mr. Churchill is the most popular and trusted leader the British
people have had within the memory of living man. The man who caused
the defeat of the General Strike in 1926 is if anything more popular
among the working classes than among the upper classes. In the House
of Commons he usually receives heartier applause from Labor members
than from Conservatives even though he is the head of the Conservative
party. This is partly because the Conservatives cannot rid themselves
of a tinge of resentment at the man who was always, consistently,
unfailingly right about the coming of the war, and what it would be
like, while they were always, consistently, unfailingly wrong. The
Conservatives out of a rooted misconception of the character and
intentions of Hitler, felt an instinctive sympathy for him almost up to
the time he actually began to drop bombs upon them. The Labor party on
the other hand shared Churchill’s antipathy for Hitler from the very
beginning, and there was thus early established a bond between the
great British aristocrat and the British working classes which has been
greatly strengthened by his leadership of the war. I doubt if there
is a single Labor party leader with as devoted a following among the
British workers as Churchill has.
Q. _What part in the war has the British workingman played under
Churchill’s leadership?_
A. The British workingman, inspired and informed by Churchill, has been
superbly and intelligently patriotic. It is this union of Churchill
with Labor which has warded off defeat in the most desperate hour,
and which with our help will eventually win the war. British Labor’s
attitude toward the struggle which will decide the fate of all the
world for generations to come is a reproach to that minority of
American labor which has failed to understand the fact that the liberty
and the life of every individual American workingman depends on the
outcome of this war. During those awful months following the evacuation
of Dunkirk, the British trades unions voluntarily gave up all the
trades unions rules which, designed to protect the interests of labor
in peacetime, hampered production and became a danger in war. They
lengthened hours, took less pay for more work, stayed on the job to the
point of complete exhaustion. In the course of about three months the
British workingman doubled the production of weapons and munitions, and
almost tripled airplane production by the end of the year. It could not
have been done without Churchill. From 1932 to 1939, for seven years,
Churchill had been tirelessly teaching, preaching, exhorting, and
pleading with the British public and the British government to meet the
German menace. By the time the war came the British working classes had
learned from Churchill what it was about. They learned much faster than
the Chamberlains and many a muddleheaded rich appeaser.
Another impressive sign of the wisdom of the British Labor Party from
the leaders to the rank and file is that you do not hear from them the
demands for a “definition of war aims” which are so loudly voiced by
groups of American liberals. These Americans who are so concerned about
establishing the chemical purity of British intentions, and who insist
on a blueprint of the peace settlement, and a guarantee that the world
will be made over in a style that meets with their approval--these
Americans show precisely the incomprehension of Hitler that Chamberlain
showed with his appeasement. Your ordinary British dock worker knows
more about the meaning of the war than scores of American intellectuals
who are still bleating about war aims. As the British Labor publicist,
G. D. H. Cole, put it, “The Labor leaders and the great majority
of their followers alike believed firmly that the defeat of Hitler
mattered immeasurably more than anything else. For this reason they
were ready to put aside even their socialism and the greater part of
their reforming policy and even to abstain from criticizing openly
the government’s mistakes rather than run any risk of dividing the
national elements which stood for a vigorous prosecution of the war.”
Q. _Is Churchill what you would call a realist or an idealist?_
A. Churchill is both. He is a hardheaded, tough-minded idealist and
an imaginative, generous realist. He is convinced that the policy
which works for the good of all will also work best for the good of
the individual. This is the foundation stone of civilization. Hitler
believes that the smart man is the man who exploits others. Hitler’s
are the ethics of the “heel,” the gangster, the racketeer, the cheat
who is always on the lookout for a chance to swindle, or rob, betray,
or murder for profit. The Churchill attitude is that of the moral man,
the member of society. The Hitler attitude is that of the amoral man,
the bandit preying upon society.
I do not think Churchill is formally a religious man, although he
attends divine services and thus sets an example for the nation under
his leadership. But Churchill’s beliefs add up to something closely
approaching practical Christianity. It seems to me that very few
Americans really understand what Churchill stands for. He is so much in
the public eye as a war leader, that we are bound to think of him as
a warrior first. We forget or never were told that he is first of all
a builder. Before the war, in the field of international relations he
believed passionately in the life-and-death necessity of sustaining the
League, of collective security through the League.
Then as now, and in England as here in America, there were great
numbers of persons who thought they were being hardheaded realists
by rejecting the League as romantic. Their successors today are our
isolationists or noninterventionists, as they shamefacedly call
themselves now. Churchill remorselessly revealed how suicidal was this
refusal to cooperate among nations for the maintenance of security for
all. Long before Litvinoff coined the phrase Churchill was preaching
that “peace is indivisible,” that only through collective security
could the security of any single state be secured. His scorn for the
British counterpart of our isolationists was withering: “It is of the
utmost consequence to the unity of British national action that the
policy of adhering to the Covenant of the League of Nations shall not
be weakened or whittled away. I read in the _Times_ a few days ago a
letter in which a gentleman showed that these ideas of preventing war
by international courts and by reasonable discussion had been tried
over and over again. He said they had been tried after Marlborough had
defeated Louis XIV and after Europe had defeated Napoleon, but, he
said, they had always failed. If that is true it is a melancholy fact
but what was astonishing was _the crazy glee_ with which the writer
hailed such lapses from grace. I was told the other day of a sentence
of Carlyle’s in which he describes ‘the laugh of the hyena on being
assured that, after all, the world is only carrion.’”
It is of course plain to everybody now that the world is being torn
apart because _crazy_ people prevented the League of Nations from
functioning, _crazy_ people who believed they were as shrewd as the
Americans who today would like us to wait for the Germans to land on
United States soil before we fight. It has always been considered by
cheap and vulgar men that it is clever to be entirely selfish, and so
our Lindberghs, Wheelers, and Nyes even whisper temptingly the base
suggestion that we may profit by this war if Britain falls and her
Empire crumbles. What retribution would be ours were we to listen to
such voices! Churchill, whom no detractor has ever called a stupid
man, is not afraid to come out boldly and declare: “I think we ought
to place our trust in those moral forces which are enshrined in the
Covenant of the League of Nations. Do not let us mock at them, for they
are surely on our side. Do not mock at them for this may well be a time
when the highest idealism is not divorced from strategic prudence.
Do not mock at them, for these may be years, strange as it may seem,
when Right may walk hand in hand with Might.” This he spoke in 1937.
How the words are crammed with meaning now for America whose vital
self-interest to bring about the defeat of our enemy is identical with
the highest idealism.
Q. _Can Churchill be trusted?_
A. I will answer by citing Mr. Churchill’s attitude toward Ireland. In
1938 when the bill to turn the Irish naval bases back from British to
Irish control was being discussed, Churchill protested that when war
came, if Ireland refused to lend the ports to England, there would be
no way to get them back. Because, he said, “It will be no use saying,
‘Then we will retake the ports.’ You will have no right to do so. To
violate Irish neutrality should it be declared at the moment of a
great war may put you out of court in the opinion of the world and may
vitiate the cause by which you may be involved in war. If ever we have
to fight again we shall be fighting in the name of law, or respect for
the rights of small countries.” Can you imagine Hitler nourishing such
scruples? Churchill has proved, moreover, the hardest way, that he
meant what he said. The British still abstain from occupying and using
the Irish ports. They have lost scores of ships to German submarines
which might have been stopped if the Royal Navy had the use of the
Irish bases. Many people think it wrong for the British to imperil
their cause by respecting the neutrality of Ireland, which like every
other country outside the Axis owes its hopes for national independence
to a British victory.
Q. _What does Churchill think of the United States? I know that his
mother was American and that now during the war he wants as much help
from us as he can get, but what does he really think of America?_
A. We can go as far back as 1932 and find that he had this to say: “Of
course if the United States were willing to come into the European
scene as a prime factor, if they were willing to guarantee to those
countries who take their advice that they would not suffer for it, then
an incomparably wider and happier prospect would open to the whole
world. If they were willing not only to sign but to ratify treaties of
that kind, it would be an enormous advantage. It is quite safe for the
British Empire to go as far in any guarantee in Europe as the United
States is willing to go, and _hardly any difficulty in the world could
not be solved by the faithful cooperation of the English speaking
peoples_.” This was his view of the possibilities of Anglo-American
cooperation before the war; his faith in it now is stronger than ever.
As for his opinion of the American people, one can deduce a good deal
from some of the adjectives he has used about us in the past. He has
called us “active, educated, excitable and harassed”; and “the most
numerous and ebullient of civilized communities.”
Q. _What does Churchill think of Roosevelt and the New Deal?_
A. I am sure he has a profound admiration for Mr. Roosevelt quite
aside from the help he wants from him. Churchill and Roosevelt are
both aristocrats, both expert politicians, both highly cultured men,
both believers in humanity, and in the destiny of the English-speaking
peoples. There are only two factors to make them differ. The first is
that they are rivals, friendly rivals, of course, and allied rivals for
the duration of the war, but rivals just the same, and when the time
comes to translate victory into peace terms it is going to be exciting
to see which of these powerful, determined men will do the leading. It
will be a struggle of titans. As one reviews the chief characteristics
of each man it seems as though each possesses to the ultimate possible
degree the qualities of courage, intelligence, imagination, and
stubbornness.
Churchill has called Roosevelt “this great man, this thrice chosen
head of a nation of 130,000,000.” Another time in 1934 he described
Roosevelt’s administration as a dictatorship, writing: “Although the
Dictatorship is veiled by constitutional forms it is none the less
effective.” Hastily he added: “To compare Roosevelt’s effort with that
of Hitler is not to insult Roosevelt but civilization.” Now both men
have become dictators in the classical sense of the word as it has
been so sapiently defined by Frederick L. Schuman. “‘Dictatorship’ is
a form of power which is resorted to voluntarily and temporarily by
democracies to meet dangers of invasion or revolution. It is a device
to save democracy, not to destroy it.... The disposition of democrats
to regard dictatorship in times of crisis as fatal to democracy rather
than as fundamental to its preservation reflects a tragic confusion
resting upon ignorance of history and misuse of labels.” Schuman points
out that Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini are tyrants or despots, but not,
if one uses the word properly, “dictators.”
The reassuring fact is that both Roosevelt and Churchill believe that
a Pax Anglo-Americana is the key to the future. Churchill believes
that the British ought to take the leading role in such an arrangement
because they have borne the heat of battle to a greater degree than
we shall have done even with our troops in Europe. Roosevelt believes
America ought to be the leader since we are coming out of the war
considerably stronger than Great Britain and the younger nation is now
ready to take over guidance of world affairs from the parent country.
Out of this fundamental difference could come a massive dispute, but
since it will have been based on victory we can hope fervently that the
opportunity for the discussion be provided as quickly as possible.
Churchill has a second difference with Roosevelt in the field of
economic theory and practice. He is distinctly against the New Deal.
There was a time during the period of the Blue Eagle when Churchill
seemed almost to fear that communism was coming to the United States.
He warned: “It is irrational to tear down or cripple the capitalist
system without having the fortitude of spirit and ruthlessness of
action to create a new communist system.” With Churchillian directness
he proclaims his belief in profits. “There can never be good wages or
good employment for any length of time without good profits.”
With equal candor and with much wit he defends rich men. “A second
danger to President Roosevelt’s valiant and heroic experiments seems
to arise from the disposition to hunt down rich men as if they were
noxious beasts.... It is a very attractive sport, and once it gets
started quite a lot of people everywhere are found ready to join in the
chase.... The question arises whether the general well-being of the
masses of the community will be advanced by an excessive indulgence
in this amusement. The millionaire or multi-millionaire is a highly
economic animal. He sucks up with sponge-like efficiency money from all
quarters. In this process, far from depriving ordinary people of their
earnings, he launches enterprise and carries it through, raises values,
and he expands that credit without which on a vast scale no fuller
economic life can be opened to the millions. To hunt wealth is not to
capture commonwealth.” All this, his own economic philosophy, he sums
up in the formula: “Whether it is better to have equality at the price
of poverty or well-being at the price of inequality.”
Does this indicate a narrowly selfish interest by Churchill in his
own class? Not at all. He believes profoundly in the possibility of
extending leisure and well-being to all mankind through the benefits
of science. He takes the evidence of Soviet Russia that the means to
general affluence is not communism, nor does he think it can come
through any form of nationalization of production. He believes the
essence of the problem is monetary. He believes the rights of man are
more important than the success of any economic system. He believes in
the British Empire as a mighty instrument of civilization. He believes
profoundly in cooperation with us. There is no reason why the two
mightiest democratic dictators, Roosevelt and Churchill, should not
emerge from the Peace Conference with a harmonious plan.
Q. _Is it true that Churchill is gifted with a peculiar power to
foresee the event?_
A. I know of no statement which summed up in so few words a complete
forecast of history as was contained in one sentence of Churchill’s
delivered April 6, 1936 in a speech on the fortification of the
Rhineland. You will remember that Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland March
6, 1936. Mr. Churchill had this to say: “The creation of a line of
forts opposite to the French frontier will enable the German troops to
be economized on that line and will enable the main forces to swing
round through Belgium and Holland.” There in thirty-six words you have
the entire story of the Battle of France, told four years before it
took place.
Q. _Tell us what you know of Mr. Churchill as a person. What are his
principal characteristics?_
A. Courage is his principal characteristic. I hesitated a moment but
decided to put his courage ahead of his intelligence, because courage
is a more important quality than intelligence. I remember I once had
a spirited argument on this point with Henri Bernstein, the French
playwright. We were at the country home of Louis Bromfield in Senlis,
the point outside Paris where the Germans during the last war came
nearest to the capital. Bernstein insisted intelligence was the most
valuable quality a man could have, and with enough of it he would not
need more than a minimum of courage. I argued that without courage
the keenest intelligence is useless in a world of action. A couple
of years later Bernstein and I were on the same refugee ship, the
_Madura_ of the British India Line, fleeing from Bordeaux to England
after the fall of France. I reminded Bernstein of our argument and
insisted that the disaster of France proved my contention was right.
Surely the French were still what they have often been called, the most
intelligent people on the continent, but for some reason which nobody
has yet completely fathomed, they had at this moment of their national
history lost the desire or the willingness to fight. I suppose it would
be fair to define that as lack of courage, although I would be the last
to assert that this is a permanent state of mind or of heart on the
part of the French.
The collapse of the French was the signal for Churchill to display the
finest quality of his character. Senator Gerald P. Nye once, with the
good taste characteristic of our isolationists, said: “Britain is a
dead horse. America should not team up with a lost cause.” To France in
her death agony Churchill made the offer that she merge with Britain
and establish a single Franco-British government and cabinet, unite
the resources of the French and British Empires, and fight on to the
last drop of British blood, even if all France were occupied. It took
a Churchill’s imagination, generosity, and audacity to make such an
offer. The French did not have enough strength left to reach out and
accept the hand of rescue. We have heard a great deal about fighting to
the last drop of blood, but Churchill is the only man I have ever seen
among the belligerents who makes it absolutely convincing.
I was in London during those peak months of the Battle of Britain,
August and September 1940 when the Germans were bombing by day as
well as by night, trying to conquer the R.A.F. to make invasion
possible. One day I was driving through London with Mr. Churchill, and
as we passed a particularly large and well-camouflaged machine-gun
emplacement at a street intersection, the Prime Minister called my
attention to it. “Do you see that?” “Yes,” I said, “it seems you really
meant it when you said the British would fight in the streets.” “Meant
it!” exclaimed Mr. Churchill. “Why the Germans could if they liked
drop a hundred thousand parachutists on London, and if they did we
would chew them up and spit them out.” There was in his voice a note
of delight at the prospect. This note is present in all of Churchill’s
references to getting at the enemy. Although no man would act more
quickly to relieve his people of the necessity of shedding their blood,
while the fight is on Churchill revels in it. The responsibilities
which are his now must be greater than those carried by any other human
being on earth. One would think such a weight would have a crushing
effect upon him. Not at all. The last time I saw him, while the Battle
of Britain was still raging, he looked twenty years younger than before
the war began. As we walked across the garden in the rear of Number Ten
Downing Street I had to quicken my pace and almost trot to keep up with
him, so swiftly did he stride along the gravel path.
His uplifted spirit is transmitted to the people and it is my
impression that the British are, just as Churchill said, “proud to
be under the fire of the enemy.” You may think it overdrawn but if
you had shared with them the experience of heavy air bombardment, you
would agree that Churchill was only expressing the exact truth when he
said: “The sublime but also terrible experience and emotions of the
battlefield which for centuries have been reserved for soldiers and
sailors now are shared for good or ill by the entire population.” Even
in the midst of the most fearful danger Churchill taunts the enemy--“We
are waiting for that long promised invasion. So are the fishes.” I
would not be surprised if Churchill really wanted the Germans to try,
for if they were to try and fail it would be a defeat so disastrous
that it might well lead to a German collapse.
Without courage nothing can be accomplished. With it plus intelligence
everything can be done. Churchill’s courage is of every variety. He has
the simple battle courage of the Hussar. Remember the cavalry charge at
Omdurman in the Sudan when the young Lieutenant Churchill fought his
way through a tangle of howling dervishes? He has the enduring physical
courage to play a championship game of polo with a dislocated shoulder.
He has the moral courage to lead a lost cause. It was he who defended
the Duke of Windsor at the abdication, when the once most popular man
in the British Empire had lost every other friend. He has the courage
to take responsibility, and since he has been Prime Minister he has
personally taken the criticism for every ill turn of fortune, every
plan gone wrong. He can meet a hostile mob and talk it down. He can
lead in battle. He can lead in war. Above all he can infuse his courage
into others.
One’s pulse quickens at that immortal peroration of his delivered on
June 18, 1940, when France had surrendered, the British Expeditionary
Force had escaped with the loss of all its tools, and England stood
weaponless before the foe, in greater mortal peril than ever in ten
centuries. The words Churchill spoke then were the equivalent of a
strong army to defend the British Isles. Translated into the deeds of
the R.A.F., they defeated the enemy. Churchill said: “What General
Weygand called the Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is
about to begin. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long
continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might
of the enemy must very soon be turned upon us. Hitler knows that he
will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand
up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move
forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole
world, including the United States and all that we have known and cared
for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister and
perhaps more prolonged by the lights of a perverted science. Let us
therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if
the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men
will still say ‘This was their finest hour.’”
Q. _What was it Churchill said about carrying on even if the British
Isles were conquered?_
A. On August 20, 1940 in the midst of the Battle of Britain, Churchill
said: “If we had been put in the terrible position of France, a
contingency now happily impossible, although, of course, it would have
been the duty of all war leaders to fight on here to the end, it would
also have been their duty, as I indicated in my speech of June 4, to
provide as far as possible for the Naval security of Canada and our
Dominions and to make sure they had the means to carry on the struggle
from beyond the oceans.”
Q. _That would be fine for us if we could depend upon it, but do you
think Churchill really meant it? What good would it do for the British
Navy to carry on if the British Isles were conquered?_
A. I am sure that Churchill himself would do exactly as he said he
would. He would perish with his troops or with his Navy--who can tell
how or where--but he would never surrender. Can you doubt it when you
hear those words of his which are as much an inspiration for us today
as they were for the British when he uttered them on the last day of
the evacuation of Dunkirk? They deserve to be memorized by us all.
“Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have
fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious
apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to
the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas, and
oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength
in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we
shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we
shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the
hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a
moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and
starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the
British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time,
the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue
and the liberation of the old.”
With Churchill’s picture these words are placarded in homes and
offices throughout the British Empire. Their spirit is the spirit of
Britain. But having said this I am compelled to add that it would be
feeble-minded for us to expect that the British Navy would continue
resistance to the Germans after the British Isles had been conquered.
Let us examine what the position would be if the British Isles fell.
First let us ask a British Naval Officer what would happen to the Royal
Navy if the British Isles were conquered. He will tell you: “There
wouldn’t be any Navy left.” I can see readily how this would be true.
If the Germans try invasion, the Royal Navy is going to throw itself
between the home island and the invaders with a desperation such as
has never been equaled in British Naval history, and that is saying a
very great deal. The Germans cannot capture the British Isles by air
power alone. They can land men and machine guns by air as they did at
Crete, but the heavy weapons they need to beat off and batter down
the formidable British artillery and heavy tanks now massed at home,
they will have to land by sea. Without these weapons they cannot win.
The Royal Navy will prevent their landing or perish in the attempt.
The Germans will try to clear the way for their invading craft by
torpedoes, mines, speedboats, Stukas, burning oil on the water, and
every conceivable means, and by some perhaps not now conceivable to us.
The British defenders will discard caution and risk everything. They
will hurl themselves at the invader. If they lose there will surely be
little left of the Navy.
But suppose there were left a British naval force large enough when
taken in combination with what we could spare from the Pacific to
continue to maintain practical control of the Atlantic, enough anyway
to prevent any German attempt at sending an invading army to America.
Could we then expect this remnant of the British Navy to retire to
Canada or the United States, and continue resistance to the Germans? I
do not think so.
In the first place, what would be the purpose of the British Navy in
continuing resistance to the Germans after the British Isles had been
captured? Would it be for the purpose of eventually reconquering the
British Isles? No, because that would be impossible. This is one of
those grim facts which are too ugly for most people to look at, but
there is no use turning our eyes away and refusing to see that if the
Germans do invade and conquer the British Isles, the British people
will have finished their life. It would be the end for them, not for
the duration of this war, which would in fact be ended then, but for as
far into the future as the imagination can travel. The Germans might
remain in possession of the British Isles or in effective control for
the thousand years Hitler so often boasts about, or until they became
weak through centuries of good living. Hitler would disarm the people
of Britain and allow hunger to decimate them. He could count on forty
per cent of the population dying of starvation in a year or so. Does
this seem an exaggeration? It is only one more of those facts about
Hitler which nobody would believe. The trusting Dutch would not believe
what Hitler was like until he taught the people of Rotterdam. But the
British people have now learned their lesson. They have totally lost
the wide-eyed faith of our Lindberghs, that Hitler is “human after
all.” The British know Hitler would do just what I have said, he would
deliberately destroy a great part of the population, allowing to remain
alive only those sufficiently broken to become good slaves. But why,
you ask, could not the British Navy reconquer the British Isles, if
they had our wholehearted help? The answer is that there would be no
base from which to operate.
We can now contemplate reconquering Europe from the Nazis because we
have a base or several possible bases from which to operate against
the Reich. We have the British Isles and Russia and the Middle East,
and parts of North Africa, and may have other bases before the war is
over. But if the British Isles were captured, where could the British
Navy land to invade and repossess them? And with what troops would this
engagement be fought? With the Canadians and Australians? Nobody would
dare disparage the fighting qualities of these magnificent men, but if
the 46,000,000 Britishers in the British Isles had failed to throw back
the German Army is it likely that 16,000,000 Canadians and Australians
could defeat it? What about the United States? If we had not entered
the war before the conquest of the British Isles, is it likely we would
go to war after the British had been beaten? Moreover, if we did, it
is inconceivable that we should beat the Germans after they had seized
the resources of the United Kingdom. They would then have added to the
shipbuilding capacity of the continent all the British shipyards, at
this moment the most productive in the world. It might be worth our
while to glance an instant at the shipbuilding situation which would
exist if Germany takes the British Isles.
The shipbuilding capacity of each of the following countries is listed
as of the most productive year since 1917. This was usually 1919.
_Tons_
Germany 600,000
Denmark 140,000
France 210,000
Holland 240,000
Norway 60,000
Sweden 165,000
Italy 220,000
Japan 700,000
---------
2,335,000
United Kingdom 2,000,000
---------
Total 4,335,000
After the defeat of Britain, Germany and her allies would possess the
capacity to build 4,335,000 tons of ships a year, which is more than
four times our 1941 production of around 1,000,000 tons and is even
larger than our record performance in 1919 when we turned out 4,075,000
tons of ships. Admiral Land’s prediction that we would eventually
build 6,000,000 tons a year remains to be fulfilled. As matters now
stand if the Germans were to capture Britain, time would be on their
side for the building of ships. Furthermore, of course, the Germans
would inherit the vast British industrial machine, and save for the
production of steel, would have the power to turn out more airplanes
and munitions than we could for many years. All of this is merely to
emphasize what the fall of Britain and the end of the British Navy as a
fighting force against Hitler would mean to the United States.
Q. _But isn’t Churchill often wrong in his military judgment? Hasn’t he
made mistakes due to overconfidence?_
A. It is true that Mr. Churchill has the vices of his virtues, and
since his most prominent virtue is courage, he also possesses what has
seemed at times to be recklessness. His sanguine temperament makes him
ideally equipped to lead a nation in desperate circumstances, but his
critics of whom a few still exist will never cease insisting on the
obvious, that he makes mistakes, as though it were not the hoariest of
adages that only the man who never does anything commits no errors.
They list a roll of his alleged military failures, beginning with his
unsuccessful defense of Antwerp and the costly attempt to take the
Dardanelles in the last war; and in this war Norway, Greece, and Crete.
But if these events are analyzed it will be seen that each of them had
its justification.
Many military critics looking back at the last war now agree that Mr.
Churchill was right to advocate holding Antwerp as an Allied strong
point behind the German lines, and if the Allied High Command had
supported him sufficiently Churchill’s defense might have succeeded.
The Dardanelles attempt--which used to be the failure his enemies
most enjoyed--was in the view of most military men today a brilliant
conception which would have ended the war victoriously for the Allies
two years earlier, if Churchill’s plan had been carried out as it could
have been. We know now not only that the campaign could have succeeded
from the outset and at comparatively little cost, if the Churchill
timetable had been scrupulously kept, but also that the straits could
have been captured even at the very end if one last push had been
made. One of Raymond Swing’s best stories is of his experience as a
war correspondent with the Turks, whom he saw hoarding their last few
rounds of ammunition as, to their astonishment, the British steamed
away, losing with a completely un-British lack of persistence. It was
jealousy more than anything else that spoiled the Dardanelles campaign,
Kitchener’s jealousy of Churchill.
In his old age, Kitchener, the Army chief, obstinately refused to do
what the Navy chief advised, and the end was failure. It was perhaps
the most keenly felt failure in the life of Churchill when he resigned
after the Dardanelles. Anyone who reads the painstaking account he
has written of the campaign in his history of the war, _The World
Crisis_, may perceive how heavy the blow was. Even clearer evidence are
the pictures of him in his country place at Chartwell. One for which
he sat immediately after the Dardanelles campaign shows him looking
years older than a picture of him before the campaign began. No, the
Dardanelles ought to be remembered to Churchill’s credit, and it will
be eventually.
In this war its place has been given by his critics to Norway,
Crete, and Greece. Ed Angly, my companion in flight from France,
used humorously to wonder if the British were ever going to cease
retreating and my reply was that they probably never would until they
had retreated to victory. The Norwegian campaign discouraged many, and
critics on both sides of the Atlantic demanded to know why the British
secret service had not known in advance of the German intention to
invade Norway; why the Royal Navy had not prevented invasion; why the
British Army landed in the north could not hold on.
The reproach of faulty information can be leveled only by persons not
acquainted with the nature of the Gestapo. It must not have escaped
general attention that when the German Army marches into a captured
territory, for a few days news of a sort continues to trickle out, and
we may hope that British or other enemy agents continue to function
during this time. But as soon as the Gestapo appears, with Himmler
directing its hordes of agents in civilian clothes, and its tens of
thousands of black-uniformed SS, it is as though an asbestos curtain
had fallen on the frontiers of the country, and from then on the
silence of the grave envelops the land. I was not surprised that
Hitler could strike with such devastating secrecy; what victim of his
has been warned except by the general reputation of the invader? Even
the Bolsheviks were plaintively surprised when the “assassin of the
working classes” so violently dissolved his friendship with the “scum
of the earth.” We may be sure that if Hitler were ever put, by the fall
of Britain, in a position to attack the Western Hemisphere, we would
also be surprised, not by the action but by the time and method. The
Norwegian surprise was no fault of Churchill.
The question why the British could not hold on is one that is put not
only about Norway but about Crete and Greece and it may be put again
before the last battle is fought. The answer is one which may have to
be borne in mind for a long time. It is contained in the simplest facts
about the war, which tend to be forgotten in the riot of daily news.
The principal fact is that Britain after two years of war has not yet
caught up with the numbers and equipment of the German war machine
built by a population double that of the British over seven years of
peacetime preparation and two of war. The British have fought on nearly
every one of their battlefields so far with inferior numbers against
superior material and better-trained men. Let those of us in America
who imagine we have only to call a few million boys to the colors
and train them a year in order to have an army, consider the British
experience. The British soldiers are only now after more than two years
of war training, becoming a capable modern army, about one-third the
size of Britain’s “medium-sized” army.
Finally we heard the criticism that Churchill’s decision to send troops
to Greece was a mistake, since he knew they could not hold out against
the Germans. “Political” reasons, it was said, ought not to govern
military decisions. But what is the war being fought about if not to
re-establish honor among nations? Britain was sworn to come to the
aid of Greece. Had she failed to do so, forlorn though the hope was
of immediate success, she would have lost a good part of that moral
reputation which is worth more than many army corps to her today. This
“political” decision was made in the sense of the classical definition
of politics, “that branch of ethics dealing with the ethical relations
and duties of states.”
Churchill did make one public mistake, and it was shared by hopeful
millions, when he said at the beginning of the Norwegian campaign,
“Herr Hitler has committed a grave strategic error in spreading the war
so far to the north.” The man who had almost never underestimated the
Germans did so that time.
Q. _Wasn’t that apparent error in judgment perhaps really a piece of
good-cheer propaganda for the people?_
A. I do not think so; it was a real mistake based on his own audacity,
yet who would not prefer a leadership which tries and fails to one
which does not try at all? In Churchill the British have one leader
who understands that wars are never won on the defensive, and we may
be sure that he can be depended upon to seize the first conceivable
opportunity to carry the war into Hitler’s territory. The offensive
spirit never had a more consistent exponent than Churchill, as in his
proclamation:
“We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of his Nazi
regime; from this nothing will turn us--nothing. We will never parley,
we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his men. We shall fight
him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the
air, until, with God’s help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and
liberated his peoples from the yoke.”
This eloquence of Churchill is a gift from Heaven for our side during
these terrible years, when confusion of mind is the greatest foe of
the democracies. One of the most famous sayings of Hitler, quoted
by Rauschning is: “Mental confusion, contradiction of feeling,
indecisiveness, panic; these are our weapons.”
We in America can see how effective these weapons are. Consider the
mental confusion, indecisiveness, and conflicting feelings aroused in
the United States by the speeches of Hitler’s American Quislings, the
Lindberghs and Wheelers. The counterpart of these circles existed in
England but they were long ago rendered powerless and even speechless
by the analytical eloquence of Churchill. Take the case of Hitler’s
invasion of Russia. Hitler undoubtedly expected to divide the outside
world by proclaiming his “Holy Crusade” against Bolshevism. But
Churchill choked this deceit in its inception. The Germans began their
attack on Russia at four o’clock in the morning, and before the day was
out Churchill had given the world his answer. Other statesmen might
have waited a day or even a week. Churchill gave Hitler no time to
spread mental confusion. “Any man or state,” Churchill declared, “who
fights against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches
with Hitler is our foe.... Hitler’s invasion of Russia is no more than
a prelude to an attempted invasion of the British Isles.... The Russian
danger is therefore our danger and the danger of the United States....
Let us redouble our exertions and strike with united strength while
life and power remain.” This declaration, swift and uncompromising as
a bullet, was equivalent to the loss of a great battle for Hitler. I
am sure he entertained hopes that he could induce Britain even to stop
fighting in order that he could more easily destroy Bolshevik Russia.
Churchill’s speed prevented the question from even being debated. This
is the finest example of leadership. The Prime Minister did not wait to
find out by Gallup poll or otherwise what the British people thought.
He boldly led them.
Q. _Do you think the flight of Hess to England had any connection with
the German attack on Russia which followed six weeks later?_
A. Hess fled to England May 10, and Hitler attacked Russia June 21. I
think there must have been a connection, and I have my theory of it,
but it is only a theory. I think Hess may have carried Churchill a
message from Hitler saying he was going to attack Russia, offering a
negotiated peace, and soliciting the benevolent neutrality if not the
active aid of Britain to destroy the Bolshevik menace. We may be sure
that whatever was the purpose of Hess’s visit, Churchill knows all
about it by now.
There are two passages in Churchill’s speech after the invasion of
Russia which might bear on Hess. In one place he says, “All this was
no surprise to me. I gave clear and precise warnings to Stalin of
what was coming.” And then, as though he realized that this statement
might indicate that he had specific foreknowledge of the German plans
against Russia, Churchill adds, “I gave him warnings as I have given
warnings to others before. I can only hope that these warnings did not
fall unheeded.” Then at another point Churchill emphasized: “We will
never parley, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his men.”
That might refer to Hess’s effort to negotiate. We know that if Hess
had carried such a proposal to Churchill it would have been rejected,
and if Churchill warned Stalin it is very likely Stalin profited by
the warning. It has been argued, however, that the British could have
allowed Hess to believe, and to transmit to Hitler his belief, that the
proposal would be accepted. This would have served to encourage Hitler
to go ahead with his plans and attack Russia. We can be certain that in
the meeting between Hess and Churchill, the Prime Minister did not come
off second best.
I knew Hess personally--not very well, but well enough to have formed
an estimate of his character. On the basis of his character I would
say we could exclude a great many alleged explanations of his flight.
He was brave and led a life of hazardous adventure. He was not likely
to flee for cowardly reasons. He was first in the personal esteem
of Hitler and Hitler was the only person who could have threatened
his life. Himmler could not do so, nor Goering. He was a quiet,
unambitious fellow and had few enemies. I do not believe fear had
anything to do with the flight. He was devoted to Hitler and it is
almost inconceivable that he should have done anything contrary to the
Fuehrer’s wishes. He was never a policy maker, meddled not at all in
the high politics of the party or state, but merely delivered speeches
on order, and acted as a sort of super-private secretary and valet
to his master. It is not likely that he went to England to advance a
policy of his own, as was widely believed before the German attack
on Russia. Many signs point to the probability that Hess was acting
as Hitler’s emissary to try to dupe Churchill into withdrawing from
the war and sanctioning the attack on Russia. The objections are, of
course, that it is hard to believe that Hitler could have been such a
fool as to think such an attempt feasible, or that he would risk losing
his valued confederate on a mission with such little likelihood of
success, or that he would have risked the revelation of his plans to
the Russians. Yet if Hess had fled because he was afraid, or because he
thought Germany was losing, or because he had split with Hitler, or for
any other reason discreditable to the Nazi cause, surely the British by
now would have given the facts to the public. It would have made the
best propaganda in the world. I heard Jan Valtin, author of _Out of the
Night_, advance the suggestion that Hess, who was always a sensitive
fellow, with a touch of sissy in his carriage, and who was attached to
the Fuehrer with an almost morbid devotion, might have succumbed to a
fit of pique; he might have been slighted by Hitler before one of his
rivals, as Goering or Himmler or Goebbels or Rosenberg, and might have
leaped into his plane and left the country to “make Hitler sorry.” This
is an engaging theory. I will stick to mine.
Q. _What is the secret of Churchill’s success?_
A. His appetite for creation. He is as eager to create as Hitler is
to destroy life. He cannot live without creating. Hitler cannot live
without destroying. Churchill’s courage, wit, and eloquence are matched
by his industry. He does an incredible amount of work. Before he came
back into the government he never let a day go by without writing at
least 2,000 or 3,000 words. His powers of concentration are phenomenal.
His memory is prodigious. He dictates everything he writes. I have
visited him in his workroom on the top floor of his country home at
Chartwell in Kent. A shelf about breast-high runs the length of the
room, and on it he has arranged his books of reference, notes, and
documents. I was there when he was finishing his monumental life of his
ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. There were twenty or thirty volumes
lying open on the shelf, with paper slips marking other passages to
be consulted. His practice is to walk up and down the room, glancing
here and there at his various works of reference, dictating all the
time to a secretary. As in the composition of his speeches, he has a
first draft typed with plenty of space for corrections and interlining.
This is returned for recopying and sometimes half a dozen drafts are
necessary before the final form is completed. The result of this
striving after perfection is something as near approaching perfection
as one can find in the works of any writer of, what I might call,
inspired history. I remember once a conversation about Churchill’s
writing ability with Alexander Woollcott. I thought I had been as
appreciative as one could be, but Aleck broke in: “No, Knick, you
haven’t said enough. Churchill is the greatest master of the English
language since the men who wrote the King James version of the Bible.”
There is a nobility and grandeur about Churchill’s oratory which no
literature I know outside the Bible can approach. On July 14, 1940 when
Hitler’s army had swept all before it save the British Isles, Churchill
said: “And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and
face the worst that the tyrant’s might and enmity can do. Bearing
ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding
purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion
by which it is threatened. We are fighting _by_ ourselves alone; but
we are not fighting _for_ ourselves alone. Here in this strong City of
Refuge which enshrines the title deeds of human progress and is of deep
consequence to Christian civilization; here, girt about by the seas
and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess
and devotion of our airmen--we await undismayed the impending assault.
Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps
it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting
sudden violent shock, or what is perhaps a harder test, a prolonged
vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no
terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy--we shall ask for
none.”
Can this language be matched except by the adjurations of the prophets
of old? And what could surpass the fiery blast of his invective turned
upon Hitler? “This wicked man,” he said, “the repository and embodiment
of many forms of soul-destroying hatred, this monstrous product of
former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to try to break our famous
island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction.
What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and
all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the
conflagration he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted
a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last
vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe and until the
Old World--and the New--can join hands to rebuild the temples of man’s
freedom and man’s honor, upon foundations which will not soon or easily
be overthrown.”
It is interesting to catalogue the various words Churchill has used to
describe Hitler, and to note that he prefers the simplest descriptives,
“wicked,” “evil,” and “bad.” What other speaker could use the childish
adjective “bad” and make it so effective as did Churchill on April 27,
1941 when he said: “In February, as you may remember, _that bad man_ in
one of his raving outbursts threatened us with a terrifying increase
in numbers and activities of his U-boats....” And again on February
9: “We must all of us have been asking ourselves what is _that wicked
man_ whose crime-stained regime and system are at bay and in the toils,
what has he been preparing during these winter months?” And earlier on
October 1, 1939: “How soon victory will be gained depends upon how long
Herr Hitler and his group of _wicked men_, whose hands are stained with
blood and soiled with corruption, can keep their grip upon the docile,
unhappy German people.” Once he calls him a “cornered maniac,” and in
the same speech of November 12, 1939 says: “I have the sensation and
also the conviction that _that evil man_ over there and his cluster of
confederates are not sure of themselves as we are sure of ourselves;
that they are harassed in their guilty souls by the thought and by
the fear of an ever approaching retribution for their crimes, and for
the orgy of destruction into which they have plunged us all....” On
March 30, 1940 he refers to “Hitler’s murderous rage,” and says, “In
his frenzy, this _wicked man_ and the criminal regime which he has
conceived and erected, increasingly turn their malice upon the weak.”
Constantly recurs the simile of bloodstained, foul hands, perhaps best
in Churchill’s speech of June 12, 1941 when he said: “We can not yet
see how deliverance will come or when it will come, but nothing is more
certain than that every trace of Hitler’s footsteps, every stain of his
infected and corroding fingers will be sponged and purged and if need
be, blasted from the surface of the earth.”
The most famous of Churchill’s epigrams is the one now known by the
entire English-speaking world, about the Royal Air Force, delivered
in his speech of August 20, 1940 on “The War Situation” in the House
of Commons. I heard that speech and particularly noted the epigram,
but I cannot now certify which of the two current versions he actually
delivered. As I remember, he said, “Never in the field of human
conflict have so many owed so much to so few.” But in the collected
volume of his speeches edited by his son, Randolph, the sentence runs,
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to
so few.” I have seen both of these versions on placards in British
stores and offices. Hansard must have the original version and it is
possible Churchill or his son may have made an amendment in the volume
of speeches.
Q. _What are Churchill’s principal interests?_
A. I am going to make an omnibus answer to this and include replies to
a score of questions usually asked about Mr. Churchill. Roughly, in
order of importance Mr. Churchill’s principal interests are England;
the war, the Royal Navy; his family, past, present, and future; power;
politics; the English language; public speaking; writing history and
making it; writing journalism; reading history, biography, literature;
the English-speaking people; Scotch whisky; good food, good wines,
cigars; the French people; all other people; conversation; favorable
publicity; unfavorable publicity; ceremony; painting; bricklaying;
swimming (in younger days polo); six-pack bezique; his hats; his shoes;
his clothes; and of course “that bloodthirsty guttersnipe.”
Compare this with Hitler’s interests: power; Hitler-Germany; the war;
the German Army; barbarism; haranguing crowds in public; haranguing
friends in private; propaganda; rewriting history; reading military
history (and making it); suppressing journalism; the Jews; colossal
architecture; the movies; vegetarian food; and of course “the warmonger
Churchill.”
By this comparison I do not put the two men on the same level, for
morally they cannot be considered as belonging to the same species, but
it is interesting to note the contrasts that come out in such a list.
It is not merely the contrast between the aristocrat who is striving
to preserve free life for common men and the “guttersnipe” who is bent
upon enslaving them all; it is a contrast of two worlds.
Churchill has a profound historical sense and the thought of himself
as a part of the broad stream of the British people, flowing from
the distant past into the limitless future, is never absent from his
speaking and writing. He is never just Churchill, he is Churchill of
British history, of the Marlboroughs, but now more than ever Churchill
of the British people, with whom he has established a community of
feeling seldom equaled in the relationship of leader to people. It has
always been Hitler’s boast that “I _am_ Germany!” An Italian journalist
thinking to jibe at England during the tormented months of the Blitz
said mockingly that the British Isles seemed to be inhabited by “forty
million Churchills.” He was right, for under Churchill’s leadership
the entire population has become animated with his courage and he _is_
England to the same degree and by the same psychological process as
Hitler _is_ Germany. Hitler obtained his ascendancy over the German
people by expressing their hitherto largely unconscious aspirations,
for revenge, aggression, expansion, and conquest. At the height of the
British people’s peril they turned spontaneously and unanimously to
Churchill whom Providence seemed to have reserved for this critical
hour, and they entrusted to him the fulfillment of their aspirations
to beat off the enemy, save their families, and win victory. I was
there and for four months watched the British people and in particular
the eight million Londoners endure the anxiety of expected invasion
and the full blast of the greatest attack ever made on a civilian
population in history and I know that their faith in Churchill was a
most important factor in their endurance. Every Londoner thought as
the bombs fell, “Churchill is there; he can’t be beaten; we can’t be
beaten.” Churchill “became” England. This is the experience that has
elevated him above himself, fulfilled his character, made him great.
Today Churchill’s every faculty of soul, mind, and body is devoted to
the service of the British Commonwealth. Today every soul and resource
in the German Commonwealth is devoted to the service of Hitler.
Churchill actively directs the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force but
his love is the Navy. One can tell from his speeches how frequently his
mind dwells upon it. It remains his favorite branch of the services,
despite the noble tribute he has paid the R.A.F. He reserves for it
words such as he would use otherwise only to describe Old England
herself. “Amphibious” is the term he likes best to define the power
of Britain in arms. His conviction of the paramount importance of the
Fleet was thus dramatically expressed: “On them, as we conceived,
floated the might, majesty, dominion and power of the British Empire.
All our long history built up century after century, all our great
affairs in every part of the globe, all the means of livelihood and
safety of our faithful, industrious, active population depended upon
them. Open the seacocks and let them sink beneath the surface and in a
few minutes, half an hour at the most--the whole outlook of the world
would be changed. The British Empire would dissolve like a dream; each
isolated community struggling forward by itself; the central power of
union broken; mighty provinces, whole Empires in themselves, drifting
helplessly out of control, and falling a prey to strangers; and Europe
after one sudden convulsion passing into the iron grip and rule of
the Teuton and of all that the Teutonic system meant. There would
only be left far off across the Atlantic, unarmed, unready and as yet
uninstructed America, to maintain single-handed law and freedom among
men.” That was written about the Royal Navy mobilized for war in August
1914 but with what melancholy accuracy it reflects the situation of
today, except that this time the Teutonic might is such that Europe
has already had its one sudden convulsion and has passed under the
rule of a Teutonic system far grimmer than anything the Hohenzollerns
would have imposed. And once again, after a score of years of warning,
America still finds herself “unarmed, unready and as yet uninstructed,”
dependent now for her very life upon the continued existence of that
Navy which Churchill apostrophizes.
Now of course the war takes all of Churchill’s time, but in normal
circumstances he has an enormous number of interests and activities.
He concentrates fiercely upon each in turn, and everything he does he
does at least well, some things he does excellently, and some he does
superlatively. Fighting, speaking, writing, eating, drinking, sleeping,
smoking, all are the source of intense satisfaction. He relishes every
moment in his life. This war was made for him, because fighting is
life itself to Churchill. In the last war he was a subordinate and
could not thoroughly enjoy the fight when others checked his combat
plans. Now he is unchecked by anybody except the British people, and
they have shown they are only too glad to let him savor to the full
what are to him the joys of responsibility in the greatest fight with
the greatest consequences in the memory of mankind. Before the war the
most exciting form of conflict was politics, about which Churchill once
said, “Politics are almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous.”
He takes the keenest pleasure in writing, but he would always give up
his work on a book to go back into politics, as he did when this war
began.
He was just finishing his monumental _History of the English Speaking
Peoples_ when he was called to the Admiralty. I understand the
_History_ is to be in several volumes, but despite its size Churchill
wrote the whole thing in a year, dictating thousands of words a day. He
had worked on it, gathering material for many years, and such is the
organization of his mind and so precise and comprehensive is his memory
than when he once began he was able to dictate it almost as fast as he
could talk. I have heard that the publisher has already set the book up
but is waiting presumably for the end of the war to release it.
Today his prewar books, as _My Early Days_, are reprinted and have
become best sellers. Even his prewar newspaper articles are eagerly
dragged out, and reprinted both here and in England to sell at high
prices. His books have been phenomenally successful and his income
from them, from journalism, and from lectures has been for most of his
life considerably higher than the $50,000 a year he receives as Prime
Minister. It was always a financial sacrifice for him to go into office
despite the comparatively liberal salaries of British ministers. He has
no interest in money. His earnings have been large ever since he was
a war correspondent in South Africa, but he has spent money as fast
as it came, on his estate, his family, and on good living. One of his
best American friends, Bernard Baruch, once tried to instruct him in
the art of stock exchange speculation but nothing came of it. Churchill
had for it the interest he has for everything in life, and wanted to
learn it, but he lacked the indispensable requirement for amassing a
fortune, namely an overwhelming desire to make money. The power given
by the possession of money is so paltry compared with political power
that none of the great statesmen, or even the wicked dictators, have
exhibited any interest in it. What use has Hitler for money? I doubt
that he has touched any for years.
Until this war began it was power that appealed to Churchill more than
anything else in the world. It is ironical that now he possesses it
to a greater degree than he could ever have dreamed of, power for its
own sake he no longer wants. But that has not lessened his aesthetic
capacity to enjoy it. No stress of war, nor the imminence of awful
danger, can prevent him from enjoying the power of his spoken or
written word. You can feel his artistic satisfaction as you hear him in
the House of Commons, delivering on a desperate day passages calculated
not only to encourage, guide, and inspire, but to excite admiration for
their felicity.
We American correspondents in London used regularly to attend the
House every time Churchill spoke, although none of us need have
done so, since the speeches were delivered into our offices almost
instantaneously by ticker. We wanted to hear him in person not only for
the stirring drama of it but because as journalists we wished to listen
to the greatest living master of our craft. The trouble of attending
Parliament was considerable, for the old House, now in ruins, was too
small to accommodate even the Members if they all attended, and the
foreign press was allotted so few seats it was necessary to apply days
in advance to get a place. The narrow seats with too little space for
knees and feet were uncomfortable, the acoustics poor, but the view
from our gallery was perfect.
There sits the government, the bald head of Mr. Churchill shining
among the Members with unmistakable authority. The benches are nearly
empty until the time draws near for the Prime Minister to speak; a
few minutes before he rises the House is jammed with Members sitting
even on the foot of the Speaker’s dais. The Prime Minister rises.
There is dead silence as Mr. Churchill lays before him a sheaf of
what are technically called notes, as it is prohibited in the House
for any member, even the Prime Minister, to read a speech. This rule
is presumably to prevent a member from using a speech written by
someone else. The familiar Washington ghost writers would have little
employment in Westminster. Mr. Churchill would have about as much
use for one as Shakespeare would have had. Mr. Churchill’s “notes”
are in fact his completely written speech which he has memorized by
rereading the final copy quickly on the way to the House. He has
worked on this speech for several hours a day for eight days, writing,
rewriting, until he finally has it typed on sheets half the size of
standard typewriter paper. Thereafter he never looks at it. He has it
before him, and he automatically turns the pages, but his delivery
is perfectly extemporaneous, and you would imagine as you sat there
watching and listening that those incomparable phrases were conceived
at the moment, and to the satisfaction of hearing them is added the
illusion of being present at their creation. Mr. Churchill himself
insists he cannot speak well impromptu and I have heard that his son
Randolph, recently seated in Parliament, is considered a better offhand
speaker than his father.
It is an extraordinary coincidence that this greatest orator of modern
times should have an impediment of speech similar, we may imagine, to
that of the greatest orator of ancient times, Demosthenes. Churchill
has almost overcome the impediment. His delivery is not what we would
consider the best. He depends not at all on gesture. Now and then
he pauses to glance over the top of his spectacles with defiance or
curiosity. His stance is determined, not graceful. For the most part
he stands quietly in the same spot, and only moves a step backward or
forward when he wishes to emphasize a passage. His voice is sonorous,
strong, not the golden voice of a William Jennings Bryan, but also not
the vulgar guttural of Hitler. Yet when Churchill speaks of Hitler
there comes into his tone a note that promises to meet all the Nazi’s
brutality and pay interest. Churchill’s voice is ideally adapted to the
radio and the millions of Americans who listen to him on the air have
heard him at his best. Many have exclaimed at his accent that he does
not talk like an Englishman. His is the accent of Sandhurst, Britain’s
West Point, which is nearer the American way of speaking than the
curious upper-class cockney affected by some graduates of Oxford and
Cambridge.
I do not know why Mr. Churchill avoids as much as possible making
extemporaneous speeches, unless it is his passion for perfection,
because as a conversationalist he is without superior and he has few
peers. One of them was his intimate friend, Lord Birkenhead, whose
power of expression was almost on a par with Churchill’s, as I had the
opportunity to observe once in Berlin when the then most brilliant
lawyer in England attended a luncheon of the Anglo-American Press
Association and dazzled us with his talk. I remember the answer he
gave when someone asked what he thought of Mussolini. “Mussolini,” he
remarked, “bestrides Italy like a Colossus, but to judge a rider one
must consider the kind of horse he rides.”
I have listened to Mr. Churchill talk at the dinner table and
he is as brilliant there as he is in the House of Commons. His
conversational style has the same classical quality of his writing
and public speaking. Every sentence is rounded and balanced; none
is left incomplete, and I should think that ninety-five per cent of
everything he says in talking with his friends could be taken down
by a stenographer and reproduced without changing a syllable. At the
same time there is no studied effect and the listeners have not the
feeling they are attending a recitation or declamation. They are
transported back to the time when, either in Ancient Greece or in
eighteenth century Europe, men cultivated the art of speaking and
especially of conversation. Who knows what effect it will have upon
English education and English habits of conversation to have had as
a Prime Minister during the war a master of the word such as appears
only seldom in centuries. The oratory of Churchill must already have
influenced the language standards of the English-speaking world, even
though imperceptibly, for it is impossible that so many millions should
have listened to him and read his speeches without having their taste
improved. As a contrast it is interesting to observe what the effect
has already been upon the German language to have had the apostle
of illiteracy as the head of the German Reich for eight years; the
language of Goethe and Heine has been supplanted deliberately by a
coarse vulgarization of German chosen for its appeal to the lowest
instincts of the population.
Churchill attracted much attention when in a memorandum to all
government offices he asked for a more effective and economic use
of the English language in official communications and demanded the
abandonment of the jargon currently in use by bureaucrats. He can be
colloquial. The first time I met Mr. Churchill was at a luncheon given
by Lady Colefax, who has done more to help American correspondents in
London than almost anyone there. Present were Mr. Churchill, J. L.
Garvin, the crusty, brilliant editor of the _Observer_ and one-time
editor of the _Encyclopaedia Brittanica_, Somerset Maugham, Mrs.
Simpson, not yet the wife of Edward, Harold Nicolson, Peter Fleming,
Jan Masaryk, and a number of others. The conversation was almost
exclusively between Churchill and Garvin, and well it might be, for
Garvin is one of the few who can talk on anything like equal terms
with the master, and indeed on this occasion Garvin practically talked
Churchill silent. It was just two years before the war, but the topic
was even then the position of Russia, and Garvin exclaimed, “Do you
mean to say you would throw in your lot with the Bolsheviks?” The
Churchillian reply was, “I mean just that, old cock!” with a remark to
the effect that when one had to face an enemy like Germany it would
be only common sense to try for the help of any ally no matter how
distasteful otherwise.
We can see from Churchill’s policy of helping Russia since the German
attack how consistent he has remained. On the day after the Russians
marched into Poland--and horrified the world of fellow travelers and
caused all except party-liners and a few foresighted realists to draw
back in aversion from this manifestation of Red Imperialism--I had
a talk with Mr. Churchill, who had been appointed First Lord of the
Admiralty a fortnight before. I asked him whether, since Great Britain
had guaranteed the territory of Poland against aggression and had
gone to war with Germany because of the German attack on Poland, one
could now consider that Great Britain was at war with Russia since the
Russians also had attacked Poland? I am not at liberty to quote him,
but he gave the answer in public a fortnight later when after the fall
of Warsaw he declared: “We could have wished that the Russian Armies
should be standing on their present line as the friends and allies of
Poland instead of as invaders. _But that the Russian armies should
stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia
against the Nazi menace...._ I can not forecast to you the action of
Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but
perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”
Thus early and late Churchill maintained that it was desirable to
attempt to bring Russia into arms as an ally against the Germans, and
he was one of the few men in Britain who could advocate such a policy
without being suspected of sympathizing with the Bolsheviks. Only
Finland shook his resolution to do nothing to alienate the Russians and
it is interesting now to recall his words uttered in the midst of the
Russian assault on Finland: “Only Finland, superb, nay, sublime in the
jaws of peril--Finland shows what free men can do. The service rendered
by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed for all the
world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red
Air Force. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been dispelled in
these few fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle. Everyone can
see how Communism rots the soul of a nation; how it makes it abject and
hungry in peace and proves it base and abominable in war.”
His reaction of sympathy with the people of Finland fighting against
“servitude worse than death” is only one of countless examples that
could be named of the little-appreciated fact that he is an extremely
sensitive man. His gruff way sometimes conceals it, but there is not
a man in public life anywhere who feels the miseries of this stricken
world with more compassion than Churchill. When eighteen months after
these caustic remarks about the Communist regime, Russia was attacked
and Mr. Churchill expressed his sympathy with the Russian people, it is
certain he meant it, although it was good politics too. Incidentally
I am convinced that one of the reasons why he is loath to discuss
detailed plans for what a victorious Britain would like the postwar
world to be, is the problem of Russia. Certainly the vast majority of
British people would like to see the Bolshevik government replaced by
some democratic regime.
I am sure one reason for Churchill’s aversion to Bolshevism is his
strong family feeling, and his repugnance for the Communist attempt
to subordinate the family, if not to abolish it, as was originally
attempted in the Soviet Union. For his family in the past, his noble
and famous ancestors, he has profound respect and a feeling of proud
affectionate gratitude which has led him to devote a good part of
his literary labors to the biography of his father, Lord Randolph
Churchill, and to the massive life of the Duke of Marlborough. To his
present family, his wife Clementine, his daughters Sarah, Diana, and
Mary, and his son Randolph, he devotes more time and attention than
most men with a fraction of his responsibilities. Randolph’s marriage
to the beautiful Pamela Digby was a delight to Mr. Churchill. It
represented the only chance of the perpetuation of the Churchill name,
and when Winston Spencer, the first grandchild to bear his name was
born, he became the favorite member of the dynasty.
Churchill’s aversions are just as strong and notable as his
predilections. They might be listed, without order: Hitler, Mussolini,
Trotzky, Nazism, Communism, the New Deal, Prohibition, hypocrisy,
cruelty, thick soup, bores, mediocrity, cowardice, stupidity,
sentimentality, bigotry, muddling, proletarianism, poor English, poor
food, poor anything except poor people. He is intolerant of anything
but the best. He is the perfect exemplar of a gentleman who never
offends anyone except intentionally. His manners to his friends are
of an old-fashioned courtliness. When he bids a guest farewell Mr.
Churchill comes to the driveway to see him off with a handshake and a
Godspeed. His manners to his enemies are savage and the lash of his
tongue is feared from Berlin to Whitehall. He can be wounding to a
colleague who has failed to meet requirements. One Cabinet Minister
complained that when Churchill dismissed him he “kicked me out as
though I had been a servant.” As the war wears on and the duties of
office become heavier, his patience has frayed and the single criticism
one can frequently hear is that he has become short-tempered. He
is particularly intolerant of Parliamentary inquiries which would
require the Government to reveal facts of military value to the enemy.
Constantly, naive Members ask such questions, and if Mr. Churchill
chooses personally to reply he frequently makes his answer blister. Yet
there has never been a Prime Minister with a more meticulous regard for
the rights, functions, and ceremonies of Parliament than Mr. Churchill.
This regard is such that he has sometimes been criticized for delaying
action until all forms are duly complied with by Parliament.
Churchill’s restless energy is such that his associates are both
inspired and compelled to work harder than they ever did with anyone
else. Shortly after he went to the Admiralty I visited his office and
chatted with his secretaries. They were obviously sincere in their
hero worship of him, but equally sincere in their sighs of weariness
over the strenuous schedule they have to follow. Rauschning describes
Hitler as an essentially lazy man who “does not know how to work
steadily. Indeed is incapable of working. He hates to have to read with
concentration. He rarely reads a book through; usually he only begins
it.” Could there be found a greater contrast than this with the habits
of Churchill whose perpetual industry and powers of concentration are
as important elements in his genius as intellect? As an illustration
of his ability to concentrate I know no better anecdote than the one
told me by Randolph. It was during the months before the war when Mr.
Churchill was writing the _History of the English Speaking Peoples_,
and every day world without end, he turned out, generally in the
evening, his stint of words from 2,000 upward. It made no difference
what was happening in international affairs, or what other demands
were made upon his time. No excitements or exigencies were allowed
to disturb his writing. But events grew bigger and bigger and to the
prescient eye of Mr. Churchill it became every day more clear that
war was certain to come, and that a violent gesture by Hitler might
precipitate it any moment. Suddenly Hitler marched into Prague,
breaking the fresh vows he had made at Munich, deliberately insulting
Britain and France, cynically strangling the rump state he had sworn
to respect. Throughout Europe ran a shudder and the mind of every man
was absorbed with anxious exploration of the possibilities. On that
evening Mr. Churchill rose from dinner, and as he started upstairs to
his workroom to write his stint, he exclaimed to his family, “It will
be difficult for me tonight to concentrate my undivided attention upon
the reign of King James II, but I shall do so.”
Another time I visited Chartwell with Randolph and as we walked through
the garden I saw a new brick building and remarked that it had not
been there before. “No,” Randolph explained. “Father just built it.”
“You mean, had it built?” I asked. “Oh no, built it with his own
hands.” I had heard about Mr. Churchill’s bricklaying but had no idea
it extended to building whole houses. This one I found was his studio.
He had laid every brick in the building, and evidently was expert as
a professional. He particularly likes difficult jobs such as arches
and corners and curves. The Brick-layers Union at one time admitted
him to membership, but later called in his card on instructions from
the central office which objected to the Union’s accepting a Tory
politician as a member! This brick house, however, was not built by
any honorary bricklayer. If Mr. Churchill ever falls upon evil times
it may serve to recommend him for employment. While Churchill, without
having to do so and merely as a hobby, became a qualified artisan in
the building trades, Hitler could not even out of dire necessity keep
a job in the building trades. Churchill might earn a living also as a
painter. The studio walls were hung from top to bottom with the product
of his brush, signed Charles Morin. There were landscapes, seascapes,
and every variety of scene, many of them recording vacations on the
French Riviera, his favorite resort. Presently we joined Mr. Churchill
swimming in the outdoor pool he had also personally constructed. Later
he played cards with his wife. Six-pack bezique was the game. Guests
had tea on the lawn in the shade of the trees.
These were the last peaceful days before the hurricane which it
is fashionable to say will sweep away all that comfortable, easy,
country-home England. I do not believe it will do anything of the
kind. The war will certainly leave little of parasitic England. The
vast accumulations of inherited wealth are being swept now into the
hopper of war. It will no longer be possible for Francis Williams
to declare that eighty per cent of the wealth of England belongs to
six per cent of the population, and that nearly half of the national
income goes to ten percent of the people. But Churchill’s type of good
living, country house and all, will not disappear, for it is based upon
his own labors, as we could see demonstrated before our eyes. After
the card game Mr. Churchill went upstairs to his workroom and about
an hour later came down with the manuscript of a 1,500-word article
for the _Daily Telegraph_ which he had just dictated. I read it with
professional envy, for in only a few minutes he had produced one of
his characteristic gems, informative, learned, witty, for which he
would receive a remuneration about equivalent to the annual income of
an average American newspaperman. He frequently surpasses this feat in
economizing time. He used to write many of his newspaper articles on
the way up to London in his automobile, dictating to his secretary.
Churchill has now by act of Parliament completely dictatorial powers
and can order any British citizen to perform any service or can
confiscate any property, but he has yet to be criticized for ruling
arbitrarily. He hates silly questions and will walk away from a bore,
or cut a hypocrite down with an epigram. Whisky, he believes, is a boon
to mankind, and he has never been the worse, but often the better for
it. The two men he most abhors in our time are Hitler and Trotzky, both
teetotalers. He is a gourmand, that is to say a man with a sensitive
taste in food who likes a lot of it. Once he was in ill health and
went to a noted specialist who, contrary to the fashion of the day and
despite the patient’s well-upholstered body, advised him to eat more
food. He follows the prescription enthusiastically.
One night, about eighteen months before the war, traveling from
London to Paris, I had the good luck to be on the same train with Mr.
Churchill. After he had finished his work he invited me to join him.
All the way from London to Dover he had dictated to a secretary who
was to return to London. This is the way he works, incessantly, never
wasting a moment. Our train was run onto a massive ferryboat, a new
system of crossing the Channel and this was Mr. Churchill’s first
experience of it. It was bitterly cold. Mr. Churchill wore a heavy
fur-lined coat. We started to explore the ferryboat. Word got about
among the crew that Winston Churchill was aboard, and speedily men
gathered to salute him and mention their service in the Royal Naval
Volunteer Reserve, which he organized. The Captain invited us to the
bridge. Steaming out of Dover harbor with an icy wind cutting our
faces, we listened as the Captain pointed out the lights of two wrecks
near the harbor and ventured the opinion that “You, Sir, I believe
ordered those ships sunk to block the harbor entrance to submarines?”
Mr. Churchill believed the skipper was right.
With unflagging energy Mr. Churchill led the way about the ship from
the bridge to the hold, stopping now and then to exchange a few
sentences with his admirers. Churchill had been out of the government
then for many years, but he remained the best-known figure in the
realm and one could measure his popularity by the reception he received
on the ferryboat. Toward midnight we climbed to the smoking room where
Mr. Churchill as a nightcap consumed a large platter of thick slices
of rare roast beef with the appetite of John Bull. As I watched him I
thought to myself that this is the way he deals with life, he devours
it. When during the quiet period of the war he made an intensive
inspection of the French and British positions and the Maginot line,
French officers were astonished at his ability to sit up with his hosts
studying and discussing the problems of war and probably a hundred
other things, including certainly the dry vintage champagne he likes
so well, and then appear again a few hours later at dawn for a hearty
breakfast with cigar! No Frenchmen and few of any other nationality
smoke cigars for breakfast, but Mr. Churchill finds them invigorating.
He is seldom without one in his waking hours.
The last time I visited him he received me at about 9:30 A.M. in the
upper bedroom at Number Ten Downing Street. The Prime Minister was
sitting up in bed, cigar in mouth, hard at work with a kind of bed desk
in front of him to hold his papers, and pinned within easy reaching
distance on the wall a rack for various colored folders to hold
documents of different urgencies. This man who might justly be called
the most industrious human being on earth, is a believer in the maxim
of Mark Twain who did most of his voluminous writing in bed: “A man’s a
fool who runs when he can stand still, or stands when he can sit down,
or sits when he can lie down.”
For serious writing Mr. Churchill requires the stimulus of striding up
and down, but he finds that for reading and working over state papers
and for dictating letters and memoranda, there is no more efficient
position than sitting up in bed. To sleep Mr. Churchill does not
necessarily require a bed, for such are his powers of endurance that
now in his sixty-seventh year he frequently when on tours of inspection
takes his night’s rest in his automobile. I remember saying good-by to
him one afternoon before the Admiralty and as he was climbing into his
car to drive to one of the great naval ports, his aide-de-camp asked
him where he would spend the night. Mr. Churchill replied, “In the car
driving back.” No Prime Minister has ever moved about his constituency
so much, so tirelessly, and so dangerously as Mr. Churchill who travels
day and night by blackout and under bombardment. He manages the total
war effort of the Empire, but as he has repeatedly emphasized, the
war will be won or lost in the British Isles, and inside this mighty
fortress the Prime Minister gives the major part of his attention to
his duties as Commander in Chief. He is incessantly on inspection.
Like the Captain of an old-time castle under siege, he roams from
battlement to battlement, from the South of England to the North of
Scotland, viewing the coast defenses, visiting naval stations, driving
the newest tanks, witnessing test flights of the latest warplanes,
cheering the R.A.F., the troops, the civilian population, sharing their
dangers, striding through the dust of bombs, and always everywhere
comprehending instantly, offering suggestions, giving the orders of the
expert he is in every branch of defense. It is sometimes forgotten that
if Hitler is indeed the Marshal in Chief of the German war machine,
so is Churchill of the British war machine, and if Hitler has proved
a military leader of intuitive genius, Churchill has incomparably
more experience and scientific education in war, and certainly no
less imagination than Hitler even in the narrow field of strictly
military affairs. Hitler had four years of the last war as a private
and corporal; has read military history; since he became Chancellor
has had the counsel of the Prussian General Staff; and now has had two
years’ experience of war. Churchill’s military education began with
the exacting instruction of Sandhurst and for practical experience in
old-fashioned combat he witnessed or took part in the Boer War, the
River War in India, civil war in Cuba, and the Sudan campaign. In the
first World War he helped direct the struggle from one of its most
important posts, the Admiralty, conceived the tank and numerous other
new devices of war, fought in France as a colonel, and all the while
before and since, studied and wrote about war until he became one of
its foremost historians. These experiences and studies are those of a
Doctor of Philosophy compared to Hitler’s grammar school course. In the
long run, granting all of Hitler’s genius, I am convinced Churchill,
given the tools, will win--but not without America.
You may object that it seems absurd to compare favorably the military
abilities of a commander of forces which have constantly been on the
defensive with those of the chief of troops so far ever victorious. But
the war is a long way from its end, and before that goal is reached,
the military qualifications of Churchill may prove their superiority
over Hitler’s. Churchill has not yet had the opportunity to show
what he can do as a war leader pitted with equal weapons against the
enemy, because the war machine he inherited from the feeble hands
of Chamberlain was for a long time capable of nothing but defense.
Meanwhile as the British plus American war machine is growing, it
is encouraging to remember that Churchill with his background of
forty years of war, study of war and leadership in war, his youthful
inventive mind and eager imagination, is capable of taking everything
the Germans have devised or used successfully, and improving it until
with the eventually superior resources he will command, victory will be
certain, provided always that the United States enters the war in time.
4. WAR AIMS
Q. _What are Britain’s war aims?_
A. We Americans may still find it interesting to inquire “What are
they fighting for?” but if we stood in the midst of the ruins of
Westminster Abbey or the House of Commons, it would not occur to us
to ask the question. Mr. Churchill has joined President Roosevelt
in a formal statement, the so-called Atlantic Charter, but it seems
to me that he has twice expressed himself far more eloquently and
accurately than he did in the Eight Points. In those dread days when
despair touched nearly every soul but his, and he had just accepted the
responsibility of leading his country at the moment of its greatest
peril, Mr. Churchill said: “You ask what is our policy? I say: It is
to wage war by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the
strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny
never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.
That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word:
Victory! Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory
however long and hard the way may be; for without victory there is no
survival.”
Simple survival does not seem enough for some comfortably situated
critics in this country sheltered by British resistance, but that is
only because it is so difficult for those who have not experienced
the near threat of death to understand what life means. Mr. Churchill
expressed the irritation at such questions that must seize anyone
who has witnessed the effect of Hitler’s terrible force when in a
discussion of Poland he exclaimed: “What a frightful fate has overtaken
Poland! Here was a community of nearly thirty-five millions of people
with all the organization of a modern government and all the traditions
of an ancient state, which in a few weeks was dashed out of civilized
existence to become an incoherent multitude of tortured and starving
men, women and children, ground beneath the heel of two rival forms of
withering and blasting tyranny. Although the fate of Poland stares them
in the face, there are thoughtless dilettanti or purblind worldlings
who sometimes ask us: ‘What is it that Britain is fighting for?’ To
this I answer, ‘If we left off fighting you would soon find out.’”
Q. _I understand that, but after victory, what? That won’t be the
end of the world; after we win we shall have a lot to do. What was
the meaning of the Churchill-Roosevelt meeting and their eight-point
declaration?_
A. The meeting and its published result, which Churchill calls the
Atlantic Charter, made an interesting commentary and answer to the
demand for a statement of war aims. Its first importance lay in the
fact of the meeting of the two men; its second importance lay in the
confidential discussion of ways and means of beating Hitler; its
third importance was a statement of war aims. I have not been able
to understand why the statement was labeled in this country as an
American statement, as though the President had imposed it upon the
Prime Minister, or as though the principal ideas contained in it
were characterized more by American unselfishness than by British
hardheadedness. It may very well be that Churchill was reluctant to
make any statement of war aims at all, but now that it has been made it
seems to me to be hardheaded, and frankly Churchillian and not at all
the sort of statement that American liberals had been discussing.
Q. _Why not; is there anything not liberal in the statement?_
A. Not to my way of thinking, but the average liberal argued there
should be a statement of war aims in order first of all to impress
the good German people that we are kindly disposed toward them and if
they knew how well we intended to treat them after they were defeated
they would give up now. What is the sense of the Atlantic Charter? Its
chief meaning is that the main war aim and peace aim is to make the
world safe against Germany. It names two ways of accomplishing this
aim: A. By destruction of the Nazi power and disarmament of Germany
and her allies. B. By restoration of the nations now enslaved. Does
this constitute an encouragement for the Germans to give up? Hardly.
Churchill and Roosevelt were too clear-sighted and too candid to
fall in with the argument that the German people could be fooled by
a dishonest statement of war aims. They knew that the Germans are
bound to realize if they lose this war they will be worse off than
if they win. War is Hell, but much more hellish for the defeated
side. It is untrue that war never settles anything. It always settles
something, whether for a short time, as for the twenty years following
the uncompleted war of 1914-1918, or forever as the Third Punic War.
The Germans know this better than almost any other people. But now
they have had a crushingly frank statement of basic British-American
war aims: abolition of German military power. This time they cannot
complain they have been deceived.
Q. _Wasn’t that true of Wilson’s Fourteen Points? Weren’t they a
frank statement to the Germans of the terms they could expect if they
surrendered?_
A. No. In the first place, one great difference between Wilson’s
Fourteen Points and the Eight Points of the Atlantic Charter is that
Wilson acted alone, and issued his Fourteen Points to the world in
January 1918, without consulting Britain or France, so that when the
Germans in October finally in the extremity of defeat accepted them,
Britain and France were not bound by them at all. In the second place,
the Fourteen Points declared there should be general disarmament, and
not just a one-sided German disarmament, so that when as a matter of
common prudence, the British and French insisted upon and obtained
German disarmament ahead of their own, the Germans protested they had
been betrayed by Wilson particularly and by the Allies in general.
Hitler based his campaign for power in Germany largely upon his
complaint that Germany had never been fairly beaten on the battlefield,
but had been betrayed by the Fourteen Points. Now it is hard to see how
any future Hitler can raise again such a complaint since the Germans
are now given fair warning that when they are beaten their present
government will be abolished, and their arms will be taken from them
while the British and Americans keep their arms intact. This is a
refreshing example of common-sense honesty. It seems almost as though
Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s clear-sighted candor might finally brush
away the mists of false feeling and thinking which have obscured our
view of the war and of our own interests.
Q. _You have named what might be called a negative side of the Atlantic
Charter as being its most important side._
A. It is, if you call it negative to aim to destroy the power which has
torn the whole world apart.
Q. _Yes, but after that power is destroyed, or rendered impotent, what
are we or the British going to do to consolidate the gains of victory?
How are we going to be better off?_
A. If you think we are going to be better off, or could be better off
than we were before 1939, the answer is that we cannot be because
no matter which side wins the world as a whole is going to be very
much worse off for a long time than it was before the war began. We
are not offered the choice now of fighting in order to improve our
present position. Our choice is, either to fight and save something
of our most precious spiritual as well as material possessions; or
not to fight and lose everything. The world as a whole is bound to be
materially much poorer after this war no matter who is victor, although
the United States ought to come out of it in better condition than any
other country. Think of the immense demolition which has been wrought
and is now being wrought in Europe. Just to name a few of the cities
which have been bombarded and have suffered varying degrees of damage
is to compile a roll of casualties never equaled: London, Manchester,
Liverpool, Portsmouth, Southampton, Plymouth, Coventry; Berlin,
Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Duisburg, Essen, Dortmund; Warsaw; Belgrade;
Leningrad, Moscow, Minsk, Smolensk, Odessa, Kiev; Alexandria; Nanking,
Hankow, Chungking. From China to Egypt and from England to Central
Russia, fire and high explosives have blasted scars it will take a
century to heal.
The diversion of billions of man-hours from productive work to the
making of war supplies, the loss of lives, and the dislocation of
millions of human existences, and of the whole world economy, will
impoverish us all for a certain length of time. Happily there are
reasons for believing the United States will suffer less than almost
any other part of the human family, provided only that we enter the
war soon enough to ensure the defeat of the Nazi power and do not
wait to face that power alone. We must keep one thing firmly in mind,
that though our condition may be poor if we are victorious, it will
be definitely better than if we are defeated, and though we may lack
in goods and comforts as a result of our participation in the war, we
shall be far richer and easier in body, mind, and soul after hard-won
victory than if we attempted to purchase from the conquering Nazis a
humiliating security.
Q. _Why should the United States, as you suggested, come out of the war
in a better economic condition than the others?_
A. First, because if we enter the war in time to have any Allies, we
shall probably be physically undamaged. That is, as long as the British
Isles, our foremost fortress, persists in its resistance it is not
likely that we shall suffer any important injuries by air bombardment
or otherwise. You can see how important this factor is if you consider
the condition of the cities of England now, and how much money, labor,
and time it will take to restore them. Second, the economic structure
of the United States can more easily be transferred back from war to
peace production than most countries. After this war there will be an
increase in the private use of airplanes comparable to the increase
in automobile ownership after the first successful Ford. Our warplane
production can be easily switched to the production of private planes,
and many observers would not be surprised to see American private plane
production go into six figures and then into seven.
The United States, as the most self-contained of the belligerent
powers, at the end of the war will have everything necessary to resume
its own economic progress and to help the world recover.
Europe will be starving and desperately in need of our agricultural
products, our cotton, and of almost everything else we produce. If
we wish decisively to influence the organization of the world, one
powerful lever will be our economic power after the war, our ability
if we like, to finance the reconstruction of Europe. With wisdom and
far-sight in control of our administration we ought to be able to put
back into circulation some of our monstrous hoard of gold, for our
own good as well as that of the world. Sometimes when one succumbs
to optimism, it seems possible that there may come after this war a
marvelous opportunity to reshape the affairs of mankind into a happier
pattern. We shall have an opportunity such as we have never had before,
not even after the last war, to make our hopes and aspirations
practically effective, but only of course if we enter the war in time.
There is a fourth reason why we should be economically or financially
better off at the end of this war than at the end of the last one:
we now have no war-debt problem. Who will deny now that everyone
would have been better off after the last war if international debts,
including reparations, had been canceled all around. This aspect of
the Lend-Lease program may go down in history as Roosevelt’s cleverest
device.
This sounds almost as though I thought the war would be a blessing to
America, emerging undamaged, easily reverting to peacetime production,
stored with goods for our own consumption and for export to clamoring
millions abroad, and with no delinquent war debtors to confuse our
financial affairs. Actually I do not think the war will be a blessing,
except as it unifies us and does something to cleanse us of the scum
of materialism. This view of America’s chances of coming relatively
unscathed out of the war depends entirely upon comparison of our fate
with that of other countries, maimed by bombardment, mutilated by the
loss of millions of breadwinners, fiscally bankrupt, economically
paralyzed, politically divided, and in the case of some, the prey of
anarchy. Think what the problem of leadership will be in most of the
countries of Europe. In Germany and Italy the tyrants have long ago
executed, imprisoned, exiled or otherwise effectively removed from the
political scene every possible candidate for office not in agreement
with them. In France the demoralization caused by defeat and Vichy’s
collaboration with the enemy has left few men with the initiative and
courage to become leaders of a renascent republic. If, as so frequently
happens, we become inclined to take an over-cheerful view of ourselves
and our prospects, we ought to be sobered by the thought of our
responsibilities in the postwar world. Whether we like it or not, and
our isolationists to the contrary notwithstanding, the United States
after this war is going to be compelled to assume the leadership of
the Western World, not only economically but politically. But we shall
be able effectively to influence the peace only if we have effectively
taken part in the war.
Q. _What will the peace conference be like?_
A. It might be more instructive in the first place to discuss what
the peace will be like if Hitler wins. Of course there will not be
any peace _conference_ if Hitler wins. The Quislings and Darlans will
be called to function for the states of Europe in the same way as
Hitler’s rubber-stamp Reichstag functions for Germany. We know now
what Hitler plans to impose upon the world. Let us begin with Europe.
Europe is to belong exclusively to the Germans. They as a master race
will occupy the top of a pyramid at the bottom of which are the Poles,
Czechs, Serbs, and other “subhuman Slavs” who constitute the lowest
class of slaves. Between these “untouchables” and the Germans will
come all the other peoples of Europe, arranged in order depending
partially upon their degree of racial kinship with the noble Teutons,
but more on the degree of their subservience and “collaboration.”
The Dutch and Scandinavians, for example, are considered by the
Nazis to be semi-Teutonic cousins, but they will not be ranked as
high as the French if the Vichy appeasers succeed in their policy of
“collaboration.”
Now that Italy has proved an even feebler war partner than her worst
detractors had imagined, Hitler obviously is considering the grant to
France of the position of First Vassal instead of Italy. Spain, if she
eventually enters the war, will be given a role perhaps second to that
of Italy, chiefly because Spanish influence will be helpful in the
conquest of South America. Sweden and Switzerland will of course be
_gleichgeschaltet_, or “coordinated” into the Nazi system and given a
rank corresponding to their servility. But all are slaves, including
the Axis “allies” Italy, Hungary, Spain, and they differ one from
another only in the degree of their degradation. None of them will
be permitted to bear arms capable of threatening their Nazi masters,
and none will have a word in the formulation of the major laws which
determine their lives.
Q. _In what sense will the conquered people be slaves?_
A. Politically, they will be disfranchised, without a vote, unable to
influence their own fate except by humble petition to Berlin. For the
most part they will be ruled by Nazi governors. States like Poland
will also have Nazis ruling the smallest organs of government, as
municipalities. States like France may be permitted to operate their
own provincial and municipal governments under a Nazi _Gauleiter fuer
Frankreich_.
Q. _But Germans also have no vote under the Nazi system. How does the
position of these other nationalities under the Nazis differ from that
of the Germans themselves?_
A. It differs as the night from day. Every ruling made and every
action taken by the Nazi governors of the vassal states is intended
to procure tribute for the Great German Reich, tribute which,
scientifically extracted, will prove greater over the years than any
amount of old-fashioned looting could have produced. This tribute,
which is to be paid not merely for generations to come, but as Hitler
modestly estimates, for 1,000 years, will go to elevate the standard
of living of all Germans, and to depress the standard of living of all
non-Germans. It makes no difference that most Germans have no voice
in their government; every German will be under Hitler’s New Order, a
slaveholder, and every non-German inhabitant of occupied territory is
automatically a slave of the whole German tribe.
Q. _How is this to be accomplished? Isn’t it difficult to extract
tribute? Didn’t the Allies have trouble getting reparations from
Germany?_
A. The Allies were innocent children compared with the Nazis in the
art of obtaining advantage from one’s beaten adversary. No one knows
whether Hitler’s system will work for 1,000 years, or for ten or two
years, but it certainly is a grandiose design without any parallel in
the history of human conquest. First is the movement of populations.
Hitler has moved upward of two million Poles from Western Poland,
dumped them indiscriminately in Central Poland, and replaced them
with Germans, some from the Baltic states, some from the Tyrol, some
from the Reich. The Poles as a rule were visited by the Gestapo after
midnight, given half an hour’s notice to leave their homes forever,
allowed to take but a single suitcase with food for three days and
the clothes on their backs. They were forbidden to take any of their
own articles of value, not even a silver spoon from the kitchen or a
rake from the barn. The German families moving in were fewer than the
evacuated Poles, so that the Germans became wealthier per capita than
the Poles had been. The Poles died for the most part, or else are still
in process of dying from starvation and exposure; it was part of the
German calculation that they should die. Similar methods were used to
evacuate the French from Lorraine.
Other desirable parts of Europe contiguous to the Great German Reich
will be evacuated of their native populations and settled by the
Germans. This constitutes looting on a grand scale. Sir Norman Angell,
profound thinker on war, once held in his Nobel prize-winning thesis
“The Great Illusion,” that modern conquest cannot pay in this Christian
day and age, because the acquisition of mere political control over an
enemy’s territory, the advancing of the flag over foreign lands, does
not pay even for the cost of the war. The usual incidental looting by
the soldiery amounts of course to nothing from the point of view of
the nation’s economics. Sir Norman could not be blamed for failing
to foresee the grand-scale looting practiced by the Nazis. There is
an evident economic advantage to the nation if a million of its farm
families are moved into rich, fully equipped farms robbed from the
conquered and expelled enemy. But this sort of looting is only the
beginning of Nazi total plunder. In France the major part of the
productive apparatus in industry, trade, and the professions is being
systematically taken over by the Nazis. This is only a step toward
the huge permanent system of eternal tribute, which is based upon the
exploitation of the labor power of Europe.
No conqueror since the Romans has ever been able profitably to exploit
the labor power of his conquests, but the Nazis propose to do so and
are doing so and boast they will continue to do so for centuries. The
Nazis intend to concentrate all industry in Germany, and to convert
the rest of Europe into an agricultural colony growing food and raw
materials for the master state, the Great German Reich. The entire
population of non-German Europe is to be turned and is already being
turned as fast as possible into a vast army of coolies of the soil,
toiling to supply the Third Reich. The coolies will likewise be
required to buy all their industrial products from Germany. The price
the Germans pay for the coolies’ agricultural products and the price
the coolies pay for the German goods will be fixed by the Germans. Nice
calculation will arrive at the precise prices which will bring the
Herrenvolk the maximum advantage. The Germans with their traditional
scientific acumen will certainly find it to their advantage to pay
their coolies such prices for agricultural products as will enable the
coolies to buy liberally of German manufactured goods.
Thus with a little reasonableness and spirit of accommodation on
the side of the coolies, who ought to be happy to give up the
responsibility of liberty, and glad to dispense with the obligations
connected with free speech, press, assembly, and thought, Hitler
Europe might settle down into one great unhappy family, orderly as a
penitentiary, quiet as a grave. It is important also to note that by
turning their conquered populations into farm hands the Nazis make
it much easier to keep their victims permanently disarmed, since
only industry on a large scale can turn out tanks, machine guns, and
warplanes necessary for insurrection against a totalitarian tyranny.
Q. _But Hitler has not destroyed or removed the factories from France
and not even from Poland, since we constantly read that he is obtaining
considerable war supplies from the industrial plants in the occupied
regions._
A. That is because the war is not over yet and Hitler has not had
time to move these factories into Germany. He needs their products
immediately for the war against England and Russia. After his
conquest of Poland he kept many Polish factories, notably locomotive
and freight-car plants, running in Poland with German supervisors,
but after the fall of France, during that period when he was sure
England would capitulate also, he ordered these factories transferred
to Germany. Then after the British failed to surrender and as soon
as it became plain that the war would last some time longer, Hitler
countermanded the transfer of the Polish factories, and many of them
are running today on Polish soil.
Q. _Where is Hitler going to get the man power to run such a huge
industrial machine, comprising the manufactories formerly owned in all
the rest of Europe?_
A. That is a question which closely concerns us all in America. Hitler
will get the man power in part from his own partially demobilized
armies, but in part also from the conquered coolies, millions of
whom are not agricultural workers at all, but skilled mechanics and
technicians. German authorities admit, or boast, that today 2,000,000
prisoners of war and “others” are working in German factories, mines,
and on farms. It is against the products of this essentially slave
labor that American industrial products would have to compete if Hitler
after conquering Britain offered merely to compete with the United
States in foreign trade.
Q. _Would we not then be at a great disadvantage? How could we compete
at all?_
A. We could not compete successfully. Under the Nazi system, precisely
as under its twin brother, the Soviet system, all foreign trade is
carried on by a foreign trade monopoly. It has a hundred different
names in Germany but in reality every foreign trade transaction is a
government transaction. Competition among Germans is thus eliminated
and any foreigner attempting to compete with the Nazi Colossus has
as much chance to succeed as a one-well oil producer trying to trade
against the Standard Oil Company. No American manufacturer, no matter
how big, including our automobile manufacturers, could buck the Nazi
machine, because in addition to its slave labor prices, and its
government foreign trade monopoly, it would have the advantage of
terrific political-military pressure on all the states in the world
not yet an integral part of the Nazi Empire. What South American state
do you think would have the nerve to stand up to a Germany which had
just finished off the whole of Europe and the British Empire? Which one
of them would refuse to give Nazi goods favored tariff treatment over
American goods notwithstanding any existing treaties?
Q. _If these are Hitler’s plans for Europe, what does he intend to do
with Africa, Asia, and America if he wins?_
A. He intends to swallow piece by piece the entire world, but since he
cannot do so by immediate, world-wide conquest, he would like to be
allowed periods of negotiated peace during which he could allow his
forces to recuperate while by soothing reassurances he lulls that part
of the world not yet under his dominion, into a state of helplessness.
If he could, after the conquest of Russia, make a negotiated peace with
Britain and tacitly, with the United States, he would expect, after a
breathing spell, to be stronger relative to the combined strength of
Britain and America than he is now. When his superiority in strength
had reached a certain point, he would attack again.
Q. _How could Hitler expect to be stronger since we are now building
our two-ocean Navy and our great Air Force and Army? Even if Hitler
were now or soon to obtain negotiated peace, wouldn’t we continue
to forge ahead and grow stronger? Wouldn’t we in the face of a
Hitler-dominated world which would result from a negotiated peace be
compelled to turn the United States into an armed camp, and wouldn’t we
increase our armaments until we were invulnerable?_
A. That is not at all certain. If we continue in our present state of
complacency, we might take a negotiated peace to be a sign that we
could disarm. The House of Representatives passed the bill extending
the service of selectees beyond one year by a vote of 203 to 202.
One vote preserved the existence of our embryo army. It was not a
mere technical question of how long an army man ought to serve. The
question was whether we were to have an army at all. In the midst of
the war, when every qualified expert declared the United States faced
mortal perils, the House of Representatives could find a majority of
but one-tenth of one per cent in favor of maintaining or attempting to
construct an effective army. I know the majority would have been larger
if the administration leaders had known the vote could come so close,
but the fact remains that in this crisis of our national life, with the
enemy rampant and untamed, the House took this complacent view of our
defense necessities.
Now what would be the attitude of Congress if a peace should be
negotiated? Would not our isolationists say this was a God-given
opportunity to reduce our tremendous expenditures, whittle the
Army down to police size, confine our Air Force to a few thousand
planes, and stop building our two-ocean Navy? Certainly they would,
and all the immense propaganda resources of the Nazis would be
employed to encourage throughout the United States such a move toward
“common-sense pacifism.” Now, the argument would run, the war is over,
Hitler is satisfied, let us go back to normalcy. Whether we actually
succumbed entirely to this temptation or not, there would be a strong
isolationist campaign in favor of our disarmament, and this would
surely slow up our defense effort. Meanwhile Hitler would be bringing
his New Order slave states with their industries and agriculture into
the service of the Reich, increasing his Navy, rebuilding his Air
Force, re-equipping his Army and in general growing stronger relative
to us. He would never want a negotiated peace unless he believed this
would be its result.
Q. _Have you any idea what kind of negotiated peace Hitler would
consider acceptable? Would such a peace be as desirable for us as
Wheeler and Lindbergh say? I notice Lindbergh recently urged that the
only alternative to a negotiated peace was “either a Hitler victory
or a prostrate Europe or a prostrate Europe and possibly a prostrate
America as well.”_
A. Fortunately Axis sources have given us a rather complete blueprint
of what they would consider acceptable terms of a negotiated peace.
Reduced to a few words, their terms are: Surrender by Britain and
America of control of the seas by reduction of the British and American
navies to parity with the Axis and demilitarization of British and
American naval bases outside home waters; German dominion over all
Europe, most of Africa, and parts of Asia; Japanese control of the rest
of Asia; and the United States to open the doors of Latin America to
Axis enterprise.
Q. _Do you mean that those are serious terms suggested for a so-called
negotiated peace? What is the source of these terms?_
A. It is the version put out by the Japanese Foreign Office through its
organ the _Japan Times Advertiser_, April 29, 1941, as a trial balloon.
It remains the most comprehensive statement of Axis terms yet issued.
Since the British government ignored it, and the British and American
press derided it, Germany dropped the idea for the moment, but you
may be sure it has not been dropped for good. Seven weeks after its
publication Hitler sent his armies into Russia. When he has attained
his goal there, it seems highly probable he will again offer peace and
when he does, the general outline of his terms will probably follow
this statement. One has only to remember that since the issuance of
this provisional peace text Russia has been stricken from the list of
“the nations called upon to settle world peace” and has been added as a
victim.
Q. _But didn’t the meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt exclude the
possibility of a negotiated peace, since they declared in their
eight-point program that “final destruction of the Nazi tyranny” was
the precondition to peace?_
A. They did, but Hitler, though he may have little hope of actually
achieving a negotiated peace, may offer it in order to appeal over the
heads of Churchill and Roosevelt to those elements of the British and
American populations he considers vulnerable to his propaganda. There
are few such elements left in England, but many here. Hitler knows
by now that he has only to furnish the ammunition and Lindbergh and
Wheeler will do the firing for him.
Q. _Have you the text of these Hitler terms?_
A. Yes, and it would be most instructive to compare it with the
eight-point Atlantic Charter.
JOINT DECLARATION
The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister,
Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty’s Government in the United
Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain
common principles in the national policies of their respective
countries on which they base their hopes for a better future of the
world.
First: Their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;
Second: They desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord
with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned;
Third: They desire to respect the right of all peoples to choose the
form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see
sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been
forcibly deprived of them;
Fourth: 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;
Fifth: They desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between
all nations in the economic field, with the object of securing
for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social
security;
Sixth: After the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to
see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of
dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford
assurance that all the men in the lands may live out their lives in
freedom from fear and want;
Seventh: Such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas
and oceans without hindrance;
Eighth: They believe that all of the nations of the world, for
realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment
of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if
land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which
threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they
believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of
general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential.
They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures
which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of
armaments.
_Franklin D. Roosevelt._
_Winston S. Churchill._
To this the President added in his message to Congress: “It is also
unnecessary for me to point out that the declaration of principles
includes of necessity the world need for freedom of religion and
freedom of information. No society of the world organized under the
announced principles could survive without these freedoms which are
a part of the whole freedom for which we strive.” And Mr. Churchill
made this significant comment in his broadcast: “There are, however,
two distinct and marked differences in this joint declaration from
the attitude adopted by the Allies during the latter part of the last
war, and no one should overlook them. The United States and Great
Britain do not now assume that there will never be any more war again.
On the contrary, we intend to take ample precautions to prevent its
renewal in any period we can foresee by effectively disarming the
guilty nations while remaining suitably protected ourselves. The second
difference is this: That instead of trying to ruin German trade by
all kinds of additional trade barriers and hindrances as was the mood
of 1917, we have definitely adopted the view that it is not in the
interests of the world and of our two countries that any large nation
should be unprosperous, or shut off from means of making a decent
living for itself and its people by industry and enterprise. These
are far-reaching changes of principle upon which all countries should
ponder.”
* * * * *
The Axis statement begins with the declaration that the day of small or
weak nations is over, and no nation which cannot stand on its own feet
may be permitted to exist.
“1. The strongest powers must have the greatest opportunities of
developing the world and disposing of such questions as spheres of
influence, resources, and type of government. This is the law of nature
and attempts to maintain the status quo of dominant powers who cannot
continue to function through their strength but only through alliances
must break down.”
The reference here of course is to such colonial powers as France,
Holland, Belgium, etc.
“2. The nations called upon to settle world peace would be Germany,
with Italy as a junior partner, Japan, the British Empire, and the
United States. Such a peace should include: a. Parity of naval strength
of Britain and the United States on one hand, and the Axis powers on
the other hand, with a naval holiday after this is established.”
This is the key to the intention of the whole peace. Since the British
and American navies are about double the strength of the Axis powers,
so long as the British hold out we together could continue effectively
to control the seas. If we were to consent to a naval agreement
reducing our and the British strength to the strength of the Axis, and
at the same time demilitarize our naval bases as demanded in other
paragraphs, effective sea power would pass to the Axis.
“b. Demilitarization of such strongholds as Gibraltar, the Eastern
Mediterranean, Malta, Aden, Red Sea, Singapore, and Hong Kong, as well
as all United States bases in the Pacific and any projects in the
Aleutian Islands reaching out toward Japan.”
This paragraph would complete the conquest of sea power by the Axis
and would render defenseless all the British Empire’s Far Eastern
possessions and our Philippines and Alaska.
“c. Complete withdrawal of the British Navy from the Mediterranean and
joint Anglo-Axis administration of the Suez Canal.”
Withdrawal of the British Navy would give mastery of the Mediterranean
to the Axis, which would automatically control the Suez Canal. To offer
“joint Anglo-Axis administration of the Suez Canal” is a sop which only
underlines the grotesque nature of a Hitler-negotiated peace.
“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?_
A. First, a Pax Anglo-Americana, based on our naval control of the
world. This may take one of several forms, including Union Now,
Clarence Streit’s thoughtful plan for amalgamating the democracies. Its
immediate purpose would be to unite the coercive power of the nations
of good will to restrain those of ill will until time and repentance
had made it possible to bring them into our second organization.
This World Federation of some kind might be a resuscitated League of
Nations, or it might have another name or form. All we know positively
is that unless we organize for peace, we shall have war again; and we
know now that the nations of good will on earth are not strong enough
without the United States to impose peace on the world. We know that if
we stay out of the peace we shall surely be drawn into the succeeding
war. Perhaps by the end of this present struggle we shall have learned
our lesson and will never again attempt to withdraw into an illusory
isolation which must always bring us into the very war it tried to
avoid. Perhaps for the first time in our history we will with open
eyes and clear plan enter the strength of the United States into the
organization of peace with the same zeal we use to make war. If we do,
who knows but that the peace established after this war could endure
for longer than we even dare to guess at this melancholy moment.
Q. _Is it a fact that because of the war England is becoming Socialist
and will come out of the war with a government and social system just
as repugnant to us as the Nazis’?_
A. It is true that the government and social system of England have
become Socialist but in the Christian and democratic sense of the
word. British society has become a Christian collective. If they could
maintain after the war as ideal a spirit of cooperation and love of
their neighbors as they have today under fire, we might call it the
first step toward the millennium. Far from being a government and
social system we disapproved, they would be worthy of our emulation. To
compare such a system of voluntary, democratic, unselfish devotion to
the common good as exists today in wartime England with the Nazi regime
is to compare good with evil. Beaten by the blows of war the British
people have attained in a period of months a degree of social progress
they would not have reached in decades otherwise.
Britain was forced to adopt a system of wartime socialism, if you want
to call it that, because that form of socialism under the inspiration
of life-and-death battle can produce so much more than uncontrolled
capitalism. Production is the materialist index of the value of any
economic system. Under British wartime socialism, capitalists and
workers genuinely pool their interests and restrict their demands to
the minimum, while men and women of all classes risk and give their
lives in battle for the community. Until we adopt such a system and
are inspired by the same dire necessity which animates the British,
our system of production, man for man, and unit for unit, will not
equal British production. As for the Nazis, their system of Socialism,
based on Terror and megalomania, aims to enslave the world; the
British system of Socialism, based on free choice and democracy, aims
to liberate the world. No, there is no possibility that any form of
government should emerge in England after the war which would be “as
repugnant to us as the Nazis’,” unless Britain is conquered and becomes
a satrapy of Hitler.
Q. _Is this British wartime Socialism not really equivalent to
Communism? How does it differ from capitalism?_
A. It is the sort of communism anyone would approve if it could work
in peacetime, though it seems that it really works only in war. In
wartime the motive that makes men work is defense of their lives, their
families, their nation, against an enemy from without. This leads to a
degree of self-sacrifice that is never even approximated in peacetime.
Witness the invariable collapse of national morale after every war.
One of the chief reasons, if not the chief reason, why communism
in peacetime does not work, either in Russia or anywhere else, is
because except under the duress of war, individuals primarily work for
themselves. The Russian Bolshevik party tried for twenty-three years
to make the Russians work for the community, but they never succeeded
until now, when they have gone to war. No matter how the Battle of
Russia turns out, when the war is over, if the Soviet Union is still
Communist, it will revert to its accustomed slackness and poverty.
If the British were to try to continue their wartime socialism into
peacetime, they would find it impossible. Strikes would break out;
employers would begin to reach out for profits and soon the old-time,
though modified capitalism would return, with many of its faults, but
still far more productive than peacetime communism anywhere in the
world. Capitalism in peace; collectivism in war appears to be the law
for democracies in our time.
5. FRANCE
Q. _Why did France fall?_
A. Because the French people were hypnotized by their low birth rate;
because their Maginot line had imprisoned their army; because, ignorant
of the character and intentions of their enemy, they did not know
why they had to fight the Germans and so preferred to fight among
themselves; because they had no Churchill; because they were betrayed
by a powerful group of their leaders including senior officers of the
Army; and because the French were stultified by their debased and venal
press.
Q. _But I thought they lost chiefly because they lacked the proper
weapons: airplanes and tanks._
A. They did not possess anything like the number of tanks and airplanes
used by the Germans; but I would rank this deficiency at the bottom
of any list of causes of the French defeat. If they had ignored their
birth rate, been willing to spend lives, had retained the old offensive
spirit traditional in the French Army, had known that they had to win
or perish, had possessed a Churchill to inspire and lead them, and had
had no traitors in their ranks, their comparative lack of weapons would
not have mattered; they would still be fighting the Germans in France.
The inferiority of their equipment consisted, as you indicate, in the
lack of a sufficient number of planes and tanks, but if they had had
the spirit to win they could have held the Germans until the deficiency
could be made up.
Tanks cannot cross properly defended rivers, and there were several
sets of rivers which the French could have held if they chose: the
Meuse, the Somme and the Oise, the Aisne, the Marne, the Seine, and
finally the Loire, but they held not at all at any of these natural
barriers. At most of these rivers I was present during the retreat, and
it astonished all of us, including United States officers, to visit a
French position along a river one day and observe how strong it was,
and how difficult it would be to take, and then the next day learn the
Germans had taken it within a few hours of our departure.
Q. _But surely the reason was the German dive bombers who could fly
across the rivers and drive the defenders away. I have heard that they
were the principal weapon used to break the French who didn’t have
enough pursuit planes to down them. It seems to me that if the dive
bomber is anything like as lethal as it is said to be, you must put
more of the blame for the French collapse on it than on the failure of
French morale._
A. No, the dive bombers are not effective against brave determined
troops. They are not as effective as artillery. I have an authority
for that, General Charles Huntziger, now Minister of War of the
Vichy government. I met him when he was Commander of the Second Army
occupying the left wing of the Maginot line. It was about May 31, 1940
in the second week after the German break-through.
General Huntziger received me in his headquarters, an old fortress
of Verdun. He explained that he had now taught his men how to meet
the terrible German tank-plus-dive-bomber attack. He said that he had
explained to his men that the dive bomber was not nearly so deadly as
artillery, and that its effect was chiefly psychological, and that if
the soldiers could master their first fright they could hold their
ground and win. The great thing was to hold long enough to learn that
your chance of being killed by dive bombers was much less than your
chance of being killed by artillery fire, since artillery shells may
fall uninterruptedly for an indefinite time, while a dive bomber has
only one or at the most a few bombs to discharge, and once it has
dropped them, has to return to its base for more, and the number of
dive bombers is limited.
He emphasized that French soldiers had never been afraid to stand
artillery fire, so why should they run from the less dangerous dive
bombers? He said he instructed all soldiers not serving antiaircraft
guns to go under cover for the few seconds while the dive bombers
dived, but to emerge immediately upon hearing the detonation of the
bombs, and meet the advancing tanks. If they were small thinly armored
tanks, and the French possessed adequate antitank guns, they should
attempt to destroy the tanks. If the tanks were too large and heavily
armored, the French should permit the tanks to go through and emerge in
time to stop the German infantry following the tanks.
General Huntziger admitted that it had been extremely difficult at
first to persuade his troops of the comparative harmlessness of the
dive bombers and mentioned the fact that in the first thirteen days
of the German attack his troops had been overwhelmed and he had lost
fifty per cent of his effectives, more than ninety per cent of whom
were captured, but he believed that now the troops were experienced
and could not be frightened as they were at first. As we were soon to
observe, the French troops never did get used to the dive bomber which
is truly the most terrifying weapon ever invented. General Huntziger
compared it to a locomotive with its whistle wide open falling upon you
from the sky.
“You are certain it is coming just for you,” the General said, “and you
believe it is not merely going to drop bombs upon you, but you are sure
the plane itself is going to crash upon you and leave you smashed like
a beetle.”
The noise of the dive bomber is its most terrifying quality. An
ordinary airplane diving makes a loud rushing noise familiar to
everyone nowadays, but many of the German dive bombers were equipped
with sirens attached to loud-speakers, so that when they dived each
plane screamed with the noise of a score of ordinary diving planes.
In addition to that they were often equipped with screaming bombs.
General Touchon, commander of the Sixth Army, showed me one at his
headquarters. It had four whistles, each about the size of a cannon
cracker, in the vanes of its tail. They made each falling bomb sound
as loud as four American locomotives with the whistles open. “But,”
General Huntziger said, “all you have to do is to realize that noise
doesn’t hurt anyone, and I have explained that to my soldiers and from
now on they will stand firm.”
Huntziger gave me a copy of his orders of the day. I cannot read it
even now without feeling the terrible weight of despair that settled
upon all of us as we realized that the end of France was near. It is
dated May 18, 1940 and begins: “The war has commenced,”--it was to
be all over in exactly thirty days--“and, in order to win, the enemy
always attacks your morale. In this first shock, his tactic, his ruses
of warfare and his weapons have but one object, _to demoralize you_.
The enemy is reckoning only upon fighting you with fright. It is
necessary therefore that you know this.
“Know also that the massive bombardments of the enemy aviation, no
matter how impressive they are, make few victims, as you may have
already noted. You know the total lost; they are a minimum. Take refuge
when the enemy aircraft passes and immediately afterward take up again
your combat post. Never forget our aviation protects you. _Even when
you cannot see it._ Know that our airplanes have knocked down more than
a thousand enemy machines in less than eight days and that among the
enemy our bombers are giving blow for blow.
“Know that against infantry the tank is not able to accomplish big
things if you hide yourself and the tanks cannot see you. Let them pass
without showing yourself, then fire on the guides who accompany them.
Without them the tank is almost blind; sooner or later it will have
to abandon the field to refuel if our antitank guns have not already
knocked it out.
“These guns are very efficient; they have given many proofs of it in
the last few days.
“Do not allow yourself to be influenced by tales of parachutists but
if you actually find some, remember that an armed man can always beat
them. Guard yourself against imaginary dangers. As though you were in
active combat, you have to defend yourself against false rumors which
may be spread by a traitor or an imbecile seized with panic.
“If you listen to such tales they may be able to provoke serious
defection. Listen to no one but your superior officers and those you
know.
“A man can overcome his fear. It is his duty to surmount it and to
combat the fears of others. If a man spreads fear he not only commits
an act of cowardice. He commits treason.
“Know finally that the enemy is not so strong as some people think.
Oppose to him your will. It is your will which will sweep the enemy
away. Never forget what you are defending. If you let the enemy pass
you will lose more than your life. You will be pitilessly separated
from your families to suffer far from them a slavery worse than death.”
The intelligence and courage of Huntziger as displayed in these orders
were of no avail, because he could not, as Churchill can, transmit his
spirit to others. His soldiers listened to his talk and read his orders
of the day but still they yielded to their fear. It must be seldom in
military history that a commanding general has to devote his principal
orders to adjuring his troops not to be afraid. The French Army was
already panic-stricken.
Q. _You say there was treachery among senior officers of the French
Army and among the government. Why do you say that and what proof of it
have you?_
A. There were both treachery and treason. High French officers and
officials conspired to overthrow the Republic. Pétain himself was their
leader. They were so fanatical in their desire to destroy the Republic
that they fell into the German trap and acquiesced in what the Germans
told them would be a fake defeat, after which they would set up the
Fascist government which they did set up at Vichy. After that Hitler
would withdraw his troops and restore France to all her old power
and glory, an equal partner and friend of Nazi Germany. They were of
course deceived and now most of them must realize they were deceived,
and that Hitler has no intention of ever allowing France to be a great
power again. But this awakening is too late and the guilty men, many
of them now in Pétain’s government, have a life-and-death interest in
preserving their secret, since in the present temper of the French
people if the truth were known many another assassination would follow
the attempts on Laval and Deat.
This is a rough outline of what I believe to have happened in France.
I will be glad to give you all the evidence I have, admitting that
it probably is not sufficient to win a verdict of guilty in a court
of law, but maintaining that it is convincing to one who witnessed
the debacle and was bewildered by the lack of adequate explanation.
You see, after we had added up all the other reasons for the fall
of France, there was still something lacking; something to explain
the fact that the French Army of nearly five million men, with its
centuries of glorious tradition, and its reputation among experts as
the best in the world, never once held firm after the Germans broke
through the Low Countries, never once stopped the enemy for as much as
a day, but steadily, day by day retreated, crumbled, broke up, and at
the end of five weeks ceased to exist.
Review our list of causes now and see if all of them put together
explain this phenomenon. Complacency and trust in the Maginot line
and the softening effect of eight months of inactivity, comparative
lack of leadership, man power and planes and tanks; lack of faith,
anger, and the spirit to fight to kill; conflict between communists
and conservatives. No, all these reasons together do not explain the
conduct of the French Army between May 11 and June 17, 1940.
Q. _But the thesis you present is too astounding. That French Army
officers should have conspired with the enemy is almost beyond belief.
Do you mean the French General Staff?_
A. Yes, the French General Staff. Not all of it; only a few members
were necessary. If you find it difficult to believe, remember that
the French officers and officials concerned did not believe they were
betraying France; they believed that Hitler would keep his word and
restore France as soon as the Republic was overthrown. To make this
aspect of the matter clear: suppose you were a young Frenchman today,
would you think of it as treason if you worked to overthrow the Vichy
government? Would you think of yourself as a traitor if you conspired
with the British to throw out Pétain and reorganize a democratic
government? No.
Well, in so far as one can credit such Fascists with sincerity, we
have to admit that these men also thought they were serving the best
interests of France when they conspired to overthrow the Republic.
Remember that French officers as a class have generally been
anti-Republican. Napoleon’s officers soon forgot Republican principles
in their devotion to the Emperor. The hierarchy of the Army did not
favor the equalitarianism of the French Republic. Aristocratic officers
generally set the tone for the majority of the higher ranks. Time and
again I was astonished to note that upper-class Frenchmen seemed to
remember as though it had been yesterday the bloody events of the
French Revolution, and were more afraid of their own working class than
of any foreign enemy.
I visited once the famous deep cellar vaults of the Bank of France
where they kept the gold, and while walking through the doorway,
piercing its twenty-foot thick steel and concrete walls, I asked why
they needed such formidable and expensive protection. Was it against
the Germans? It could not be, because if ever the Germans occupied
Paris, as they do today, no underground fortification such as these
vaults could prevent them from getting the gold, especially since the
Germans would be holding as hostages the men with the keys. No, it was
not against a foreign enemy; the vaults were built against the Paris
mob, against revolutionaries, against another 1789.
This spirit was shared by many French senior officers, and it is
ironic that their conspiracy to bring about a feigned defeat in order
to overthrow the Republic was greatly helped by the defection of the
Parisian Communist troops in Corap’s Ninth Army at the Meuse. The
very workingmen who had most to lose by the fall of the Republic and
the establishment of a Fascist France, helped bring about their own
downfall under the mistaken guidance of Moscow. The treachery to France
came from the two opposite poles of French society.
Q. _How did this treason manifest itself in the operations of the army?_
A. I will give you one example, from personal experience and the
testimony of French friends. You remember the Germans, when they broke
through the Low Countries and across the Meuse, dashed with their
Panzer divisions for the coast, pell-mell, at top speed, not bothering
or wasting time at first to widen their column of penetration, which
was still only a few miles wide for much of its length when the first
German detachments reached the sea at Abbeville. North of this thin
German column was the strong French Army under General Prioux, while
south of it were the main French forces. It was the constant fervid
hope of the French that their armies would cut across the German
column, roll it up in two directions, and win not merely the battle of
France but perhaps the war.
Military experts, foremost our own, thought it possible; some held it
probable. This hope reached its climax after Weygand made an inspection
flight to the Low Countries and returned to Paris. That day at the
Ministry of Information as I was waiting in the office for Colonel
Schieffer, in charge of American correspondents, the gaunt, one-eyed,
black-monocled, fiercely patriotic Colonel came in with a bang, dropped
his customary stillness and exclaimed: “Weygand says he won’t leave a
German alive, not one. He’s going to cut the column and bottle them up
and he says there won’t be left one living.” Like wildfire the word of
Weygand spread through the building, through Paris, through France. It
was the only bright moment in the whole Battle of France.
But it did not happen. Why didn’t it? A captain from General Prioux’s
staff may have the answer. This is the story he told. “After the
Germans reached Abbeville and cut us off from the South, General Prioux
called us all together one day and said, ‘I have orders from General
Headquarters that you must blow up your tanks and guns and retreat as
speedily as possible to the seashore. I must tell you that personally
I do not approve these orders. I am convinced we are strong enough to
make an offensive southward and cut the Germans and reunite with our
troops in France. However, orders are orders and one does not discuss
orders. You will do as I have told you and I shall stay here where I
am.’
“We did as we were told and Prioux became a prisoner of war. That was
our last chance. The failure to cut the German column was the end of
the Battle of France. We could have done it; we were ordered not to.”
Counterattack, always we waited for the famous French counterattack,
the fulfillment of the French Army tradition of aggression, _à la
baionette!_ but it never came. Orders stopped it.
Q. _Who gave the orders? Pétain was not an active officer then._
A. No, but General George was. I want to give you my evidence in the
form of a firsthand quotation from a French friend, but before I do so
it is important to point out that between General Gamelin, commander in
chief of all the Allied land forces, and General George, commander of
the French armies fighting against Germany, there existed a jealousy so
strong that it amounted to hatred, and their headquarters staffs became
so permeated with it that they actually withheld information from each
other.
Here then, were the principal elements and forces involved in the
great conspiracy: First, Pétain, towering above all other figures and
forces; then the Deuxième Bureau, the famous Second Bureau in charge of
Intelligence of the French Army; General George and General Dusseigneur
and Colonel Eugene Deloncle; the Cagoulards, that secret society of
so-called Hooded Men, which most people considered merely absurd but
whose importance turned out to be greater than that of any French
secret society since the Revolution; the group operating the Fascist
weekly, _Je Suis Partout_; and on the German side Otto Abetz, now
Hitler’s ambassador to France, and the unlimited money and propaganda
of Himmler’s Gestapo, Goebbels’ Ministry, Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office,
and the Ausland’s Buro.
* * * * *
_Now I shall let my French friend talk. This is his report: from here
to page 262 he is speaking in the first person._
On June 17, 1940, I found myself standing outside a wayside tavern in
France. I was one of the millions retreating southward from occupied
Paris ahead of the German Army. I had stopped by the roadside because,
through the open window of the inn, I heard a radio broadcasting the
pathetic voice of an old man. Marshal Pétain was telling the French
nation that he had decided to ask Hitler to grant France an armistice.
Standing beside me was a young artillery lieutenant. As the last words
of the old Marshal died away, he turned toward me, pale as ivory, and
exclaimed: “Now I begin to understand! They forced us to retreat so
that we would have to accept this armistice, so that the Germans could
come in to do their dirty work for them!”
I didn’t dare understand. “How do you mean?” I asked him.
“Don’t be so naive!” he exploded. “Can’t you see what’s happened?
Don’t you remember that handful of enthusiastic young fools who were
always shouting ‘Pétain in power!’ Well, now he is in power. He can
govern with the aid of German troops. He has opened the way for them to
occupy the country. The Germans will make the arrests and carry out the
executions, and when their opponents have all been put out of the way,
Pétain and his friends will be in possession of the kind of Nazified
country they like. Mark my words--this is not the end, but only the
beginning. This is not war; it’s a domestic political maneuver!”
At that moment it seemed that only a man completely out of his mind
could have believed what the young officer had just said. A higher
officer who had been listening broke in to correct him. Pétain, he
said, was very old and possibly not very intelligent. But he certainly
could not be a traitor.
“His first consideration,” this officer went on, “will be to obtain
reasonable terms from the enemy. I doubt very much whether he will give
any time at all to internal political questions. All Frenchmen, all the
legislators, all the people, will be behind him in his struggle against
the Germans. What greater power could he gain by bringing about an
internal political transformation?”
I said nothing but I was deeply anxious. _Why had Pétain announced
publicly that he had asked for an armistice before he was sure
that honorable conditions would be granted?_ The mere fact of an
announcement’s having been made would complete the shattering of army
morale and all hope of further resistance, and make it impossible, in
case satisfactory terms could not be achieved, to reshape a fighting
army and resume the struggle. Pétain’s radio speech seemed at the very
least unwise--_unless its object were to eliminate the slightest chance
that the armistice might not go through_. And in that case, the young
officer was probably right.
Two dominant theories to explain the fall of France emerge: (1)
France’s rapid debacle was due to complete unpreparedness, both
physical and spiritual; (2) France was sold out, and what happened
is to be explained primarily by the operations of treason. Both
explanations are a part of the truth; neither of them is the whole
truth.
There was a lack of matériel of all sorts--infantry weapons and
artillery, ammunition, tanks, planes, etc. It was true also that
production in the munitions factories was increasing slowly, and that
the pace would have been insufficient if the intense warfare of the
last five weeks had had to be continued over a long period. But the
fact was that the period of intense warfare was very short; and it is
hardly logical to say that France was beaten because she would have
lacked ammunition if the war had lasted longer.
Some observers have imagined that France lacked munitions even for so
short a war, for it has been established that there were shortages at
many vital points. I talked with literally hundreds of soldiers and
officers during the retreat of June. Infantrymen complained that they
were given only three or four bullets per rifle; artillerymen said that
whole batteries were left without shells; tanks ran out of gasoline at
the very beginning of action and had no chance to refuel, and worst
of all (everyone stressed this as having been the most discouraging
factor), German planes had complete and undisputed freedom in the air.
Again and again soldiers told me that during engagements, with hundreds
of German planes above, on not one occasion did French aviation
come to the aid of the infantry. It was not surprising, under such
conditions, that morale gave way, and that the army was psychologically
prepared for the final collapse.
But was this lack of matériel at points essential to the defense the
result of a general shortage or simply of failure to get existing
munitions to the necessary centers? It seems indisputable that it was
the distributing system which was at fault. And was this breakdown
of the supply lines simply due to lack of organization, or to a much
more serious cause--treason? Whatever the case, it is a fact that the
retreating soldiers and officers, drawing their conclusions from such
facts as they had been able to witness, were unanimous in exclaiming:
“We have been sold out!”
Now listen to the story of a reserve officer, a captain of a
machine-gun detachment, one of the many with whom I talked.
“Don’t tell me,” he said, “that our General Headquarters lacked
experience in supply problems, or that they forgot to send us
cartridges for our machine guns. In 1914-1918 they had no trouble of
this kind. There were situations quite as complicated as this one
again and again during that war, but the ammunition always arrived.
This short action hasn’t exhausted our reserve of matériel. The depots
are still full. Yet we at the front lines had to destroy our machine
guns to save them from the enemy when we ran out of ammunition for
them and had to fall back. The same thing happened all along the
front, for machine guns, artillery of all calibers, and antitank guns.
You can call it disorganization, if you want. I call it intentional
disorganization--sabotage, directed, probably, from the same central
point. But I don’t dare yet to try to form any conclusions, to
understand why such sabotage took place. Perhaps one day we shall all
understand.”
On the roads choked with retreating columns and fleeing refugees,
where military trucks and civilian cars were inextricably mingled,
soldiers talked of their misgivings during the waits, often hours long,
for jammed highways to be cleared so that traffic could resume its
interminable southward crawl. Scores of times, caught in such blocks,
I heard soldiers or officers say: “Why are we constantly ordered to
retreat? We haven’t been in any real engagement since the Somme. We’re
not afraid to fight, but the retreat orders keep us moving to the rear
as fast as we can get over these encumbered roads. What is the cause of
this continual flight? Aren’t they ever going to establish a line of
resistance and order us to hold it?”
They never did. One June 16, two days after Paris had been occupied
by the Germans, I found myself on the right bank of the Loire, at the
Nevers bridge. My car, heavily loaded with the members of my family
and all our luggage, had developed motor trouble. Our most urgent need
was to get across that river; for we supposed of course, that the
retreating troops would stop on the other side of the natural line of
defense constituted by the Loire, which it should have been possible to
hold for weeks, and possibly forever. Across that bridge, we thought,
lay safety.
We tried to persuade passing cars to tow us across. All of them,
civilian and military vehicles alike, passed us by. Their occupants
intent on the pursuing Germans, had no thought for anything except to
get across that bridge themselves. So we all got out except a young
girl who took the steering wheel, and pushed the car over what seemed
to be the longest bridge in the world.
We felt better when we got to the other side, with the wide river
between us and the enemy. I found a colonel supervising the retreat
of his troops, and asked him if he could direct me to the officer in
charge of the sector, thinking that he could probably let me have a
mechanic to repair the car.
“There is no officer in charge here,” the colonel said. “We are all
passing through without stopping, so there is no organization at this
point. I’m sorry I can’t do anything for you. You had better get out
of here as quickly as you can. The Germans will probably be here in an
hour.” From these words I realized with a shock that the defense of
the left bank of the Loire was not even being considered, and that the
army was retreating indefinitely. I looked up and down the long banks
of the river. There were no fortified positions whatsoever. I saw only
one lonely soldier standing by the side of a machine gun. He seemed to
be wondering whether he had been forgotten there.
South of the Loire, the bewilderment of the troops deepened, for all
of them had expected that that line would be held. Time and again I
heard the question asked: “Where are we going?” Those who clung to hope
to the last declared desperately: “The generals must have a plan. Our
orders are to retreat as quickly as we can. There must be reasons for
it.” But most of them simply gave up the attempt to understand what was
going on, and why no effort was being made to resist.
For three months after the armistice I remained in France. I wanted
to find out the story behind the defeat. What I have to tell is not
pure hypothesis. It is the only possible explanation which can be
deduced from a number of unknown or little known facts which I took the
greatest trouble to verify. Here is the story:
There has been ample occasion in recent years to observe Nazi
propaganda tactics, among them the method which consists in selecting
the most appropriate arguments to convince any group the Nazis wish to
win over, even when those arguments are directly contrary to those used
with another group. Such a procedure would seem on the surface likely
to defeat its own aims; but it is the tendency of each group to believe
what it wants to believe, that Hitler is telling the truth, while
deceiving its adversaries. It is the same state of mentality which
confidence men evoke in such tested swindles as the rosary game, in
which the sucker is led to see himself as the accomplice in victimizing
someone else and thus never imagines that he is marked for the role of
victim himself.
It was in this fashion that Germany laid the foundation for France’s
defeat by corrupting different groups of the population in different
ways. Agents of Berlin told the French Communists, for instance, that
Germany was Soviet Russia’s ally, and that if Hitler won the war, he
would not oppose a Communist Revolution in France. The new French
Soviet Republic could then conclude an alliance with Germany, Russia,
and Italy and take part in the totalitarian reconstruction of postwar
Europe. French Communist leaders swallowed this propaganda, and the
result was slowing down of production in munitions plants due to
insidious Communist propaganda against which the Interior Ministry
tried in vain to take effective measures.
There were many evidences that Communists believed they were working
in accord with Germany. After the armistice, Communist factory workers
in the occupied region on several occasions started the singing of the
_Internationale_ in the factories where they were employed with the
idea that this would please their new masters, and were surprised that
it didn’t.
During the war, the Communists had been given reasons for believing
that they were on the side of the Germans. Some of the French Bolshevik
leaders who deserted during the war fled to Germany. Findings of
French radiogoniometric services proved that Communist short-wave
stations broadcasting in French were operating from Germany. After the
German troops reached Paris, several young French writers known for
their Communist sympathies, who had remained behind when most other
Leftists had fled, were immediately given important places, such as
the editing of Paris daily papers, by the Nazi authorities. These
incidents demonstrate that the Germans had succeeded in establishing
relationships with French Communist leaders during the war; but it must
be recorded that the majority of Communist workmen remained definitely
hostile to the Nazis.
This failure to enlist the support among the Communist rank and file
which had been found among the leaders convinced the German secret
service early that there was no real chance of bringing about the
defeat of France by fomenting a Bolshevik revolution. If such a method
had been feasible, Nazi Germany would certainly not have hesitated to
apply it, just as Imperial Germany did not hesitate to send Lenin and
his companions in their famous sealed railroad coach into Russia in
1917.
Under the circumstances, the Communist movement was taken advantage
of by the Germans only to the extent of being employed to create as
much unrest as possible among French workers, who did not even realize
to what influences they were being exposed. The chief effort of
German secret agents was concentrated on conservative circles, which,
according to reports received at the Wilhelmstrasse, were in a much
better position to exert effective influence on the outcome of the war.
There was nothing contradictory about this willingness on the part of
the Nazis to cooperate with either the extreme Left or the extreme
Right, or even with both simultaneously, since their object, whatever
their dupes might think, was not to help them to victory, but to use
them as a tool to weaken the unity and the power of the government.
Nazi propaganda welcomed any loophole through which it might penetrate
into the vitals of a foreign country with the aid of any resistance to
the regime which might already exist there.
For years before the war, the Nazis had established contact with
reactionary Rightist circles in France. One such circle which in
America has been accused of having been influenced by the Germans and
having perhaps contributed to France’s downfall is the Croix de Feu,
at one time generally considered as the future Fascist movement of
France. I must say that I could find neither proof nor indication that
the Croix de Feu had played Germany’s game. On the contrary, the _Petit
Journal_, published by Colonel François de la Rocque, the Croix de Feu
leader, assumed a more courageously anti-German attitude after the
armistice than did most other papers published under the control of
the Vichy government.
Two other less conspicuous, but perhaps more influential Right-wing
groups were, however, definitely approached by the Germans during the
prewar years. One of them was the secret revolutionary organization
popularly known as the Cagoulards (the Hooded ones); the other was the
group which published the weekly, _Je Suis Partout_. These contacts
were established chiefly by Otto Abetz, infamous “special delegate”
of Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, who was expelled from France
shortly before the war. On his initiative, members of both groups
undertook several trips to Berlin between 1937 and 1939 to discuss
means of action.
The German secret service had a particular interest in these two groups
because, while entirely independent of each other, they had one thing
in common--far-reaching ties with the French Army.
The Cagoulard group was headed by French officers of high rank--majors,
colonels, and even generals. General Dusseigneur was among those
arrested when the Cagoulard movement was uncovered shortly before
the war after it had planted bombs in Paris. The dissolution of the
movement made its members more cautious, but its underground activities
continued.
If any further evidence of German support for the Cagoulards had been
needed beyond that already turned up by the French police, it was
provided by the Germans themselves. When they occupied Paris, one
of the first things they did was to demand that the French national
police turn over the files on the Cagoulard case. From these files, the
Germans learned the names of the police commissioners who had unearthed
the Cagoulard plot, and immediately arrested those who were in occupied
territory.
This was in striking contrast to the treatment of the arrested
Cagoulard leaders, all of whom had been released by the French
government by the beginning of the war. Shortly after the start of
hostilities I met in the train the brother of one of the Cagoulards
who had been arrested. In the ensuing conversation, I remarked that I
was astonished that responsible adults should have indulged at such a
time in what then appeared to have been a somewhat childish imitation
of a motion picture conspiracy. Nettled by my attitude, my interlocutor
answered:
“You don’t understand how serious this movement was. It was organized
by the Deuxième Bureau (the department of the army concerned with
espionage and counterespionage). It was at the instigation of the
military secret service that my brother and his friends organized the
Cagoulards. That can’t be told now, of course, but the day will come
when all the truth will be known, and my brother will be considered a
hero for the time he has spent in prison.”
“The Deuxième Bureau!” I exclaimed incredulously. “Why in the world
should the Deuxième Bureau want to foster a revolutionary movement when
it’s already so near the power itself?”
“Ever since the 1936 elections,” he answered, “important members of the
French secret service have been very much worried about the influence
the Communist movement has gained in this country, and so they decided
to take matters into their own hands. The Cagoulard movement was formed
to do that. The Popular Front ministers got my brother and his friends
put in jail, but you’ll see that they haven’t said their last word yet.”
_Je Suis Partout_, the weekly which was another outpost of German
propaganda in France, belonged originally to the publishing house of
Fayard, which put out books and another and more prosperous political
weekly, _Candide_. _Je Suis Partout_ was a money loser and publisher
Arthème Fayard decided several years ago to discontinue it. When
the news got out, Pierre Gaxotte, editor of the paper, proposed to
Fayard that he turn the paper’s name over to him instead of giving him
severance pay, since he thought he might be able to keep the magazine
going himself. Fayard agreed, and _Je Suis Partout_ continued to appear
without interruption, and so far as the public knew, without any change
in its control. Circulation did not increase. Advertising continued
low. The paper showed no signs of prosperity--but it did not show any
signs of having financial difficulties any more either.
Pierre Gaxotte, as well as some other members of his editorial staff,
had begun his political career in the Royalist _Action Française_
movement, but had apparently decided to strike out for himself and
cut his own political tracks. Under Gaxotte’s direction, _Je Suis
Partout_ assumed a definitely pro-German attitude, arguing that France
and Germany should come to an understanding between themselves as the
two great continental powers, leaving England out in the cold. Paul
Ferdonnet, who won fame later as the “traitor of Stuttgart” delivering
propaganda broadcasts in French from the Stuttgart radio station during
the war (he is now supervisor of the French radio in Paris), was
also on the editorial staff until he went to Berlin to establish his
permanent residence and his own press syndicate there. From that time
on, he was the secret liaison agent between the German authorities and
Gaxotte’s paper.
The German sympathies of _Je Suis Partout_ were apparent enough, but
no one bothered much about it, for circulation was low and the paper’s
influence was considered to be negligible. This must have been the
viewpoint of the Daladier government also, for except for friendly
arguments with the censors, the paper was able to continue publishing
unhampered even after the war broke out.
When Daladier resigned and Paul Reynaud came in, he appointed Georges
Mandel Minister of the Interior, and thus head of the French police
organization. Although Mandel, zealous, patriotic, and uncompromising,
like his master Clemenceau whose secretary he had been during the
last war, undertook to hunt down defeatists of all descriptions, _Je
Suis Partout_ continued to appear as usual. Mandel also apparently
considered it too insignificant to be dangerous.
But one day a well-known French journalist brought to Mandel the
proof that the principal members of the editorial staff of _Je Suis
Partout_ were simultaneously agents of the Deuxième Bureau. Mandel was
astounded. He who knew all the undercurrents of French political life,
who for years had kept secret files about all public figures, had not
dreamed that any connection could have existed between this outspokenly
pro-German magazine and one of the most influential departments of
the French Army. He had put the editors of _Je Suis Partout_ down as
innocuous fools. He now realized that though the circulation of the
paper was small, the private influence of its editors might have been
both great and disastrous.
He did not hesitate an instant. He ordered immediately the arrest of
five members of the staff. Among them was an obscure journalist, not
generally known as a member of the staff, named Pierre Mouton, who some
years before had founded a small press syndicate called _Prima Presse_
in partnership with Ferdonnet. Mandel quickly obtained proof that the
two men were still cooperating. Mouton, while maintaining permanent
contact with _Je Suis Partout_, was also flooding the French daily
press with cleverly prepared pro-German articles which were supplied to
the newspapers free of charge.
With the known leaders of the _Je Suis Partout_ group in jail, Mandel
apparently thought that there was no immediate urgency for delving
further into this particular case when so many other vital matters
pressed for attention. The same attitude had been taken a few years
before in regard to the Cagoulards, who seemed to have been set down
as definitely muzzled because their figureheads had been imprisoned.
Neither the stern and Spartan Mandel, who had arrested the _Je Suis
Partout_ group, nor the vivacious and epicurean Albert Sarraut, his
predecessor, who had handled the Cagoulard case, imagined that either
of these two groups had achieved a real and lasting penetration into
the high command--a penetration which seems to have contributed largely
to the debacle of May and June.
Possibly the two cases had never been laid side by side so that the
telltale fact that both times a trail led to the Deuxième Bureau
had not been observed. Perhaps also the two Interior Ministers had
hesitated each time before venturing to have civilian authorities
investigate the most powerful of the military departments. The Deuxième
Bureau of the French Army was sometimes called “a state within the
state.” It might more exactly have been called “several states within
the state,” for it was a complicated organism with its own currents
and undercurrents, comprising a number of competing groups. Somewhere
within this complicated office existed the only link between the
pro-German _Je Suis Partout_ and the German-inspired Cagoulards; but
on the surface, at least at the beginning, no relation seemed to exist
between these two separate activities.
The Cagoulard movement, although it had started in the Deuxième Bureau,
soon succeeded through the interlinking relationships of high officers,
some of whom supported its activities, in putting out tentacles into
the first and third bureaus of the army as well--those concerned
respectively with direction of operations and supplies--in other words
the two departments which in June were responsible respectively for
the orders to retreat and for the failure of the front-line troops to
receive ammunition and aid from the aviation.
It may be noted also that several of these high officers who were
sympathetic to the Cagoulard movement were in particularly close
contact with Marshal Pétain who had his own devoted followers in the
army, just as all other first-rank military leaders, like Gamelin and
Weygand, had also, whether they were on the active list or retired.
All this may seem incredible. It is difficult to believe that French
officers of high rank should have acted in the interests of Germany
during the war, thus contributing to bring about their country’s
downfall. Even though the Cagoulards, an emanation of the Deuxième
Bureau, may have maintained contact with the Germans several years
before the war; even if unsuccessful newspapermen like Gaxotte may have
made up for deficits by accepting subsidies from the Nazis, it still
seems fantastic that the military leaders of France, whose patriotism
no one has ever doubted, should have acted as traitors in time of war.
It seems to be a moral impossibility.
The explanation is simple. Neither the Cagoulards, nor the editors
of _Je Suis Partout_, nor the French officers who were in relations
with them, ever believed at any moment that they were traitors. If
history sets them down as having betrayed France, the verdict will be
incomprehensible to them. They believed themselves to be patriots. It
is our privilege, if we wish, to see them rather as pitiful victims of
German Propaganda.
What happened was this: Long before the war, the Nazi secret service
realized that both the Cagoulards and the staff of _Je Suis Partout_
were worth cultivating because of their connections with members of
the French General Staff, and with officers of influence close to such
leaders as Pétain, among others.
Friendly relations were established, and the Germans hammered away with
arguments like these:
“You Frenchmen consider that we Germans are your hereditary enemies.
There’s no reason why you should think so. Our two peoples should
be able to live and work side by side without friction. It’s true
we’ve had trouble in the past, but why? Because England, who can only
maintain her influence on the continent if the continental nations are
divided, has constantly stirred us up against each other.
“Besides that, we have not fought against the real France. Our wars
were against the French Republic. For 150 years that regime has usurped
the place of the real France. In 1789 the English provoked the French
Revolution to weaken your nation, and since then your people seem to
have forgotten its great destiny.
“The Revolution of France started in the lodges of Freemasonry, which
were implanted in your country by England. The Freemasons operated
with English and Jewish help; for the last 150 years, you have been
under the control of the same powers. For the last twenty years these
powers have been cooperating with international Communism and thus have
brought another danger into your country.
“Wake up! Denounce the English alliance, expel the Jews from important
positions, suppress Freemasonry, as we have done in Germany. The danger
of Communism will be over, and there will be no obstacle to a happy and
peaceful understanding between France and Germany.”
This bait was eagerly taken. It made no difference that this account
was inaccurate, and might easily have been refuted. It was the sort of
thing that right-wing Frenchmen of anti-Republican and antidemocratic
leanings were ready to hear, and it provided a moral basis for
cooperation between them and the Germans. Supplied with a patriotic
motive for destroying their domestic political opponents, convinced
that in so doing they would not open the way to the hereditary enemy
but on the contrary make him a friend, these Frenchmen no longer had
any scruples about accepting subsidies for the arming of the Cagoulards
and the publication of _Je Suis Partout_ from an ally in the common
cause of continental peace and friendship.
The Germans had found the ideal sophism with which to gain friends
within the French Army. They realized, of course, that they could
not hope to influence a majority of General Staff officers, but they
knew also that an active minority, so convinced it is right that it
is willing to use any methods to achieve its aims, can arrive at its
objectives at decisive moments by obstructing the course of action
decided upon by the majority. And among the officers whom German
propaganda had reached were many so placed that they could easily block
the complicated intermeshing gears of the army machine at the critical
juncture.
Relationships between the Germans and their friends in France were
maintained even after the beginning of the war through various neutral
countries. Ferdonnet continued to communicate with Mouton and the staff
of _Je Suis Partout_. Michelin, the big automobile tire manufacturer
whose name was whispered all over France as that of one of the men
behind the Cagoulards, sent frequent messengers to Switzerland. Pétain
himself was French Ambassador to Spain, and several members of his
entourage maintained contact with members of the German Embassy in
Madrid. There were even rumors that Pétain had secret meetings with the
German Ambassador, though this was denied. The theme the Germans were
singing to their French friends now was a development of that which
they had dinned into them earlier. It had evolved into this:
“We did not want this war. You yourselves did your utmost to avoid it.
But now that it has come it is a fact which we cannot leave out of
account. Both of us wanted to create a better understanding between our
two countries, to be followed by an alliance. The war now prevents us
from reaching our goal by direct means.
“If you concluded a separate peace with us, we could still become your
allies. We know, of course, that you and your friends, who have the
true interests of your country at heart, and can see into the future
more clearly than the others, would eagerly accept this solution. But
you have not the power to do it; and even if you had, the people who
have been worked up by war propaganda to hate us, would never agree to
it. There is only one case now in which the French people would accept
a separate peace; and that, unfortunately, is if France suffers a
military defeat.
“It must seem monstrous to you even to envisage a French defeat. We
understand that. We sympathize with you. But suppose you knew that
it would not be a real defeat. Suppose we could arrange a simulated
defeat, which would bring the French people to accept the idea of an
armistice whether the English are ready to fight or not?
“We can give you a binding promise that if France can be apparently
defeated in this manner, she will not be treated as a defeated nation.
On the contrary, you will immediately become Germany’s ally and we will
cooperate to build up a new order in Europe. You have only to break
definitely with England as proof of your good faith.
“Of course, a brief occupation of certain parts of France by German
troops would be necessary to make the defeat look real and to persuade
the population to accept it. One of the purposes of the occupation
would be to purge France of the elements which you dislike just as much
as we do, and which stand in your way in your task of resuscitating the
real France from her torpor of a century and a half. But when it is
all over, when our troops have been withdrawn, you will be in control
of a new and reborn France which with the new Germany will impose upon
Europe an era of strength and prosperity for both of us.”
Once again the bait was taken. Its effect was felt in extremely
influential circles. I have personally been able to verify conclusively
the fact that Marshal Pétain, having invited two highly placed
Spaniards to dine with him in Hendaye in November 1939, said to his
guests: “Do not judge France by its present appearance. Democracy
is finished everywhere. Next spring will see a movement in France
comparable to your own national uprising.”
Such a phrase in the mouth of a French Ambassador who was at the same
time a French military leader was extremely significant. What other
meaning could a revolt in wartime have except that its intent was to
end the war? What other reason could there have been for waiting until
spring except that this period was the best for a German offensive?
It was not necessary, as I have already noted above, to transform all
or even a majority of the officers of the French General Staff, into
accomplices in order to provoke a French defeat. If in a big business,
a few accountants, an assistant cashier, the head of the sales
department, and one or two keymen in the stock department took part in
a conspiracy to ruin the firm, their simultaneous coordinated sabotage
would inevitably achieve their aim--and with particular ease if the
organization of the company were faulty.
There were some faults with the French Army, certainly. Was morale
unsatisfactory? Was equipment inadequate? Undoubtedly, but the
situation in these respects was not strikingly different from that of
1914-1918. The decisive factor seems to have been faults in the high
command--important information regarding the movements of the enemy
was not relayed in time, orders to army corps suffered considerable
delays, the supply service left equipment and matériel of all sorts in
the depots instead of sending it to strategically important points.
From June 13 on, troops in good fighting shape received everywhere
mysterious orders for retreat which puzzled them most of all, at the
same time that French statesmen were hearing from French generals (most
of them may have spoken with complete good faith), that all troops were
fleeing in disorder. Confusion was so great and news of the retreat so
unexpected that nobody thought to investigate the hidden causes of the
disaster.
Shortly after the armistice, the same announcement was repeated in
French by the Stuttgart radio several evenings in succession. It was
this: “Frenchmen, in a few days we will give you the name of an
outstanding countryman of yours who was our principal agent in France,
and who helped to bring about your defeat.”
Everyone in the French unoccupied zone either heard this broadcast or
heard about it. There was naturally a good deal of guessing as to the
name that would be given by the Germans. For my part, I made a bet that
no name would ever be given by Stuttgart. My reasoning was this: That
there was such a man or men I didn’t doubt for an instant. But I didn’t
doubt also that he had not expected the terrible armistice conditions
imposed upon France. He had led his country into what he had thought
would be a fake defeat on the basis of his confidence in the honesty of
the Germans. By then he had discovered that they were not honest, and
that it was a real defeat that had been inflicted upon the country. He
saw that the Nazis intended to treat the country with all the severity
of genuine conquerors, and that he and his friends had been dupes.
I supposed then, that this man had tried to force the Germans to live
up to their promises and to treat France as an ally. He would have
pointed out that the new Pétain government had turned against England,
as had been agreed. And he would have threatened to reveal everything
if Germany did not hold to her bargain, thus ending the acceptance of
defeat on the part of the French people by letting them know that they
had not in fact been militarily defeated.
Germany’s answer was the Stuttgart broadcast. Her French agent had
tried to threaten her. She simply returned the blackmail, reminding him
forcefully that the Reich no longer cared whether the French people
knew how it had been defeated or not, since the Army was disbanded,
the strategic points occupied, and the people helpless to resume the
fight. He was reminded also what his own position would be if the story
came out. He saw that he had to keep silence to save himself, and the
Germans, perfectly willing that silence should be kept, never honored
their promise to reveal his name.
It was on the basis of this theory that I expected in advance that the
Stuttgart radio would not follow up its announcement. Since it did not,
I feel justified in assuming that the reasoning which enabled me to
arrive at a correct prediction was probably correct itself.
As if to confirm all this, Pétain himself later made a very mild speech
in which he timidly asked the Germans whether they intended to accept
the new France as a full-fledged partner in the reconstruction of
Europe. France’s new rulers have kept all the promises they had given
the Germans. They have cut off relationships with England, dissolved
the Freemasons, attacked the Jews, delivered up anti-Hitler German
refugees, fought the British at Oran, Dakar, and in Syria. They have
slavishly obeyed Hitler’s commands and now they are naively surprised
because Hitler has not kept his promise to free France and make her
independent again. With the true psychology of a dupe they had believed
that Hitler might fool others, but never themselves.
_That ends the statement of my French friend._
* * * * *
Q. _How would you sum up Pétain? Is he a patriot or a traitor, or
misguided, or what?_
A. He is first of all a very old, too-old man. Only a man who had
lost his judgment could surrender his country to Hitler as Hindenburg
did and as Pétain did, both under a profound misconception of
Hitler. Pétain is intensely religious and identifies Communism with
anti-Christ, the only enemy, failing to perceive that the most powerful
foe of Christianity to appear on earth since Christ lived is Hitler.
It is a mistake to call Pétain a Fascist; he is a medievalist. He
believes the principal goal of life is to prepare for the other
world, and the man who can do that best is the man whose activity is
closest to nature, the peasant, and the man whose mind is not confused
by learning, the illiterate peasant. Therefore he wants a France of
uneducated, devout peasants; he does not mind at all the plan of Hitler
to abolish French industry.
He is a defeatist at heart; the affairs of this earth are not worth
fighting for. It is on record that at Verdun he several times wished
to surrender. As a defeatist he believes in superior force and can be
as ruthless when he is in possession of it as he can be submissive
when he has lost it. His suppression of the mutinies in the French
Army was notoriously harsh; the statistics of the killed have yet to
be published. He accepts the French birth rate as a fact of superior
force to which France must bow and his experience of the bloodletting
at Verdun reinforced his conviction that France ought not to try to
maintain a predominant place in Europe.
As an old man his vivid memories are of the past, and Germany, though
marching under the pirate swastika, remained for him in 1940 the
Germany which let France off lightly in 1871. He once told a friend
how impressed he was with the behavior of the German commander at
Verdun who allowed French officers to retain their swords after one of
the surrenders of Douaumont. In this venerable confidence that he was
dealing with gentlemen, he gave up. The most pathetic words uttered in
this war were those of Pétain when he addressed his petition for an
armistice to Hitler with the words, “I speak as soldier to soldier.”
Q. _Why was that pathetic; isn’t Hitler a soldier?_
A. Yes, indeed, but the meaning of the old marshal’s words was,
“I speak to you as gentleman to gentleman,” and that is the most
pathetic sentence of the war, because it contains the utter failure
of the French to understand that not only is Hitler not a gentleman,
but Hitler would be the first indignantly to repudiate a title he
despises. The code of a gentleman is derived from the Christian code,
which Hitler and his Nazi-Nietzchean followers despise. They curse
Christ as a Jewish weakling whose religion is for slaves. They spit
upon the elementary idea of fair play. A group of devoted young Nazis,
a dozen strong, who have just beaten to death a crippled Jew, will be
clear of conscience, joyful as though they had done a good deed, and
utterly unable to understand the American or British notion that it is
not even enjoyable sport to attack with odds of twelve to one. It is
sport to them. Pétain had not the faintest notion that the sons of the
Germans he had known had come to this. So with his eyes closed, and
dreaming of the past, he accepted the promise of a position for France
of junior partner to Germany.
Q. _Is Pétain moved by personal ambition?_
A. He is consumed by it. He did not accept with reluctance the post
of “Chief of the Government” after Reynaud fell, but gladly, feeling
that he had finally received the recognition denied him when Foch was
made Commander in Chief. He does not consider himself a Fuehrer or a
Duce. He is much nearer the position of his fellow clericalist, the
_caudillo_, Franco, who never clearly understood the meaning of Nazism
and was repelled by what he did understand.
Pétain does not understand Fascism or Nazism but only sees that they
control the mob, and he wishes above all to see the mob controlled as
an army, to be drilled and disciplined into hardworking, God-fearing
Frenchmen, obedient in civil as in religious life. His religious
feeling dominates all his actions. In Bordeaux, the day Reynaud
resigned, I was told Pétain’s words as he heard the debacle was
reaching its end: “France must suffer for her sins!” Mystically he
surrendered, and mystically he still exclaimed a year later to a nation
which had endured twelve months of injury and abasement with no
prospect of relief, “You are suffering and must suffer for a long time
still because we have not yet paid for all our mistakes.”
To the old Marshal, France’s troubles began with the Revolution of
1789, and to cure them he wants to take France back to the Ancien
Regime. He wants to do away with liberty, because liberty is synonymous
with license and license with sin. Theoretically he is a monarchist,
but now that he has become Regent, like Horthy of Hungary, he does not
want a king. This period Pétain regards as France’s purgatory, which he
gladly endures, confident of a better world. Many Frenchmen recognize
Pétain’s good intentions but do not believe they will save him from
Hell.
Q. _Why, if the Germans have such a hold over Pétain, have they not
forced him to surrender the French fleet and to give them the use of
the North African naval and air bases? If Pétain is in fear of being
revealed by the Germans as one who helped bring about the French
defeat, why can’t the Germans get anything they want from him?_
A. First, because Pétain is more useful to the Germans than the French
fleet and the North African bases. Who else could lead so many of the
French people to submit and collaborate as they are doing today under
Pétain? Pétain does Hitler’s work for him. Pétain coaxes the plunder
from the French people in the form of taxes and hands it to Hitler in
the form of payment for maintenance of the army of occupation. If the
Germans ever exposed him, he would lose his position and they would
lose their most useful servant.
Second, the more time that elapses since the armistice, the less
effective is the German blackmail threat on Pétain, because as time
passes people become less interested in what happened, and as
experience with the Germans deepens, fewer people can be found to
believe any German explanation.
Third, Pétain, with all his senility, must have realized that it is
not nearly as certain now that Germany will win, as it was when he
surrendered. The Russian resistance, much as Pétain hates and despises
Bolshevism, must have made him think; and the growing belligerence of
America must have had some effect upon him. As he becomes less and less
convinced that Germany is certain to win he should logically become
less submissive to the Germans. On the other hand, he is not likely to
revolt openly until he is convinced Germany will lose; and the only way
to give him such conviction is for the United States to enter the war.
Q. _What would Hitler do if he finally tired of fooling with Vichy?_
A. He would simply march in and occupy all of France. He could do
it with a handful of divisions, since the French have been totally
disarmed or at least as fully disarmed as it was possible for
the Germans to do. But from then on he would have the trouble of
administering the whole country and collecting the taxes which Pétain
collects for him now. I do not think he is anxious to increase his
responsibilities that way now. Pétain knows this too, and that stiffens
the old man’s backbone a little. Essentially though the Vichy attitude
will always depend on the question who is going to win the war. I
should think that when the defeat of Hitler is assured, the Vichy
government may be overthrown and another or Free French, de Gaulle
government may re-enter the war on our side. Pétain and Darlan it seems
to me are too compromised ever to do that.
Q. _What about Darlan?_
A. Darlan undoubtedly sees more clearly than Pétain, but he is less
honorable; indeed I have heard highly placed Englishmen who knew
him intimately curse him with concentrated bitterness as the vilest
traitor of the lot. Few people would describe Pétain as consciously
dishonorable. Few of the men around Pétain are spared the charge by
Frenchmen who know them best.
Darlan has no respect from anybody. He has been all his life a
political sailor, having had his start from his father, one-time
Minister of Justice. His politics were consistently opportunistic.
Today he helps head a government that has suppressed Freemasonry; yet
he was a Freemason when to be a Freemason was an asset. He helps keep
Leon Blum in confinement; yet he supported Blum when Blum was in power.
He is now the fiercest advocate of fighting England; yet until Reynaud
fell he supported the policy of moving the government to North Africa
and carrying on.
He switched when he perceived the chance of becoming head man in the
appeasement government. His change of heart was literally overnight.
In London immediately after the fall of France, an old friend of mine,
an officer of the French Navy whose ship had broken away and come to
England, told me Darlan had issued an order to all vessels of the Navy
that with the signing of the Armistice they should make for French
African or other friendly ports and prepare to go on with the war;
twenty-four hours later another code message from Darlan countermanded
the order and directed all ships to make for French ports. In the
interval Darlan had been promised a seat next to the Chief of the Vichy
State.
Nothing in Darlan’s record indicates that he has ever acted except
for the purpose of furthering his career; he is characterized by the
French as the perfect careerist, and the word has even less flattering
connotations in French than in English. The one instinct in him
which seems to have persisted without variance is his hatred of the
British, based upon the centuries-old rivalry of the French and British
navies. While the French were in the war we Americans forgot that the
memory of Trafalgar is for the French Navy, or for its older officers
anyway, stronger than the memory of the four years of Franco-British
comradeship on the battlefields of 1914-1918.
In Darlan this feeling was always strong. At the London Naval
Conference of 1930 he fought for parity with the British, but they
refused it to him, with a prescience blessed by the event. Suppose
the French had possessed as powerful a navy as the British when the
French Army fell and Darlan had commanded a force able to challenge
the British! After the Battle of Oran, July 3, 1940 when the British,
rightly suspecting the intentions of Darlan, attempted to disable the
French Fleet at Mers-el Kebir in order to prevent its falling into the
hands of the Germans, Darlan led the outcry against the “perfidious”
assault. The British are convinced that if ever the chance comes Darlan
will use every means in his power to injure them. Whatever his motives
may have been at the beginning for joining the capitulation, Darlan
like most of the men of Vichy has by now so compromised himself with
the French people that, as one French friend of mine expressed it: “If
Germany is defeated the best these men of Vichy could hope for would
be dishonorable, furtive retirement, but I think most of them would be
killed.”
And if Germany wins? For a while Darlan and his colleagues seemed to
feel confident that Hitler would be good to them, but now he exclaims:
“If we do not get an honorable peace, if France is cut up into many
departments and deprived of important overseas territories, and enters
diminished and bruised into the New Europe, it will not recover and
our children will live in the misery and hatred which breed war.”
These words of the appeaser indicate that he has already discerned the
outlines of the fate Hitler has in store for France; yet what is the
alternative for him and those like him now? Free Frenchmen declare the
alternative is death, as traitors.
Q. _And Laval?_
A. He is wounded but he is surely enjoying himself because for the
moment he can say, “I told you so.” He is probably the world’s most
delighted observer of the Battle of Russia. My last glimpse of him
was in Bordeaux at the restaurant “Chapon Fin” the night France
capitulated. The restaurant was crowded with the wealthy, the powerful,
the noted and notorious of France. The door was locked; without an
introduction from at least a Cabinet Minister or a millionaire nobody
could get in. That night ten thousand refugees were pounding for
admission to the restaurants of Bordeaux. Our Ambassador to Poland,
Tony Biddle, unmarked from his harrowing escape across Poland under
Luftwaffe machine-gun fire, and as fresh here at the collapse of the
world as though he were attending a bridge party at home, rescued us
and with a gesture which implied we were all ambassadors, requisitioned
a table for our party of American newspapermen. From one corner Otto of
Habsburg greeted us in his cordial democratic way. He was one victim
Hitler would have liked to catch. I looked around the grotesque dining
room, decorated as an artificial rock garden of papier-mâché and now
populated by as queer a throng as ever assembled to dine at the funeral
of a nation. Nearly every French politician I had ever seen was there,
most of them drinking copiously of the wine for which the city was
famous. There was no gloom perceptible; not among the Frenchmen. The
atmosphere was excited, laughter was frequent and high-pitched. Perhaps
it was bravery; the gay talk and conviviality sounded very courageous
or else very frivolous at that moment. Who could have realized that
there were Frenchmen there calculating to improve their careers by the
fall of their country? We American newspapermen looked more depressed
than any of the men whose motherland was about to be strangled.
Presently a waiter brought me a note from Laval inviting me to his
table. I had not seen him enter. There he was, swarthy, ebony-haired,
with his famous white string tie, presiding over a company of half
a dozen friends, all talking, as everybody in the Western World was
talking, about the fate of France.
Abruptly Laval asked, “What do you think, M. Knickerbocker?”
I spoke with all the emphasis I could muster and placing my fist on
the table to help express my sincerity talked directly to him: “Mr.
President, I think that if you give up, if you surrender, it will
mean the end of France as a nation, the end of France forever unless
another, outside power comes to your rescue. But Mr. President, if you
go on fighting, if you refuse to surrender, even if you have to go to
North Africa and base your government on Morocco, then France will live
because she and her friends will win this war, however long it may
take. But please believe me, Mr. President, when I say I know what the
Nazis mean to do to France, and I know because I have lived for nine
years in Germany as a professional observer and I know Adolf Hitler,
and the Nazis, and the German people better than I know any politician,
or political party, or people in the world, and I know they mean the
utter destruction of France.”
There was dead silence, and to my gratification everybody at the
table, all of Laval’s friends, nodded in agreement with me, but M.
Laval himself, grave as a judge, leaned back and with that inscrutable
Moorish air of his said, “No, M. Knickerbocker, you do not understand.
Hitler does not want to destroy France; Hitler only wants to destroy
the Soviet Union.”
That was Laval’s belief, and because this belief was shared by so many
other Frenchmen, it became one of the principal reasons for the fall of
France.
Whatever else one may think of him, Laval has guts and is no hypocrite.
He hates democracy and says so. He is out to promote the fortunes of
M. Laval and admits it. He calls himself a realist; and realistically
he long ago estimated the strength of France as inadequate to stand
up against Germany. He learned to hate Britain during those long years
when every French move to bolster their position against the doubly
powerful Reich was checked by an imbecile British Foreign Office which
continued to think that the balance of power required a stronger
Germany and a weaker France. So Laval’s belief in the desirability of a
Franco-German “understanding” was not born of defeat alone.
He was the first French Premier to visit Germany after the war. I was
in Berlin when he arrived in the autumn of 1931 with the aging and
feeble but still brilliant Briand, then Foreign Minister. Bruening was
Chancellor and that farsighted benevolent statesman, whom the Allies
could have helped suppress the growing menace of Hitler, wished to make
the visit the foundation for a new era of Franco-German friendship. How
futile his hopes were came to light as the train bearing the French
ministers rolled in. I was standing with a small crowd of Germans at
the foot of the steps of the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof, and noticed
that the streets had been cleared and roped off all the way to the
Hotel Adlon. Masses of police manned the ropes but there was almost no
crowd to hold back. Around the station were about five hundred people.
I noticed they looked curiously alike, as though all from the same
neighborhood, the same class. Presently I saw a friend, a plain-clothes
man from Police Headquarters, all dressed up in his Sunday best, with
gloves and a derby hat and the inevitable big detective’s shoes. I
greeted him. He introduced his wife and children. A little surprised,
I asked if he were such a great advocate of Franco-German friendship
that he had brought his whole family to cheer the visitors from Paris.
“_Ja wohl!_” he replied. “Orders, you see. They sent us all down here.
Everybody here is from Police Headquarters, _mit Frau und Kinder_.
Nobody else; no outsiders. We get a day off for coming.” Sure enough,
that was the makeup of the entire crowd. They dutifully thronged around
the steps and shouted “_Hoch Frankreich!_” Laval and Briand then passed
through empty streets to the Hotel Adlon where another group of
policemen and their wives and children cried “_Hoch!_” again. And that
was the length and breadth and depth of Franco-German friendship.
Q. _Has Laval a chance to come back?_
A. Yes, if the Germans win he has the best of chances. Laval today is
the only master politician left in France; Pétain is senile; Darlan
is ward-heel size; none of the others in the Vichy camp is even that
large, and the politicians of the Republic are dead and buried. Laval
is the best-hated Frenchman alive; the shots fired into him by Colette
were cheered from one end of France to the other, but he is still the
only Frenchman capable of ruling France as a dictator.
He is much like Stalin, an Asiatic, with more than his share of the
Eastern blood of the Auvernacs. He has the psychology of the Oriental
and like Stalin he has the Oriental’s lack of human consideration. As
Stalin regards Russia without love, as an object, so Laval regards
France. He has few real friends but possesses a marvelous power of
extemporized comradeship and can talk the language of any man with whom
he converses, including, as one of his enemies suggested, “even an
honest man.” Once a friend of his exclaimed, “You ought to be dictator
of a South American Republic!” “How did you know?” asked Laval,
genuinely surprised. “Oh, just a joke,” answered the friend. “But no,”
said Laval, “I am amazed, because when I was a boy that was just what
I always dreamed of becoming--dictator of a South American state.”
Perhaps he may get his wish yet, as the malicious wits of the Riviera
have called Vichy France, “a banana republic without bananas.”
Laval’s hatred of England is extended now to America, because American
support upholds Britain, and Laval will never be safe until Britain
is defeated. He is still unwavering in his conviction that Germany
will win, but even if we entered the war and it became evident Germany
would lose, Laval cannot now change his position. He is one of those so
totally committed to the German cause that he stands or falls with it.
Q. _You have said that we Americans were very much like the French; now
in what way are we? Have we also traitors in our ranks?_
A. No, we have not, I am convinced, any traitors among our officers, as
the French had. There are many Nazi agents among us, and a few may have
penetrated to positions of some importance, but I do not believe they
could affect the issue of the war as they did in France. There are many
Communists as well among us, probably more than there are Nazis, and
we ought never to forget that whether they are native-born Americans
or not makes no difference. Nor does the fact that Soviet Russia is
momentarily engaged in fighting our enemy change the essential fact
that Communists cannot be loyal Americans. Their loyalty is to Moscow
alone, and if a change in Russia’s position should make it expedient
for the Kremlin to order American Communists to sabotage America’s war
effort, the order would be zealously obeyed.
Our chief danger of this sort lies in the wrongheaded activity of
our isolationists who, whether they wish it or not, serve the cause
of Hitler more effectively than all the paid agents of Germany and
Italy and Japan could do if their numbers were multiplied many times.
Consider carefully the account given you by my French friend of the
way the Germans appealed to Parisian conservative circles, and ask
yourself if their arguments do not sound remarkably like the speeches
of Lindbergh and Wheeler.
Treason can be difficult to define. I had a French friend, whom
I can call a friend no longer because he became one of the chief
collaborationists with the Germans. I think--I am not sure--but I
think we have no one like him in America, but he was so representative
of the group that betrayed France, that I want to quote a conversation
I had with him just before the war began. I said, “Jean, you seem to
believe profoundly that Germany is strong enough to win a war no matter
how France fights to prevent it; and you also seem to believe that the
German kind of National Socialism would be a good thing for the whole
continent, including France. Now what would you do, believing as you
do, if France were to be at war with Germany, and you thought defeat
was inevitable, and you foresaw a long and bloody conflict, and you
suddenly found yourself in possession of a military secret which would
end the war immediately in favor of Germany if the Germans knew it.
Would you give this decisive military secret to the Germans?” Jean
answered, “Yes, of course I would.” “But wouldn’t that be treason?” I
asked. “Not at all,” Jean answered. “It wouldn’t be treason to France;
it would only be a blow at what I consider the treasonable government
of the Republic.” Now I submit that even our rabid isolationists would
reject a position like Jean’s, but we ought nevertheless clearly to see
the fact that Lindbergh and Wheeler by their powerful discouragement of
the whole war effort of America are doing this country the same kind of
harm that came to France.
Q. _In what other ways do we compare with the French?_
A. It is astonishing to see how many points of similarity we can
discover, beginning with the well-known Maginot line complex which we
parallel with our Atlantic Ocean complex. I remember back in 1930 at
a cocktail party in Berlin a German Lieutenant Colonel remarked to me
about the Maginot line, which the French were just completing: “That
line of fortifications will be the death of France. If soldiers have
such an impregnable fortress to live in, they will never willingly
leave it to take the offensive, and without taking the offensive you
can’t win a war. The Maginot line will give the French Army a permanent
defense complex and out of its sense of security we will eventually
defeat it.” Our complacency behind the Atlantic Ocean, which we fondly
fancy could always protect us from attack, is precisely the same as
the French had. The French also were brought down by their skepticism;
they had ceased to have any faith in anything, whether the Republic, or
democracy, or God, just as millions of Americans lack faith in anything
and think it smart to deride any kind of ideals, particularly anything
so old-fashioned as sacrifice for one’s country.
The French had up to the bitter end, so little primitive, full-blooded
spirit that they neither sang on the way to battle nor cursed while in
action; they harbored no anger toward the enemy, no hatred for him, and
they had no will to kill. They were apologetic for being at war, until
catastrophe was upon them, and it was too late. Most Americans feel
apologetic about the war and behave as though they were not sure of the
rightness of our cause.
Another curious and not unimportant item of coincidence is that there
was a strong current of anti-British feeling in France at the beginning
of the war, just as there is here. In France it was grounded largely in
the argument, which had much truth in it, that Great Britain had been
largely responsible for the war by her shortsighted support of Germany
against France for so many years, and that the British would “fight
to the last Frenchman.” This latter argument seemed silly to me when
I first met it early in the Battle of France, at the front near Sedan
where I picked up a little printed leaflet in French, dropped by German
aviators.
It read:
“Where is Tommy? The units of the British army which had occupied
certain sectors of the Maginot line were immediately withdrawn after
the beginning of the German offensive. They were transported as
quickly as possible in the direction of the Channel. For political
reasons it was necessary to conceal this movement, so it was carried
out at night. Nevertheless the population of Lorraine could observe
easily enough that the English were retiring, and in various cities
and towns hostile demonstrations took place against them. Several
times the police and French troops had to intervene to calm the
crowds and suppress the demonstrations. _French Soldiers!_ You see
how the English are trying to get out just as they did in Norway.
_They are taking ‘English leave.’_ They are leaving you alone on the
battlefield. Are you stupid enough to die for those who are quitting
you to save their precious skins? You had better give the English the
answer they deserve for having betrayed you.”
Now there was not a word of truth in this propaganda about trouble
between British troops and French civilians, and I thought the leaflet
far too crude to have any effect, but I was mistaken; it corresponded
to the unreasoning feeling of many Frenchmen that the French Army
was bearing all the burden. They particularly resented the fact that
whereas at the beginning of the war the French mobilized all men from
twenty to forty-seven years old, the British at first mobilized only
those from twenty to twenty-five years old. The British Fleet, the
French knew theoretically, was just as important for beating Hitler as
the French Army, but the British Fleet was far away and its actions
were unobserved. Just so today in America we all know theoretically
that the presence of the British Fleet in the Atlantic is imperative
for our safety, but the British Fleet is far away, and so even when
we are sending supplies to the British Fleet and other arms standing
between us and our enemy, many Americans think of it as “aiding
Britain,” and feel quite unselfish about it.
A minor group in America also persists in blaming the British so
heavily for their now amply admitted and fully atoned faults of the
past, that some of them would almost rather see Munich revenged by
German troops in England than have America defend herself there.
Finally we have our anti-British Americans of Irish origin who
consider Oliver Cromwell more blameworthy than Hitler, although all
Irish-Americans are not so purblind by any means. Taking it all in
all, however, I should say that there is an even stronger anti-British
sentiment in America today than there was in France during the war, and
this when coupled to the broader anti-Europe feeling of a great many
Americans, increases the difficulty of our acting realistically against
a powerful enemy who is taking every advantage of these enfeebling
prejudices of ours.
Q. _You have named so many similarities between ourselves and the
French that it is discouraging indeed, but we have one undeniable
advantage of a large population, and we surely are not obsessed by our
birth rate._
A. It is true that we do not worry about our birth rate, although
perhaps we ought to, but we suffer just the same from something
very much like the French obsession with theirs. It was the French
preoccupation with their inferiority in numbers, and their falling
birth rate, which prevented them not merely from wasting lives, but
even from using them thriftily on the battlefield, and the result
was the debacle. During the Battle of France I seldom saw Colonel
Schieffer, in the French Ministry of Information, that he did not
exclaim, “We cannot bleed like this again. Twice in a generation is
too much. We have only twenty million Frenchmen. This time we must
make an end of the Boches so they can never empty our veins again.”
The Colonel, who was personally most warlike, was under the impression
we all had that the French Army was losing lives heavily, and he was
willing that it be done to prevent ever again such bloodshed in the
future, yet as a matter of fact, the impulse to save French lives had
already become so strong in the Army High Command that it governed all
great decisions and contributed seriously to the defeat.
Now despite the fact that we are a nation of 130,000,000 we are
obsessed to an equal degree with the fear of having to fight in large
numbers; we have what amounts to a phobia against sending an American
Expeditionary Force to Europe. We seem not to mind nearly so much the
idea of American boys in the Navy or the Air Force fighting and dying
abroad, but when it comes to the Army we recoil at the idea of an
A.E.F. Why the life of an infantryman should be more precious than that
of an aviator or sailor is not clear. The explanation of this attitude
must be found in the comparative numbers of men involved.
A.E.F. brings up the idea of millions of American boys laying down
their lives on the battlefield, and most Americans completely forget,
if they ever did know, that although we had 4,355,000 men mobilized
during the last war, the total number of them killed in action and died
of wounds received in action was 50,475. This is roughly one-half of
the number of persons killed by accident in the United States every
year. We nevertheless erected in every village and city of the land
large expensive monuments to our war dead, and the impression became
indelibly fixed in the American mind that we had lost millions, or
at any rate hundreds of thousands of dead. The vision of this mass
sacrifice of American youth is what moves the American people to reject
so violently the idea of an expeditionary force. We ought now to be
adult enough to see that our penurious attitude toward our precious
American blood reflects the same feeling as the French, with more
justification, had toward their birth rate, and that if persisted in,
this attitude will lead us to similar disaster.
Q. _Aren’t there any encouraging differences between ourselves and the
unfortunate French?_
A. I am glad to say there are, and enough, I devoutly hope, to save
us from their fate. We have a leader; the French had none. We are not
divided as badly as the French were divided. Despite the fierceness of
our political passions, it would be a very exceptional American indeed
who would say, “I’d rather have Hitler than Roosevelt,” as so many
Frenchmen used to say, “We’d rather have Hitler than Leon Blum.” We are
physically a healthier people than the French. There is hardly one of
the weaknesses now perceptible in the American people that would not be
swept away by the fact of our going to war, but there is hardly one of
them which can be removed by any other means.
The most encouraging difference between the French and American
democracies is the quality and character of our newspapers. American
newspapers bring to their readers today a greater volume of news,
of greater accuracy, than has ever been delivered to an audience of
newspaper readers in the history of the world. It has been my job for
nearly two decades to study the newspapers of a score of countries, not
superficially but with the businesslike object of gleaning news. I had
to read thirty-two German newspapers a day when I was correspondent
in Berlin; and a dozen or so daily in Paris. It is no exaggeration
to say that the reader of the _New York Times_, or the _New York
Herald-Tribune_, or the _Chicago Daily News_, or any one of half a
dozen of our great metropolitan dailies, has more detailed and true
information about what is going on in the world than if he were able
by magic to accumulate all the newspapers published everywhere else on
earth, and were able equally by magic to read them all in the original.
Often I am asked, “How can we know the truth? Everything is so
confusing. Aren’t we fed with propaganda?” The answer is you can know
the truth by reading your newspapers thoroughly and exercising common
sense in balancing the reports from the belligerent countries against
each other.
No war has ever been fought in such a blazing light of information.
Never has such a quantity of news been put before a people as we
Americans have before us at breakfast every day and from then on until
midnight. American newspapers are doing today the most superb job ever
done by daily journals. But that is not their chief merit. Their chief
merit is their honesty and incorruptibility and their sincere endeavor
to be fair and objective. These qualities have enabled the American
press, since the foundation of the United States, to be the equal in
importance to the executive or the legislative or the judicial branch
of government. It is the vigilant watchman over the functioning of the
other three branches of government.
In no other country has the newspaperman the rights and privileges that
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?_
A. Do you realize that we actually delivered only $190,000,000 worth
of goods in the first six months of lease-lend to Britain and China?
That is only a little over one per cent of the total lease-lend money
involved. If it takes us six months to deliver one per cent, how
long will it take to deliver 100 per cent? Certainly, the beginning
is slowest; certainly speed of deliveries will increase almost
geometrically after the new factories begin to produce. But the fact
is that we will never produce enough to win this war without going
formally to war. As Donald M. Nelson, chief defense buyer, suggested,
the only way to get capacity production for armaments is to make the
program so big that civilian needs will be irresistibly pushed into the
background, and every factory capable of producing armaments will be
forced to drop its civilian business and go immediately to work on war
materials.
What does “pushing our civilian needs into the background” mean?
It means sacrifice; it means a lowering of our standard of living.
Do you know anyone, have you a single person in your acquaintance
in civilian life, whose standard of living has deteriorated as a
result of sacrifice for our so-called defense effort? Leaf through
your smart magazines, read the news of the shops, and ask yourself
what the fighting folk of Europe would think of the war effort of a
country whose rugged males in the bloody autumn of 1941 are asked in
full-page advertisements: “Have you seen the new brown diamonds for
men? These interesting, subdued stones are rapidly becoming a major
item in the well-dressed man’s wardrobe.” Would this make very good
evidence against Hitler’s assertion that we are a “decadent, degenerate
democracy not to be taken seriously in war”?
Q. _But how can we expect to improve morale by criticism? Isn’t it true
that if you tell a healthy man he looks ill, and tell him frequently
enough, he may actually fall ill?_
A. Yes, but if you tell an ill man he looks well, and he therefore
fails to take care of himself, he may die. It is not fear that we need;
it is awareness. What was the common cause of the death of the fifteen
nations which have fallen to Hitler? It was lack of awareness of his
threat to their national existence. From Poland to Greece they were
all overconfident and hence for six long years did nothing to bring
about that coalition which might have saved them. Overconfidence is our
danger, not defeatism. The moment our Navy was given orders to convoy
and shoot, one prominent voice was raised to suggest that now we might
diminish our Army, as though the war were virtually won.
Q. _Our morale is very bad, then?_
A. No, that is not true. Our morale is high. That sounds like a
contradiction but it is not. It is my conviction after talking to
audiences all over the country that the American people are eager
to find out the truth and when they hear it they are eager to act;
that they are far ahead of their leaders in Congress, and even of the
President; and that if the President wanted it, he could get directly
from the American people, not from Congress, but from the twenty-seven
million Americans who voted for him, plus many million more, approval
of any measure he advocated, including a formal declaration of war.
National morale depends so much on leadership that a great figure, as
Roosevelt in this country and Churchill in England, can influence it to
great decisions with one broadcast.
But without leadership we soon sink back into smug apathy, and the kind
of thoughtlessness which led Americans in the first six months of 1941
to buy 35 per cent more automobiles, 42 per cent more refrigerators,
and 51 per cent more electric ranges than in the same period of
1940--all of these luxury articles being built of materials vital for
our defense industry. The French too, right up to the collapse, went on
eating tremendous meals, loafing behind their Maginot line, and reading
illustrated magazines with pictures just like ours showing magnificent
fleets of planes and tanks. An unwitting reader of some of our great
periodicals would get the impression that we have one of the world’s
most powerful tank armies and that our warplanes could darken the
skies. We lay down the magazine with a sigh of content. Good old U.S.A.
We knew we could do it. What was all that talk about unpreparedness?
Q. _Haven’t we a tank army?_
A. We have four armored divisions now being organized. We see them
under such titles as “Uncle Sam’s Mighty Tanks Move Into Action,” and
only the closest examination of the picture reveals that most of the
tanks are armored cars. In 1940 we produced 20 light, no medium, and
no heavy tanks a month; in 1941, 260 light, 130 medium, and no heavy
tanks a month; and in 1942 we shall produce 390 light, 300 medium, and
still no heavy tanks a month. I quote from an authoritative release of
July 4, 1941: “None of the four existing armored divisions is regarded
as complete and ready for combat on the European scale because medium
and heavy tanks have not arrived yet, and because _coordinated practice
with the air arm regularly attached to the divisions has not yet been
possible_ and because much of the training time must be devoted to
the basic training of new men.” There is the mechanized force of the
United States of America in the third year of the mechanized world war.
Our armored strength consists of light tanks only, completely useless
against heavy or medium tanks. But most appalling is the revelation
that this late in a war in which every victory has been won by the
famous dive bomber plus tank team, we seem not to possess any such team
at all, for that must be the meaning of the statement that there has
been no practice of coordination between planes and tanks. These teams
cannot be improvised. An army without them today is like an army would
have been without artillery yesterday.
In effect we still do not possess an effective armored force and the
production figures indicate we shall not have one in 1942 either, for
until we have heavy tanks we cannot face heavy tanks. What have the
Germans in the way of mechanized armament? We cannot tell what changes
have taken place since the Battle of Russia began, but we know that
their losses are constantly replenished from the industrial plants of
all Europe now working feverishly for the Germans. At the Battle of
France the Germans had ten Panzer divisions and it was these steel hack
saws which cut the body of France into bleeding ribbons and ended the
French nation in five weeks. The Germans captured from the French 4,000
or 5,000 tanks and since that time have produced incessantly until it
is estimated that they entered the Battle of Russia with a total of 20
to 30 Panzer divisions and with at least 25,000 tanks. The German Army
is obviously the army we are preparing to fight. Its armored strength
is conservatively estimated about twenty-five times ours, and it has
more than two years of battle experience. We not only have not got an
army that could take part in modern warfare at all, but we are not even
preparing to create such an army. We may get one. We will get one if
we have time. We will get an army if we go to war in time to keep the
British between us and our enemy for the period it will take to build
an army. We will never get an army so long as we are satisfied with
what we have.
We American people have been like a neurotic who refuses to listen to
bad news; who will not go to a physician for fear of what he may find
out. We could afford to view the matter less darkly if it appeared
that our production would give us an effective fighting machine
sometime in the future, but this does not seem to be the case. Our
gun production indicates that we expect to be ready to fight a modern
army sometime around the 1950’s. It shows that in the middle of 1941
we had a production of 4 big, 29 medium, and 20 small antiaircraft
guns per month. At that rate it would take a year to make enough
antiaircraft guns to guard New York City alone. In mid-1942 we shall,
if we are lucky, have a production of 22 big, 23 medium, and 300 small
antiaircraft guns monthly. At this rate we should be able properly to
guard the large cities of the Eastern seaboard in about ten years.
In 1941 we did not produce any 155 mm. cannon, but we will make
fourteen of them monthly in 1942; just as we produced no 105 mm. cannon
in 1940, but put out 22 per month in 1941 and in 1942 hope to make 155
a month. At this rate we ought to be able to finish enough artillery
to match the German artillery in about 1951. We are still turning out
37 mm. antitank guns, although tests have shown that this gun will not
penetrate the armor of the tanks it would have to meet. Even our famous
Garand rifle apparently cannot be manufactured anything like fast
enough to supply the growing army. In mid-1941 it was being turned out
at the rate of 22,500 a month; and in 1942 it is due to be produced at
the rate of 52,000 a month. That is only 624,000 a year. At this rate
it would take well over three years to equip the two-million-man army
which is our initial goal in the face of the fact that the forces it is
being built to meet number upward of ten million.
In airplanes we have the one advantage that we came so late into the
field that we have few obsolescent types. The British and Germans
have the immense advantage of daily contact with battle experience.
In mid-1941 we produced 206 fighters and 60 bombers per month for
ourselves and sent an average of 390 planes monthly to Britain. Our aid
to Britain, “all out, short of war,” amounted to this, that after two
years of war we were sending Britain about one-eighth as many warplanes
as Germany’s production, believed to be around 3,000 a month. Even in
1942 when we shall have reached capacity production, we expect to send
Britain only 650 planes a month, and to make only 600 bombers and 600
fighters monthly for ourselves. That is, even in the third year of war
we propose to have a production of only about three-quarters the German
production. We have pitched our sights far too low. We might as well
quit if we cannot set the sights up.
Raymond Swing always tells me as he rakes in the pot, “Knick, it is
not good hands that win in poker; it is better hands.” So it is in
this war. We shall never win with a good army, navy, and air force;
they have to be better than the enemy’s and bigger too. Before the
Battle of Russia some military critics held that we did not need even
the 1,500,000 men we now have under arms; that we needed only a highly
mechanized force. Now we see that to win in this war an army needs mass
as well as machines. As yet we have neither.
Q. _Why haven’t we at any rate planned an adequate army of four or five
million men with at least as many armored divisions as the Germans?_
A. Because to plan an adequate army would indicate we intended to go
to war. To make it big enough and well enough equipped to fight the
Germans would indicate that we intended to fight the Germans. The
consequence of our ostrich hypocrisy, our faint-hearted catering to the
pacifist, isolationist-obscurantist bloc is that we not only do not
but we cannot build an army to perform the function for which it was
called into existence: fight the Nazis. If we equip it to go abroad, up
go cries of alarm from the Wheeler-Lindbergh crowd: “Foreign war! See,
the President is going to put us into a foreign war!”
Q. _But if we have nothing to fight with, how can we go to war?_
A. Only by going to war can we guarantee the continued existence of the
British fighting machine and the control of the Atlantic by the British
Navy and our own. As long as the Atlantic is thus controlled we can arm
ourselves in safety.
Q. _But why can’t we arm ourselves, as we are now doing, without going
to war, and after we are thoroughly prepared, then, if it is still
necessary, go in and win? Wouldn’t that be more sensible?_
A. No, because until we go to war we shall never arm ourselves
adequately or send to Britain and Russia anything like the supplies
we would send if we went to war. Second, if we do not go to war at
once there exists always the possibility of German victory. Although
the German Army is busy for the time being in Russia, Hitler knows he
has to conquer Britain to win. He intends to return to the Battle of
Britain. The Battle of the Atlantic is constantly going on. Events move
with such lightning speed in this war that a sudden overwhelming Hitler
victory is still quite conceivable. Beaverbrook only the other day said
he was convinced Hitler still intended to try to invade the British
Isles.
Q. _Do you think Hitler could succeed in invading Britain?_
A. If Hitler is willing to lose half a million or a million men in a
super-Blitz--and we know that he is quite willing to invest that many
more German lives in his dream of 1,000 years of Nazi Empire--even
British authorities admit he might get a foothold in England. The
German tactics would probably be similar to the attack on Crete, except
that against the British Isles they would try many more landings by
sea. Everything would be on a gigantic scale. The air bombardment to
precede the attempt would surpass anything experienced in the Blitz
of the autumn of 1940 which I witnessed. In this super-Blitz the
Germans would attempt to paralyze the R.A.F. They were not able to do
it before. The R.A.F., as Churchill said, won the climacteric victory
of the First Battle of Britain by knocking down three German planes
to every one they lost, and in that fight the Germans outnumbered the
British three to one. But if Hitler gets the airplane factories of
Russia, to add to the production of the French, Czech, Belgian, and
Greater German production, is there anyone who would undertake to prove
that he could not concentrate in one furious attack more force than
even the dauntless R.A.F. could repel?
The Germans can never beat the British but they might suffocate them.
Hitler so far has never used more than 500 or 600 warplanes in a single
attack on England. Suppose he uses 5,000. Why has he not done this
before? Every aviation and military authority I talked with during the
Blitz in England was baffled at this. There were scores of guesses. The
most popular answer now is that the Germans did not have the airfields
from which to launch so many planes at once. This is a limiting factor
in air warfare which is now given great weight. It is pointed out that
it takes a huge airfield to send off 100 planes. It is even argued
that the British are bound to lose the war eventually because their
island can accommodate only a restricted number of airfields, which
fix an upper limit for their R.A.F., while the Germans can build an
indefinitely large force. Since the First Battle of Britain the Germans
have had plenty of time to build airfields from Norway to France
sufficient to take care of the air fleets of all the world. We know
they have built many secretly along the coast of Northern France and
the Low Countries. Hitler’s tactic of surprise would lead him to keep
them in reserve for the great invasion. Few observers would exclude the
possibility that the Germans may be able to use thousands of planes in
the Second Battle of Britain where they used hundreds in the first.
Q. _Why doesn’t Hitler use poison gas?_
A. I am convinced he will use it whenever he becomes desperate. Why has
he not used it before? The British know he has vast quantities of it.
He may be afraid of reprisals. When he uses gas at all I should think
it would be in a once-for-all storm. Imagine what the effect of a giant
attack with a heavy gas might be on London where as many as 4,000,000
persons sleep in underground shelters. The English have virtually
ceased to carry gas masks. At the beginning of the war not one person
in a hundred appeared on the streets of London without one. Today not
one person in fifty carries one.
Hitler would probably not use gas at all except as a part of a knockout
blow so violent that the British would not have a chance to strike
back. Whatever the outcome, it is possible that such a mass gas assault
might kill hundreds of thousands in one night. While the gas attack
was being poured upon the large cities, in the hope also of wiping
out the government and other leaders in urban headquarters, swarms of
flat-bottomed scows and other vessels would put out from the coasts
of the Channel and the North Sea, to make for landings at perhaps
a dozen different places, anywhere along the coast of both England
and Scotland. Some of these objectives would be feigned to divert
English defense forces from the real ones, which might number five or
six. Meanwhile great numbers of parachute troops would be landed to
capture British airfields and hold them long enough for troop planes
and gliders to land reinforcements, and these landings would also be
attempted at the immediate rear of the coastal points where the German
troops were coming in by sea.
British authorities admit that it would be a serious matter if the
Germans could establish one or more such bridgeheads on the coast and
land heavy tanks, for the British even yet are not satisfactorily
equipped with this indispensable weapon. The British believe they
could concentrate and recapture any points seized by the Germans, but
who knows? Crete showed what could be done with air-borne troops, and
although the British Isles would be in most respects more difficult to
capture than Crete, they would not be in all respects. The Germans are
much nearer the British Isles, and could concentrate many times the
force they used on Crete.
If the invasion of Britain ever takes place, Hitler will doubtless make
it a win-the-war or lose-the-war battle, on a scale of the highest
concentrated violence. Neither side will hold back reserves, as the
R.A.F. did even in the worst days of the 1940 Blitz, because they were
waiting to use their last fighters and bombers against the expected
invaders. The British Navy will drive regardless of mines or submarines
through the narrow waters of the Channel to throw itself between the
invaders and the island. The odds would still be on the British to win,
in my judgment. They are in an incomparably stronger position than in
1940 when after Dunkirk they were practically weaponless. Today they
have two to three million first-class, well-equipped, and well-trained
troops and over a million Home Guards on the island; their coast
defenses, as I have seen on visits around the island, are formidable
and deep; the R.A.F. is present in full strength on its home bases,
and the British claim it is growing steadily stronger relative to the
Luftwaffe; and the Royal Navy, sallying from its home ports, here
has the protection of air forces which were not available at Crete.
Finally, the British would be defending their homes, and this lends an
astonishing extra strength to fighting men. I would not like to be a
member of the German Army trying to occupy and pacify England. At the
school of Cad’s Warfare, run by Tom Wintringham outside of London, they
have taught the old fellows and the youngsters in the Home Guard many
odd and useful tricks, from the best way to strangle a German sentry
from behind, to the best way to stab a German sentry from in front.
Even if the chances are in favor of the British, there are so many
surprises in war, and especially in this war, that it would be folly
for us to behave as though we knew Britain would win without us. If she
falls, we must be prepared to meet the whole German war machine alone.
Q. _Is it true that the Germans once tried to invade Britain and failed
as we heard rumored here?_
A. I am convinced those rumors were without foundation; I do not think
the Germans have ever tried to invade the British Isles. I remember
the September story. I was in England then and about mid-September I
learned that the highest British authorities believed the invasion
might come at any moment. With the invincible Virginia Cowles we went
“Looking for Trouble” and motored to Dover and spent a week along the
coast, in constant contact with the British military authorities. We
heard not a whisper of the yarn about invasion until later in London
when rumors came from the continent that the R.A.F. had broken up a
fleet of German invasion vessels and drowned or burned with flaming
oil on the surface of the sea thousands of German soldiers. Now it is
perfectly possible that the R.A.F. may have surprised and thus treated
German invasion vessels engaged in maneuver or in moving from one
port to another, but it is out of the question that it should have
been a serious attempt at invasion. When that happens there will be
500,000 Germans concerned, not 50,000, and there will be no attempt at
concealment.
The decisive consideration is that if the Germans had tried an invasion
and the British had beaten it back, the British would have been
certain to advertise their victory as widely as possible. But British
authorities never said anything about a repulsed invasion attempt. We
may be sure that when and if the invasion attempt comes, there will be
no question about what is happening; not even the most enterprising
American newspaperman will be able to get a scoop on the story.
Q. _Would the Germans first invade Ireland in order to be able to
attack the British Isles from all sides?_
A. Possibly, though not necessarily. The Germans might consider the
disadvantages of taking Ireland greater than the advantages. The Irish
Channel is as wide as the English; the Germans would be no nearer
England than they are now. The possession of submarine bases in Ireland
would be the most important gain for the Germans. Against this the
Germans have to balance the cost of the operation, since there are
strong British units in Northern Ireland; the time lost; the alarm
given; and the effect on the Irish in America.
Q. _Why doesn’t Ireland allow the British to take over for the duration
of the war or at any rate let them use the Irish naval bases they need
so badly?_
A. Because the Irish still consider Oliver Cromwell a far more
unpleasant fellow than Adolf Hitler. They still distrust and to a
degree hate the British. Also they know they would be enslaved if
Hitler won; but they do not expect Hitler to win. They expect Britain
to win, but they will do nothing or practically nothing to help win.
To be fair to the Irish, their attitude is based less on historical
prejudice than on today’s life or death. If De Valera were to give
the British permission to occupy the Irish ports, the moment the news
became known, the Germans would bombard Dublin and other Irish cities,
and deliberately attempt to kill as many Irish men, women, and children
as possible to punish them for siding with the English. This is the
threat that so far has kept the Irish from allowing the British in.
Q. _If the Russians hold the German Army long enough, won’t the time
come when the German people will revolt? Why not wait for that?_
A. Because it is extremely unlikely ever to happen unless we go to war.
The German people will revolt only when, as Walter Lippmann expressed
it, they feel that it has become more dangerous to go on with Hitler
than to get rid of him. Such a time will come only when the German
people become convinced that they are going to be defeated and invaded.
It will not come merely because the German Army falls into a prolonged
deadlock with the Russians.
There has to be the conviction that foreign troops are going to enter
Germany itself, and that if the German people overthrow Hitler they
will receive milder treatment at the hands of their liberated victims.
The danger of going on with Hitler has to be very imminent and great
to move the German people to revolt, because the crimes of the Nazis
have been so atrocious that the Nazis know they will be killed if they
are overthrown. There must be ten thousand Nazis who anticipate death
if they lose their power either by revolt or by loss of the war. They
will meet any attempt at revolt with the utmost mercilessness. In the
last war there were no Germans who expected to be killed if Germany
lost. The Nazi gang whose life and death hang on the outcome of the
war is larger than the clique of the German ruling class which had an
urgent, though not life-and-death interest, in seeing the last war to
a successful conclusion. Any hopes that a German revolt would end the
war if the deadlock lasts long enough are based on wishful thinking.
Q. _What makes you think Hitler would want to destroy us?_
A. First, because he could not afford to allow any democracy, any free
state, to exist in his totalitarian world. In his world there would be
only one kind of freedom, the freedom of the German to do as he likes
with all other varieties of men. If Hitler is not interfered with and
has time to accustom his slaves to slavery, his dynasty of tyrants
might last far beyond our lifetime, but not if a single democracy
persists to tempt and challenge his slaves to revolt. Witness today how
for a long time the subjugated peoples of Europe seemed sunk in abject
apathy, but awakened to demonstrate against their despot the moment
Russia’s resistance awakened the hope of eventual victory. If Hitler
wins over the rest of the world, he must destroy us in order to be safe
in his own Empire.
As long as a democracy exists on earth it will hold out before the eyes
of hundreds of millions of Hitler’s subjects the vision of a place on
earth where the body and soul of a man belong to himself and there
are no masters and slaves. Especially dangerous to his rule would be
a democracy which not only offered this vision but was potentially
powerful enough to be a positive threat, as the United States. For this
reason alone Hitler could not allow us to continue to exist, a free
oasis in his vast helot Reich.
Second, Hitler could not afford to give us time to translate our
potential into real strength. He professes two opinions of America.
One is that we are negligible; the other is that as the last war was
decided by America, this one may be. He once told a diplomatic official
of his who still occupies a high post in this country: “The United
States is a degenerate democracy in the backwash of civilization
and too demoralized by pacifism to play any important role in the
war to come.” He is truly contemptuous of our democracy, as of all
democracies, which he judges on the basis of those he has overthrown or
conquered, from the German to the French. He concludes that we must be
weak, since our democratic system dispenses justice, as far as humanly
possible, to the weak as well as to the strong, and because since the
conquest of the continental United States we have shown little or no
interest in building an empire. To the Nazi heart justice to the weak
is a proof of weakness; and to the Nazi mind only one thing prevents
a human being from seizing the property of a neighbor, weakness.
So Hitler on the one hand thinks us weak, but on the other hand he
recognizes that we could become strong.
As he once told me that he admitted the entry of the United States into
the last war had decided the struggle, so now when America is preparing
to throw its whole weight against him, he shows signs of wishing to
keep us out. By now Britain has taught him that even a democracy can
become tough if it has time. Would Hitler, after he had crushed the
British, willingly give us time to become morally strong enough to
fight him as the British fought him? Could he afford to let us have the
two years or more still necessary for the physical job of creating the
cannon, tanks, airplanes, and naval vessels and for the training of the
officers and men for an armed force strong enough to face his?
The third simple reason for his wishing to subjugate the United States
is that he wants the loot of America, richest on earth, and wants us
to pay tribute to the Greater German Reich as France and the other
conquered countries are doing now.
Fourth, and not the least, important reason to believe that Hitler
wishes to destroy the United States, is because he has said so. You
remember his speech in the second year of the war when he said, “We
shall destroy Britain and every country which has fed Britain.” To whom
do you suppose he referred if not to the United States? And do you
not think now that it is high time to pay attention to this no longer
funny little man when he announces what he intends to do? He is unique
among conquerors, because he always, by one means or another, warned
his victims of what he intended to do to them, and in most cases, the
Lindberghs of the world have looked up appeasingly and archly inquired,
“Oh no, Mr. Hitler, you surely don’t mean that, do you?”
As someone expressed it, Hitler has never kept a promise but never
failed to carry out, or at least try to carry out, a threat. His threat
to destroy us has been documented scores of times. Hermann Rauschning
quotes Hitler as declaring privately to friends that he would conquer
the United States first from within, with his Fifth Column, and
Walther Darre, his Minister of Agriculture, has developed the topic
thus: “I have been asked about my opinion of America, especially the
United States, and the danger of this pseudo-democratic Republic’s
possible attempts to hinder us in our historical development. There
is no fear that this demoralized country will mix in this German war.
In the first place, as in France and other countries, also in the
United States, we have many of our compatriots and even more friends
among the citizens of the United States. Many of the latter hold the
most important positions in political and economic life and will not
permit public opinion to allow something so senseless and insane as war
against Germany.... The United States is at present so demoralized and
so corrupted that, like England and France, it need not be taken into
consideration as a military adversary.... The United States will also
be forced by Germany to complete and final capitulation.”
Finally, as we discussed before, Hitler as every conqueror, cannot stop
trying to conquer, and after he had finished with the Old World, his
momentum would force him to attack the New.
Q. _Haven’t we plenty to do at home, without getting into a foreign
war? Why don’t we try to make a real democracy in America before we go
out to try to improve the rest of the world?_
A. This argument that we should pay no attention to the fire in the
house next door because we are busy cleaning the windows of our house,
polishing the floor, and cleaning up the kitchen has the same amount
of logic and common sense as the doctrine that we ought not to fight
on our enemy’s territory but only on our own. President Hutchins of
the University of Chicago has put this argument of perfectionism in
scholarly form. He maintains that we are going to war to establish
throughout the world the Four Freedoms--of speech, of worship, from
want, and from fear--but he says we have no right to crusade for them
until we have established them at home. But we are not going to war to
crusade for the Four Freedoms; as we have pointed out before, we are
going to war to make the world safe for the United States, and at the
same time or thereafter do what we can to establish the Four Freedoms
elsewhere as well as in America. If we do not go to war, we risk losing
even what we have of the Four Freedoms, even the small quantities of
them measured by Dr. Hutchins.
Something of what he says about the failure of the Four Freedoms in
this country to reach perfection is true; not all of it. He says we
have freedom of speech to say only what everybody else is saying, but
Dr. Hutchins will admit we have more of this kind of freedom than any
other country at this moment. He will also admit that everyone else is
not saying the things Dr. Hutchins is saying and yet he may say them
without let or hindrance. He says we have “freedom of worship if we
don’t take our religion too seriously,” but one must ask oneself what
examples of religious intolerance have given rise to such a statement?
Where are the persecuted religionists and to what country would they
flee to escape from the alleged deficiency of freedom of worship in
America?
Dr. Hutchins says that as for freedom from want and freedom from
fear, so long as one-third of the nation is ill-fed, ill-clothed,
and ill-housed, as Roosevelt says it is, we have no right to try to
establish these freedoms in other countries. Again, we can admit that
the matter is precisely as President Roosevelt has stated it, and yet
assert that the people of the United States have as a whole better
food, clothing, and living conditions than those of any other country
with comparable climatic conditions. He says that as for democracy, “we
know that millions of men and women are disfranchised in this country
because of their race, color, or condition of economic servitude.”
But if by reason of the passive attitude toward the war advocated by
Dr. Hutchins, this country should fall under Hitler’s power, whether
directly, with der Fuehrer in Washington, or indirectly with der
Fuehrer’s Gauleiter, chosen from the America First Committee as our
President, all of America’s 133,000,000 men and women would be wholly
disfranchised.
Dr. Hutchins says that we must abandon the Four Freedoms if we go
to war, and that “We cannot suppose, because civil liberties were
restricted in the last war and expanded after it, that we can rely
on their revival after the next one.” Why not? If we cannot rely on
experience, what can we rely on? In every war the United States has
ever fought we have delegated to the executive the powers necessary
to win victory and afterward we have always taken them back, but
without even an argument, much less any forcible attempt to prevent
such action. Dr. Hutchins says, “If we go to war we cast away our
opportunity and cancel our gains. For a generation, perhaps for
hundreds of years, we shall not be able to struggle back to where we
were. In fact, the changes that total war will bring may mean that
we shall never be able to struggle back. Education will cease. Its
place will be taken by vocational and military training. The effort to
establish a democratic community will stop. We shall think no more of
justice, of the moral order and the supremacy of human rights. We shall
have hope no longer.”
Why should these things happen to us if they have never happened in
past wars? Because, says Dr. Hutchins, “this war, if we enter it,
will make the last one look like a stroll in the park.” But has the
war done any of these things to Britain? On the contrary it is the
unanimous judgment of observers of Britain in wartime that the British
are more just, humane, democratic, and obedient to a higher moral
regime than ever before in their history. The British are nearer their
enemy and more deeply immersed in total war than we can ever be. Why
should we be expected to fare worse than the British?
Dr. Hutchins expresses concern for “suffering humanity” and declares
we could best serve it by staying out of war, and extending aid to
Britain and China “on the basis most likely to keep us at peace
and least likely to involve us in war.” Is it really helpful to
suffering humanity in Britain, China, France, Russia, Norway, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Holland, Belgium, Austria, yes and in Italy
and Germany itself, to practice a policy directed solely to avoiding
conflict with the author of the misery of half the world?
Aside from that, there is only one choice before America now and the
choice is not between going to war or not going to war. The choice
today is between going to war in time to win it, and going to war too
late to win it. We can best serve “suffering humanity” by attempting
with all the strength of our bodies and souls to destroy the prime,
immediate mundane cause of humanity’s suffering. Finally, Dr. Hutchins
declares that the argument that we should go to war now when we have
Britain to help us, to avoid having to go to war later, when we should
have to face the whole world alone, rests on the improvable assumptions
that Britain must fall and that the totalitarian powers will wish to,
and be able to, and will attack us. We could debate on these grounds
and make a strong case for even this simplest, most direct form of
possible events. But the argument for war now does not rest alone on
this succession of possible events.
Germany may not be able to conquer Britain, but Britain may become so
weary and so convinced that she cannot defeat Germany without us,
and so persuaded that we shall never come into the war, that Britain
might make a negotiated peace. Such a peace would be as disastrous to
us as a lost war; to prevent it is as strong a motive for our going
to war now as is the motive of preventing the actual fall of Britain.
Again, unless Britain falls or makes a negotiated peace, how is any
kind of peace to come to the world? By Britain’s defeating Germany?
No, if Russia falls or defects, Britain alone certainly cannot conquer
Germany; no informed person thinks it possible. Does Dr. Hutchins think
Britain could? Does he think it would be desirable to allow Bolshevik
Russia the credit and opportunity of the land conquest of Germany,
which by now is Europe?
Failing to enter the war, we have to face the alternatives; First: Fall
of Britain followed by Axis economic, political, and military attack
on the Western Hemisphere and probable American defeat by Nazis within
as well as without. Second: A negotiated peace between Britain and
Germany; followed by Nazi attack on the Western Hemisphere as before.
Third: Defeat of Germany by Britain at sea and in the air, and by
Russia on land; followed by Russian Communism throughout Europe. Does
Dr. Hutchins believe this a desirable end, or that the United States
would remain immune from its effects? Fourth: An interminable deadlock
in Europe with the entire world from year to year slipping backward
politically, economically, and morally with no prospect of anything
except more ruined cities, more starving people, more dead from battle
and bombardment, famine and pestilence. Is it helping suffering
humanity to remain aloof and permit any of these alternatives to come
to pass?
Q. _Why do you think we ought to go to war with Germany today?_
A. Because until Nazi Germany is defeated the world will never be safe
for us to live in; because it will require the total war effort of the
United States and Britain and Russia to defeat Germany; and because our
formal declaration of war would be worth more in the struggle against
Germany than all the material aid we shall be able to send the Allies
for the next year or more.
Q. _But wouldn’t it be better to wait and let Hitler declare war on us?_
A. It would best serve our interests if Hitler would declare war,
but since he knows this is true, he is not likely to do so under any
provocation. I should think he would hesitate to declare war even if
we were to have a pitched naval battle and sink his ships and announce
it. He knows that even if our Navy is fighting his, there is still a
body of American public opinion which is opposed to the participation
of our Army in an A.E.F. He knows that if he declared war it would help
immensely to unify the American people. He might go into a fury and
declare war, but it would be unlike him. Behind all his tantrums there
is usually calculation.
Q. _But isn’t our present state of “undeclared war” just as effective
as being formally at war? Why would our declaration of war be worth so
much immediately?_
A. Because of its moral effect upon ourselves, our enemies, and our
friends. We can talk all we like about being in a state of undeclared
war, but until we are formally at war we will continue to behave
as though we were at peace. Only by going to war can we discipline
ourselves, our workingmen, and our employers to defeat the Axis in
the battle of production. At this moment when Britain and Germany are
devoting four hours of each working day to making arms, we are devoting
thirty minutes to making arms. Only by going to war can our citizens’
army get the morale to be a fighting force.
On the Germans the effect of our declaration of war would be
catastrophic. Every German would say to himself, “Now we can’t win;
we can hold on for a long time, perhaps, but we can’t win.” On the
Italians the effect would be to depress their feeble efforts still
further toward zero.
On the British the effect would be to give them what they lack and what
they most need: the assurance of victory. The British are convinced
that they cannot be defeated, but how are they going to defeat the
Germans without the United States actively in the war?
Upon the Soviet Union the effect would be to strengthen the resolution
of Stalin and the Russian people not to make a compromise peace nor
succumb to any of the temptations Hitler may offer; and the longer the
Red Army fights the Germans the fewer sacrifices will have to be made
by the United States to help win the war.
To France our declaration of war would bring the will to live again.
Belief in eventual German victory over Britain was the basis upon which
the French surrendered. It was the foundation of Vichy’s policy. Our
declaration of war might not change Pétain and his men of Vichy, for
they are prisoners of their own deeds, and probably cannot withdraw
from their fatal collaboration with the Germans, but it would move
the people of France profoundly. Pétain does not represent the people
of France. I believe far more in the spirit of my French friend who
wrote me: “Soon we shall all be starving, but send no food. When we are
starving will be a good moment to throw by parachute on every French
farm and on the suburbs of Paris thousands of small machine guns,
with the necessary bullets. Then the German Army will be in France
as Napoleon’s Army was in Spain in 1813.” America’s entry into the
war would be worth to Frenchmen like this more than machine guns. It
would give them the certainty that France will live again. General de
Gaulle’s army would swell by the tens of thousands.
We could reckon on the possibility of being able to occupy the
strategic positions we need in North Africa and on any other
advantages within the power of the French to give us. We could for the
first time anticipate serious revolt by the peoples of all the occupied
territories when the time came; and help for the Allied Expeditionary
Force which some day must invade the continent. All the enslaved
peoples would be equally affected. The Nazi Terror works perfectly so
long as its victims feel that it is hopeless to revolt. Revolt becomes
possible only when the victims feel that they can afford to risk all,
since freedom will eventually be the reward.
A very important effect of our declaration of war upon Germany would
be the effect upon Japan. The Japanese mental processes are difficult
indeed to understand but I venture to guess that if they saw us
formally aligned with the British for the duration, they would be
likely to take a milder rather than stronger attitude toward us.
Needing principally smaller vessels in the Atlantic, we could base our
main Battle Fleet on Singapore and confidently await any move Japan
might make. Our declaration of war might well force Japan out of the
Axis.
China, like Britain, would be given the most precious possession in
warfare, the assurance of final victory. For even if Japan continued
to fight China, once the Allies’ main task was performed and Germany
defeated, the combined British and American navies could be counted
on to bring Japan back to reason without much difficulty. On all the
other countries, as neutral Portugal, non-belligerent Spain, encapsuled
Sweden and Switzerland, the effect of our going to war would be
revolutionary. Our South American friends would become even better
neighbors. All over the world the conviction that now Germany will
be defeated would become the decisive element in the policy of every
government.
Q. _But would we really go to work if we did declare war? Britain
didn’t at first and neither did France. What makes you think we would?_
A. You are right. It took Dunkirk to wake Britain up and France never
did awake; she passed without regaining consciousness from deep sleep
to death. Perhaps we too would not awaken even if we went to war, but
we will never awaken until we do go to war. Most nations in this war
have remained curiously apathetic until their first battle experience;
this may be true of us. But the fact of our being actively belligerent
would be bound to improve our spirit since it would put our moral
position right. Ever since the beginning of the war we Americans
have suffered from a divided personality. Half of our minds clung
to the idea that we could keep at peace if we wished for peace hard
enough, and this half declared: “It is not our war.” This half of our
minds made the Neutrality Act. The other half of our minds realized
all along that we should have been in the war from the beginning,
that Hitler was fighting to conquer the world, that it was for us a
matter of life or death to keep him from succeeding and that every
consideration of self-interest, as of honor, urged us to take our full
part in the world-wide struggle against the new Barbarism. This half
was responsible for the Lease-Lend Bill, a half-measure, condemned by
the very definition: “All aid to Britain _short of war_!” Our souls
remained divided, and this division has made us an ailing nation,
hypochondriac, complaining of low morale, nervous, and subject to fits
of depression alternating with elation. We are unreasonably discouraged
or cheered as the tide of battle ebbs and flows, and always we try to
interpret whatever happens as a sign at last that we do not have to do
our duty, that after all we can get out of this task, so onerous, so
painful, and so unavoidable.
Completely opposite arguments are employed to prove that we may escape
our obligation. If the British suffer a setback, up goes the cry: “The
British are already beaten; there’s no use trying to save them now;
let’s not throw good money after bad.” If the British win a victory,
there is a rousing cheer: “The British are winning without us; thank
God now we will not have to fight.” When I came home from the Battle
of Britain, it struck me as it had struck many others who have come to
America from the war zone, that we were far more nervous and agitated
than the peoples at war, even and especially more than those under
actual heavy bombardment. Eve Curie, that admirable French patriot and
gallant fighter for civilization, who was one of our group when we
escaped from France, put it perfectly when she said: “There is no fear
in the countries which are fighting. Extraordinarily enough, fear has
gone somewhere else, to the countries which are not menaced, to the
countries ‘at peace.’”
Is there any reason to suppose that our reactions would be
substantially different from those of the peoples at war? Once we
take a bold stand for the position we know to be just, right, and
inevitable, we shall for the first time since this war began, lose our
fear and become well, strong, hopeful, and proud. The sense of guilt
which has made us nationally unhappy will leave us and we shall rejoice
in a clear conscience.
Q. _What effect would our declaring war have upon the morale of the
Army, particularly on that of the selectees, which has been criticized
so much?_
A. Going to war would unquestionably cure all the troubles of the Army
sooner or later. It is not our soldiers’ fault if today in peacetime
they are restless and discontented at being compelled to do what must
seem to them very like playing at being soldiers. Would the spirit of a
football team be good if the team did nothing but practice football all
day long, month in and month out, and never played a game, and had no
games scheduled? What would be the spirit of a cast of players if they
had rehearsals every day for months and never staged a performance to
an audience, and had no performances scheduled?
Q. _From your travel throughout the country have you formed any
impression of what the morale of the Army actually is?_
A. Yes, from personal observation, I have reluctantly had to admit the
impression that many of the selectees, at any rate, do not understand
why they are in the Army, nor why there should be conscription, nor why
their period of service was extended. In a word, they have no desire
to fight. Now this could be a most serious matter, since any nation
is doomed if its youth, or any considerable number of them, are not
willing to fight for it, yet this mood would vanish on our entry into
war. The boys are not to blame. To blame are all the leaders who have
confused and deceived them, the teachers who taught them pacifism and
the isolationist politicians who do the work of Hitler. One of the
elements most confusing in the Army mind is the promise rashly made in
the presidential campaign that we should never engage in a “foreign
war,” a promise no American should have made because nobody except
Hitler had the power to fulfill it.
Now we are paying the penalty democracy always has to pay for hypocrisy
and for deceptions in elections. The penalty is the state of mind
exposed in a questionnaire taken at Camp Callan, San Diego, among
selectees, and published with elation by an isolationist journal. The
soldiers answered: (a) Should the United States go to war with the Axis
immediately? Affirmative, 1 per cent. (b) Should the United States
continue its policy of all-out economic aid to Britain and expand
America’s military and naval forces in order to fight the Axis powers
overseas if the Axis powers are not defeated by Britain? Affirmative,
25 per cent. (c) Should the United States guard the Western Hemisphere
but send no military aid outside this area? Affirmative, 39 per cent.
(d) Should the United States be strictly neutral and prepare to defend
only our own territory and possessions? Affirmative, 37 per cent.
These answers would have distressed Count Leo Tolstoy if Tolstoy were
an American living today.
Tolstoy, who was as great a student of war as he was a novelist, has
a formula whereby he could interpret this poll and give us a rough
estimate of the military effectiveness of an army made up of soldiers
with the attitude revealed by this questionnaire. In _War and Peace_,
his epic novel on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, he says: “_In warfare_
the force of armies is the product of the mass multiplied by something
else, an unknown X. X is the spirit of the army, the greater or less
_desire to fight_ and to face dangers on the part of all the men
composing the army.” Note that Tolstoy says “_desire_ to fight” not
just “_willingness_ to fight.” The emphasis is on the positive desire
not passive willingness. This is another way to express the paramount
importance of morale. What is morale? It is knowing what you have to
fight about and having the desire to fight for it. But only one per
cent of the selectees questioned indicated they knew what they had to
fight about and desired to fight; one-third thought we ought to be
“strictly neutral,” and three-fourths were against fighting anywhere
outside of our hemisphere.
Q. _The selectees evidently had been influenced by the arguments for
passive hemisphere defense, but what do you think of the argument that
we should never fight on foreign soil, but if we have to fight, let it
be in America?_
A. It reminds me of the Chinese and the Japanese soldiers at the
beginning of their war. I saw the fall of Shanghai, and I couldn’t help
but remark that while the Chinese soldier said, “I will die for China,”
the Japanese soldier said, “I will kill for Japan,” and so for a long
time the two got along perfectly together. For every American who may
declare, “I don’t want to fight on foreign soil; if I have to fight I
want to fight only at home,” there is a German who declares, “I don’t
want to fight at home; I fight only on foreign soil,” as the Germans
have consistently done to the best of their ability for the last
hundred years. May we never accommodate the Germans in this respect.
Surely of all the isolationist arguments this is the least intelligent,
to prefer that the fearful destruction of war be wrought on our own
homes. It is an argument you will never hear in our Southern states.
Q. _What should we do with conscientious objectors?_
A. Reason with them. Many honest conscientious objectors can be
converted by the right kind of reasoning, and the more honest they
are the easier it is to straighten out their misunderstandings. If
this fails then they ought to be given work to do at some enterprise
of national interest, and be compelled to do it, as the government is
now doing in its camps for conscientious objectors. If they refuse to
register, they go to jail, as no government could afford to tolerate
deliberate defiance of its laws. We as a democracy must observe the
rights even of a minority which would bring ruin upon the country
if its policies were to rule. This is something we can be proud of,
something that marks us more than any other one thing as different
from the tyrannous Nazi state where conscientious objectors and every
variety of pacifist or obstructionist is put to death. We can afford
to treat our objectors as we would defectives. Hitler has to kill his.
He held from the beginning that pacifists were the greatest danger
to the state, and from the moment he came to power he has sought out
and executed every German pacifist who has revealed himself. Hitler
thus proves he feels that pacifist doctrine would be dangerous to his
regime, as it would.
The German nation is being led by Hitler in _aggressive_ war.
Opposition to aggressive war is a form of pacifism which makes sound
sense. The war we and the British are called upon to fight, a war
we did not want but are compelled to carry on in order to save our
national lives, is a war that even a pacifist ought to support.
In this war the man who refuses to fight for his country is like
a person in a lifeboat who refuses to pull an oar. In England a
conscientious objector was asked at his examination whether he would
do non-combatant war work. He answered, “No.” The Judge asked “Would
you not help build an air-raid shelter?” The man answered, “No.” The
Judge then asked, “But if there were an air raid on would you go into
a shelter someone else had built?” The man answered, “Yes.” I wonder
how many of the 1,800 young Americans who have been classified as
conscientious objectors would contend that this is honest, and yet
it is fundamentally the attitude of all conscientious objectors. The
nation shelters the lives, liberty, and property of all its citizens.
Everyone living in the nation is enjoying this protection. Everyone has
a primary obligation to help maintain it. In England today, however,
the government permits more than 40,000 registered conscientious
objectors to enjoy the protection of the air-raid shelters, and of the
Royal Air Force, Army, and Navy, without contributing to it. Is this
not a tribute to the invincible liberalism of Anglo-Saxon democracy?
The conscientious objector had a better case in almost all other wars
than he has in this one. The modern pre-Hitler war had a superficial
course something like this: The victor occupied the vanquished country,
made a peace treaty, collected an indemnity, then withdrew to his
own country with what loot he could carry. A part of the vanquished
country might be annexed to the victor. The defeated nation smarted
under the humiliation but in time the population resumed its ordinary
life, and within a few years a stranger could hardly find signs of any
change as a result of the loss of the war. A pacifist might argue that
under these circumstances it would pay not to resist since the loss by
fighting would be greater than the loss by nonresistance, considerable
though that might be. This is not that kind of war. Hitler does not
intend to restore the sovereignty of the nations he conquers. All
Hitler’s wars are more or less Carthaginian. For as long as Hitler
remains the master, his vanquished will be slave states, with their
citizens chained to the Nazi machine, their women degraded, their
religion persecuted, their schools closed, their books burned, and
all this will continue until Hitler is overcome by force. It is not a
choice between greater or lesser evils. It is a choice between life and
death, for those who physically survive under the Hitler tyranny are
condemned to a living death, as the Poles can testify.
Most of the great pacifist leaders have been converted by their
observation of Hitler. Albert Einstein was thought of as the world’s
greatest pacifist, but he abandoned the doctrine of non-violence after
only a few months spent under the Hitler regime before he escaped to
America. On his way here Einstein passed through Belgium and in an
interview published in a Brussels newspaper declared: “If I were a
young Belgian today, I would not refuse military service.” From a man
who all his life had been a militant pacifist, taking part in world
campaigns against war, this statement ought to persuade any young
man. Britain’s leading pacifist, Bertrand Russell, has likewise been
persuaded to give up his “isolationism” and to advocate that we give
up ours, because the airplane, annihilating distances, has made it
impossible for any nation “to secure peace for itself by isolation.”
But Hitler is more persuasive, it seems to me.
Hitler writes that the Germans “will give what many blinded pacifists
hope to get by moaning and crying,” namely, “a peace, supported not by
the palm branches of tearful pacifist professional female mourners, but
founded by the victorious sword of a people of overlords which puts
the world into the service of a higher culture.” And again he wrote:
“Indeed the pacifist-humane idea is perhaps quite good whenever the
man of the highest standard has previously conquered and subjected the
world to a degree that makes him the only master of this globe.” That
is surely clear enough to convince the most conscientious objector that
if everyone refused to fight Hitler he would conquer the world, and as
President Conant of Harvard says, men would have no more freedom than
horses have now. It is not pleasant to have to agree with Hitler, but
one must admit he defined the conscientious objector correctly when he
declared the healthy, unspoiled boy would willingly give his life for
his country and thus “obeys the deeper necessity of the preservation
of the species, if necessary at the expense of the individual,” while
the pacifist egotistically puts his interest ahead of the nation. The
charge of cowardice is easy to make, and I for one shall not make it.
I prefer to think of most conscientious objectors as men who have not
thought the problem through. After all, one of them was named Sergeant
York.
Q. _Why don’t we have a department in our Army to tell the soldiers why
they are in uniform?_
A. We have a morale section in the Army but it cannot operate
effectively until we are at war. It is forbidden to discuss “politics”
with the soldiers and it would be “politics” now to explain that they
are in uniform to fight the Germans. Yet nothing could be more valuable
for our war effort than to have qualified men visit each army camp,
and after a series of public lectures on America and the war, conduct
a question-and-answer period, followed by individual conferences with
soldiers interested enough to ask for them. Officers would probably
benefit as much from such instruction as the men.
One of the most useful departments of the German Army is its morale
section which teaches a recruit above all things to be proud to be a
soldier, and that it is the highest honor for him to be permitted to
fight for his country. It is my impression that we would have to be
even more elementary than that. Some American youths need to have it
explained that from time immemorial the young men of a family, a tribe,
or a nation have been by nature required to be its physical defenders;
that the old men, women, and children have other duties to perform,
but the young men are the only ones strong enough to go out and fight.
Statements as simple as that are necessary after our last twenty years
of pacifism and materialism. Too many times young men have asked me why
they should fight for a society they do not approve, a society which
does not provide them with good jobs and a comfortable life. The answer
is that if they do not understand now, Hitler will provide a sufficient
explanation later, as the pacifist students of the University of Paris
found out when the Germans occupied their city and shot a score of them
as a lesson.
Hitler will make it plain that this is no class war. Hitler will make
it clear that it is a simple tribal war of a brute soldier-state bent
upon the subjugation of all other states and peoples, good, bad, or
indifferent, and of all classes. The English have learned this is no
class war and every kind of Englishman, rich and poor alike, are united
now in one great fighting tribe. Our youth could learn from the example
of the youth of conquered Europe that if they do not successfully
defend their country, imperfect though it may be, they will be
conquered and cast into slavery.
It would be useful to point out that this generation of American youth
is alive and enjoying the privileges of this country because other
young men years ago and centuries ago fought and defeated the enemies
of America. It would clear up many a young soldier’s difficulties if
he were given an explanation in the simplest language of the origins
and issues of the war. Many of them hardly know the bare facts of who
is fighting whom. The American soldier has a right to be given the
overwhelming evidence that Germany intends to destroy the American form
of life, and subjugate us if she can; and that just now while Britain
and Russia are absorbing so much German energy is the best time for
us to defend ourselves by the only method of defense that has ever
succeeded, by attack; by striking with all the power we possess at the
enemy while he is still far from our shores. The American soldier
should understand that much as we may wish for it, there is little
hope that Britain and Russia alone could defeat the mighty German war
machine, built as it was during the nine years while we slept. He
should understand that this means we must fight in Europe, help destroy
the German Air Force, invade the continent, and finally occupy Germany;
that this will require every available resource of muscle and money and
brain and blood and several more years of war, but that the reward for
this immense payment is the immense reward of freedom. The American
soldier has a right to have outlined to him the kind of world Hitler
would make if he won; and the kind of world we hope to make if we win.
This is the ABC of war, and it is what our soldiers desperately need,
but it is unlikely that they will get it until we go to war.
It takes a great deal of re-education to counter the last two decades
of intellectual rule by our “Irresponsibles,”--professors, writers,
artists, and scholars who debunked our past history and every ideal,
taught that man’s economic life is all that matters, that soldiers are
suckers, that we fought the last war for J. P. Morgan, and so on until
bewildered American boys exclaimed: “My country owes me a living; I
owe it nothing.” Yet that is not youth’s natural way. Hitler won the
German youth not by offering them fun or comfort or material reward; he
appealed to them to sacrifice themselves for their Fatherland, and they
responded joyously, “like demons,” as Colonel Schieffer said. Nobody
can persuade me that our American youth would not respond even more
joyously to an honest appeal, but the appeal has to be clear, simple,
ringing as the notes of a bugle in the morning. Let the cynics and the
selfish jibe, but American youth will eventually respond to the call of
President Roosevelt for the Four Freedoms, not just for themselves, but
for all the world.
Q. _But weren’t we suckers in the last war?_
A. No, we were not suckers in the last war. By fighting and beating
Germany in the last war, side by side with our Allies, we won
twenty-three years of national independence.
Q. _But didn’t we fight the last war to “make the world safe for
democracy” and to “end all war”? We certainly failed to do either.
Weren’t we suckers to have tried and failed?_
A. Don’t you think it was worth while for us to gain the right to live
in peace and freedom from 1918 to 1939 even if we failed to achieve
our whole program? We did not fight the last war just “to make the
world safe for democracy” or to “end all war.” We fought the last
war primarily to make the world safe for the United States, and we
succeeded in that for a good many years. The world has not been safe
for democracy everywhere for a score of years, but only now do we find
it necessary to fight again because only now has it become plain that
the world is again no longer safe for the United States. In the last
war we fought first to preserve America, second to make the world safe
for democracy, and to end war. In this war we are fighting first to
preserve America, second to establish the Four Freedoms everywhere we
can, but we modestly refrain this time from announcing that we expect
to end war. Instead we have much more practically declared that when we
win we will disarm the nations that made this war.
Q. _But what difference would it have made to us if we had not entered
the last war at all?_
A. It would have meant that the Germans probably would have won the
war. The Commander in Chief of the Allies, Foch, and the actual
Commander in Chief of the Germans, Ludendorff, both admitted that the
American entry into the war was decisive. It was not that America “won
the war,” but that without us the Allies could not have won.
Q. _Suppose the Germans had won the last war; what difference would
that have made to us?_
A. If the Germans had won, we should certainly have had to fight
them thereafter and fight them alone. We may have had a few years
respite, long enough for the German Navy to become strong enough to
challenge ours. The general situation today is parallel with the one in
1914-1918, except that Hitler’s Germany is much more powerful and evil
than Hohenzollern Germany. Nevertheless Kaiser Wilhelm had the same
ambition Hitler has. He believed also that the Germans were a master
race, with a divine mission to rule the world. The Germans came late
to nationhood, too late to receive “their share” of the colonies. This
helped give them a bitter sense of resentment against a world which
refused to recognize their superiority. This German belief that they
are superior to everyone on earth is unfortunately strengthened by the
fact that in this industrial age they are among the most talented of
all peoples, and in the natural sciences superior to most others. They
have proved themselves incorrigible except by force.
Q. _Some people argue though, that Hitler actually wants the United
States to come into the war, so that we would keep our war supplies,
instead of sending them to England and to Russia. Is this true?_
A. How could it ever have been true, since Hitler always, at any
moment, could have brought us into the war if and when he wished. He
has only to order one or more of his transatlantic submarines to come
over and sink a few American ships in our territorial waters and even
a pacifist Congress would vote war. A score of other easy devices have
always been at his hand if he wanted war with us, but wished us to
declare it. But why should he wish to bring against him the greatest
single potential power, even if he thought that our entering formal war
would cause us to withhold supplies from Britain and Russia? And what
is there anyway to make anybody think that if we ever became sensible
enough to go to war we would at the same time become so unintelligent
as to cripple the war effort against our enemy? What point would there
be in withholding supplies from Britain and Russia just because we had
gone to war with Germany? Would we in the United States be in any more
danger after having gone to war than before? No, we would actually be
safer, since the safety afforded us by the British Fleet’s control of
the Atlantic would now be augmented by removal of all limitation on the
use of the extra power of our own Atlantic vessels. Suppose, however,
that we thought it desirable for a time to curtail some shipments to
the Allies while we filled in certain gaps in our own armament. Could
this temporary diversion of strength outweigh the danger to Hitler of
America’s strength in the long run?
I venture to say that this argument against our going to war has done
as much harm as almost any other, and upon examination it seems it must
have been of German origin, despite the fact that many a good American
and even some good Englishmen have thoughtlessly repeated it. The
person most competent to judge whether Hitler wants us in the war is
Hitler. As I recently recollected when looking over some old clippings,
Hitler in an interview in 1932 expressed it to me this way: “I was
a soldier in the war and it was my conviction that without American
participation on the side of the Allies, we would surely have won the
war.” This is what he thought of America in the last war. You may be
sure he thinks exactly the same of America in this war.
Q. _But the Germans have frequently expressed not merely indifference
but contempt of us, and have spoken as though they did not care
whether we entered or not. Isn’t it then an exaggeration to say that
our declaration of war would have such a tremendous effect on their
morale?_
A. No, because the Germans have expressed indifference to whether we
enter the war only because they were absolutely convinced that we would
not do so; when we do enter the war it will be an even greater shock
than if they had anticipated it all the time. Our official behavior
for a long time, and the utterances of our isolationists all the time,
led the Nazis to believe we were really for peace at any price; that
nothing, neither injury nor insult, could move us to war. When the
first Neutrality Act was passed in August, 1935, the Germans, as I have
recently been reminded by a friend who was in Berlin at the moment,
chortled with glee, and editorials boasted that now Europe could settle
its troubles secure from the meddlesome Yankee. No one can estimate
how much influence this surrender of American rights had upon Hitler
during that critical time when he was weighing his strength against all
his possible enemies. The Germans are convinced we are a money-loving
people and when the Johnson Act was passed, forbidding credit to any
nation in default on payment of its debt to us, they exclaimed: “Now
the Americans will never go to war again because they can’t make money
out of it.”
The Johnson Act almost persuaded some Germans that we had changed
sides, and Nazis revived their chatter about the essentially Germanic
character of America. We Americans may be wishful thinkers, but the
Germans, fortunately, are even more addicted to the vice than we.
Goebbels’ control of the press promotes it. Every isolationist speech
made is printed at length in the German newspapers and the voice
of Lindbergh is taken as the voice of America. The re-election of
Roosevelt was the first warning the German people had that America
might act to defend herself. Now sensible Germans are beginning to be
frightened. I know how the German people regard America. They call it
the “land of unlimited possibilities.” It has always been the dreamland
of the Germans, and if our immigration laws had permitted it, we should
have had tens of millions of Germans coming to this country after the
war. The tremendous size and economic power of America fascinate all
classes of Germans; they have never forgotten the shock they received
when, after the armistice in 1918, they learned for the first time what
their government had concealed from them, that there were over two
million American soldiers in France. Hitler tried to stamp out German
admiration or regard for any foreign country, and doubtless German
successes in this war have influenced the German attitude to a degree,
but the fundamental element in German thought about America is their
ineffaceable memory of the last war: “America joined our enemies; we
lost. If America goes to war against us again, we cannot win.” It would
be decisive.
Q. _But where would we fight Germany? What is the good of America’s
entering the war if there is no battleground?_
A. We would fight her first where we are fighting her now, in the
Atlantic and on all the seas. The difference between our naval action
if we were at war and as it is under the President’s orders to hunt
down pirates, would be considerable. At war we would fully collaborate
with the British Navy in the critical waters along the coast of Europe
and in the zone of greatest danger just west of England where the
Germans sink about nine-tenths of their victims. The reason the Germans
have been so much more effective in counter-blockading England in this
war than they were in the last war is of course the airplane, which not
only bombs and sinks as many ships as the submarine, but also provides
the submarine with eyes in the air.
Our air force, and especially our naval air force, greatly augmented
after our entry into the war, would play a large role in cleansing
the air of these German raiders. Eventually our air force operating
with the R.A.F. and based wherever the R.A.F. is based would, we hope,
become strong enough to dominate the air over the continent. That is
the goal toward which all efforts lead; it would be the turning point
of the war. Experts estimate that it will probably take two years to
reach quantitative superiority over the Germans, and then only if we
are not only formally at war but actually making war with all our might.
The site of the battlefields after the winning of the Battle of the
Atlantic and the Battle of Britain, depends upon too many unknown
factors to make more than a guess now. Possible landing places for an
expeditionary force extend from Norway to the Spanish frontier, North
Africa, the Near East, and the Balkans. There are also the immense
possibilities opened by the Battle of Russia. In considering the
possibilities of success for an expeditionary force to invade German
Europe we ought not to be discouraged by the failure of the Allies
in Norway, Greece, and Crete, because the German Army’s morale and
strength will be quite different whenever the conditions for invasion
of the continent exist. It was the German Air Force which, more than
any other factor, defeated the Allies in these three early affrays.
When the Luftwaffe has lost control of the daylight air and the German
Army is still further weakened by its colossal losses in Russia, and
the German people are weighed down by the fear of ultimate defeat and
apprehension of vengeance, and the population of conquered Europe,
elated at the prospect of liberation, is revolting, the chances of
success for an Allied Expeditionary Force would be strong. Military
experts are agreed that it would court disaster to try it before these
conditions are fulfilled. Ever since the Battle of Russia began,
impatient groups in England have clamored for an immediate attempt at
invasion of the continent, and one can imagine how painful it must
be for the perpetually aggressive Churchill to be forced to counsel
prudence. He knows that if such an attempt were made and failed it
could be fatal. On the other hand, if the Allied High Command waits for
the favorable circumstances which are to be expected if we enter the
war, we could justly hope not only to be able to invade the continent
successfully but at low cost.
Q. _Would United States troops be required for such an expeditionary
force? Are we going to have another A.E.F.?_
A. I should think so, although one must admit the bare possibility that
the Battle of Russia could make our participation with land troops less
necessary militarily, although the political reasons for our entry
would be strongest if the Red Army were winning. If the Russians were
to whittle down the German land army sufficiently, the British might
become strong enough eventually to deliver the knockout blow alone, but
I doubt it. There are just twice as many Germans as there are English,
and numbers still count, as we observe in Russia. A cool appraisal of
the future indicates that the chances are against our being able to
win the war without sending an A.E.F. If we go to war, it cannot be
with any reservations. We cannot make war on a limited liability basis.
There are strong reasons also for us to want to be represented in the
armies of liberation. By the time matters have reached the stage for
contemplation of an invasion of Europe, the temper of America may have
so changed that there may be a great popular demand for an A.E.F.
Q. _What are the strong reasons for our wanting to be represented with
the armies of liberation?_
A. In order to be fully represented at the peace. There is no
substitute for an army at a Peace Conference, and we may be sure that,
no matter what arrangements may be made between Mr. Churchill and Mr.
Roosevelt, if we are not in the war we will not be in the peace. There
were many jokes about the famous eight-point meeting to the effect
that we were trying to get in the peace before we got in the war. I do
not agree that that was the purpose of Mr. Roosevelt in meeting Mr.
Churchill, but if it were, it is unlikely to succeed. We will have the
influence we wish to have at the peace conference only if we have done
our full share in making peace possible by beating Hitler. We ought
not to deceive ourselves. We are unpopular enough as it is now. If we
stay out of the war, and by a miracle not now foreseeable, Hitler were
after all to be defeated, what do you think the victors would think of
us? Do you think they would invite us to come in and tell them how to
rearrange the world?
Yet if we do not look forward to establishing a peace which will
postpone for a long time, if not forever, a repetition of this war,
many Americans would feel too discouraged to act. We would be foolish
not to fight the Germans now even if we were mathematically certain
that we were going to have to go on fighting them once every twenty
years for the rest of time. Nevertheless we do not want to face such a
prospect; we want to rule out war for as long a time as possible, and
we can do it only by repairing at this Peace Conference the errors made
after the last one.
These errors were not what they have been represented to be, faults
in the Versailles treaty. The mistake we made was that we dodged our
responsibility for the peace after we had helped finish the war. First
we invested our blood and treasure, and then after the victory, when
we were about to gather the dividends of international security and
prosperity in the League of Nations, suddenly, because everything in
the peace did not completely please us, and because a few politicians
hated the President, we withdrew and declined to collect our profits.
This ruined the peace, made the League impossible, and another war
certain.
Q. _How much American blood and treasure did we spend in the last war?_
A. Very little blood compared with our Allies. Out of our total
mobilized force of 4,355,000 we lost 126,000 dead of all causes, or
two and one-half per cent. Out of the total of 17,314,000 British and
French soldiers, 2,266,171 lost their lives, or 13 per cent. If we
had been compelled from 1914 on to fight as totally as our Allies,
with our population more than double the combined French and British
populations, we would have lost more than 2,000,000 dead during the
time we were leaving the fighting to our Allies, from 1914 to 1917. We
sent money instead; altogether our war loans totaled thirteen billion
dollars. It is fair to say that this investment of money took the place
of investment of lives. It cost us less than $7,000 apiece to save
2,000,000 American men’s lives. Any insurance company would call that
a bargain, considering the American man merely from the point of view
of what he is economically worth to his nation. Nevertheless we asked
for the thirteen billion back. At the same time we put up our tariffs
so high that the nations concerned could not pay, but aside altogether
from the economic aspect of our war debts, consider what could have
happened had we been wiser.
Suppose, at an appropriate period after passions had subsided, we
had proposed to Britain and France that we cancel the war debts if
they would cancel the reparations owed by Germany. There was a time
when such a proposal might have succeeded. What would have been
the probable, or at any rate possible, outcome? No war debts, no
reparations, no inflation in Germany, no Hitler, no war now. Even if
there were only a chance of such miraculous results, it would have
been well worth trying, since the actual results of our unenlightened
egotism were that we were never paid the money anyway, and the chain of
reparations--inflation--Hitler--brought us to this war upon which we
are planning already to spend as a mere first installment four times
as much as the whole sum we lent the Allies and lost in the last war.
It is significant that the very men who urged that we press without
respite for full payment of our World War debts, and thus helped make
this war inevitable, are the very men who today continue to try to make
America shirk her responsibilities.
Q. _Do you think a new League of Nations could be successful, since the
old one failed so miserably?_
A. Yes, if we do our duty and make it possible for the League to work.
We blew the old League up when we refused to join it, and rejected the
Versailles treaty and declined to join France and England in a treaty
of mutual guarantee. With us not participating, the League was doomed
from the start. Our withdrawal from Europe upset the balance of power
so heavily in Germany’s favor that France, and eventually Britain, had
to make out of the League a coalition against Germany. This they did.
Even so it failed to keep the peace because Germany was stronger than
all the League members together. Had we stayed in the League we might
have made collective security really work.
Q. _How could America have made the League work?_
A. There is a popular belief that Germany might have remained a good
neighbor and respectable member of society if the Weimar Republic had
been better treated by France and her Allies. I am not sure of that,
but if it is true, let us ask why France treated Germany harshly
throughout the life of the Weimar Republic. The answer is that France
was afraid of Germany, and as we see today, with good reason. The
French fear was based on the facts that there were twice as many
Germans as French, and that these Germans had just about beaten France
and all her Allies, including Great Britain, until the United States
stepped in. Obviously the French reasoned the United States’ protection
was indispensable to French security. Without the United States in
the League the French had to look for security elsewhere. They sought
it in encirclement of Germany and conversion of the League into an
anti-German alliance.
If you object that the League is impracticable, let us ask what
there is to put in its place. I use the term League to indicate any
association of nations for collective security. Isolationism was our
policy from 1919 to 1941. Its failure has been cosmic. The group of
Senators and Congressmen who killed the League by preventing us from
joining it were as responsible as Hitler for the war today. Twenty-two
years later the political successors of Wilson’s “willful men” made it
appear to Hitler and Mussolini and the war party in Japan that we would
never stir and that aggressors could leave the United States completely
out of their reckoning. Many of these men in the Senate and the House
are today, as the isolationists were in 1919, actuated chiefly by an
ignoble hatred for their political opponent, the President.
Carlton J. Hayes, professor of history at Columbia, says: “We were the
final determining factor in winning the last World War, but more than
any nation, even more than Nazi Germany, we have been responsible for
losing the peace and bringing on the present world war. We insisted
on our rights and spurned our duties. Victim ourselves of a bad kind
of narrow nationalism, we repudiated the League of Nations which our
President had fashioned and we thus set the pace for all of its later
floutings by other powers. Moreover we selfishly and shortsightedly
refused to forgive the inter-Allied debts and thereby prevented any
timely forgiving of the fateful German reparations. The result is that
Germany now has Hitler, while we are accumulating a debt for national
defense which makes the inter-Allied debts and the reparations of the
last war seem trivial.”
Q. _If we did defeat Germany, could we then return to the kind of
peaceful lives we led before this war began?_
A. No, but the defeat of Germany is the indispensable condition for
us to have any kind of tolerable life again. After this war, which is
likely to last many years still, we are going to be a different nation.
We are going to be more united than ever before. We are going to have
shared common dangers, hopes, and fears, and for the first time since
the Civil War we are going to rise above our materialism and act for an
ideal.
We have never had to face real trouble together since the thirty
million new members of our family arrived between 1870 and 1930. We did
not really suffer in the first World War; we never had a chance to test
the strength of our arms or the temper of our spirit. How many times
have we heard the question asked, whether we were “really” a nation?
Now we shall have the chance to prove that we are. Now America will
come of age.
7. FIFTH COLUMNISTS
Q. _What makes Lindbergh the way he is?_
A. I am glad you asked this question because Lindbergh is our greatest
native individual threat to American safety and so deserves careful
scrutiny by his fellow citizens who some day may be compelled to decide
what to do with him. There is nothing to be gained by abusing him, nor
is there any merit in arguing that his sincerity ought to protect him
against the charge that he assists America’s Fifth Column.
Hitler’s most effective Fifth Columnists in every country have for
the most part been sincere men, but their sincerity has not relieved
them of the verdict of the fellow citizens they betrayed, nor of the
verdict of history. The President of the United States has delivered
that verdict upon Lindbergh already. In the most polite and restrained
language he classified Colonel Lindbergh as a “Copperhead,” which was a
Civil War name for a man in the North who sympathized with the Southern
cause. Translated into today’s situation it would mean an American
citizen who sympathizes with the enemy of America, Germany.
You recollect the President was asked why Lindbergh, who was given a
reserve commission in the Army Air Corps after his flight to Paris, had
not been called into active service. The President replied that during
the Civil War both sides let certain people go; that is, did not call
them into service.
He said the people who were thus ignored were the Vallandighams,
and explained that the Vallandighams were the people who from
1863 on, urged immediate peace, arguing that the North could
not win the war between the states. The President’s reference to
Vallandigham sent many to their reference books where they found
that Clement Laird Vallandigham, an Ohio Congressman “in 1863, made
violent speeches against the administration and was arrested by the
military authorities, tried by military commission and sentenced to
imprisonment. President Lincoln commuted his sentence to banishment and
Vallandigham was sent into the Confederate lines, whence he made his
way to Canada.”
President Roosevelt was choosing his word carefully, in order to get
the precise shade of meaning attributed to it. The President apparently
tried to find in American history as accurate a parallel to the
Lindbergh case as possible. His choice was significant. It would be
interesting to know if the President had in mind that when this country
is formally at war with Germany we shall incarcerate or deport members
of the community who for whatever reason and with whatever motives
hinder the prosecution of the war. The expulsion of Vallandigham to
the enemy’s territory raises the question of the physical possibility
as well as the political expediency of deporting our Fifth Columnists
to German-controlled territory after we are formally at war. Few of us
will dispute the desirability of just such a radical solution.
Lindbergh replied to the President by resigning his commission in
a letter saying, “I had hoped that I might exercise my right as
an American citizen to place my viewpoint before the people of my
country in time of peace without giving up the privilege of serving my
country as an Air Corps officer in the event of war.” Thereafter many
professional critics of the President accused him of having attempted
to gag Lindbergh. But the very opposite is the case since if the
President had wanted to shut Lindbergh’s mouth, all he had to do was
to call him to active service where the rule is universal that serving
officers may not make public political statements.
It should be remembered that Lindbergh, although a reserve officer,
had violently attacked his Commander in Chief’s actions in the field
of foreign policy, which naturally involves military affairs, and this
could certainly be regarded as a breach of discipline in the spirit if
not in the letter of the officers’ code. If President Roosevelt had
wished not only to muzzle, but to discipline Lindbergh, nothing would
have been easier than for the President to have ordered the Colonel to
duty in some obscure, remote, or unpleasant post, a frequent method of
discipline in the armed services of all countries. But the President
did nothing of the sort. On the contrary, by accepting Lindbergh’s
resignation he released the flyer from any hindrance to the free speech
which he has since been exercising so vigorously.
But Lindbergh is far more dangerous to American security than was
Vallandigham a danger to the Union in our Civil War. Lindbergh is
already the avowed candidate of our enormous crop of Copperheads for
the Presidency of the United States. He has the applause of the enemies
of democracy and of the United States throughout the world. A Belgian
businessman, a devout “collaborationist” with the Nazis, told a friend
of mine recently, “Lindbergh will be the next President of the United
States. He could get along splendidly with Hitler. We are all for him.”
By “We” this Belgian meant the entire herd of Hitler followers, from
his own disciplined legions to the servile rabble of Vichy France and
the Copperheads of the United States. Whether Lindbergh welcomes it or
not, he has the enthusiastic applause of the Nazi Bund, the Fascist
societies, and of all the most violently antidemocratic groups in this
country, from the followers of Father Coughlin to the most eccentric
Kluxers.
Q. _But are we being fair to Lindbergh in calling him a Copperhead and
a Fifth Columnist? Didn’t you say yourself that there is nothing to be
gained by abusing him?_
A. Yes, I maintain there is nothing to be gained by abusing him, but
there is much to be gained by identifying him. Nobody has done it any
better than the country’s wittiest enemy of our enemies, Alexander
Woollcott, in his “Voice from a Cracker Barrel” broadcast, when he
said: “By the pledges of both candidates in the last election, by
the testimony of every poll yet taken by Dr. Gallup, by the action
of our representatives in Congress and of the President himself, we
pledged full aid to England. Ex-Colonel Lindbergh now argues that this
assistance be withdrawn.
“He wants us to break our promise in the matter, to run out on the
British, and, so curious is his mentality, he thinks to encourage us
in such base desertion by assuring us that England is going to be
defeated. On this point he may be right. I would not know about that.
Neither would he. If the words of our retired eagle ever reach as far
as England, Mr. Churchill must derive some comfort from his knowledge
that all fighters in a tight place have heard such talk since the world
began. Among Washington’s discomforts during the long winter at Valley
Forge was the repeated prediction from the Lindberghs of his day that
he didn’t have a chance. Yes, Lindbergh keeps announcing the doom of
England, and always his statement is received with cheers and bursts of
applause. This gives you a rough idea of what kind of people bulk large
in his mass meetings.
“For here is a fact which Lindbergh and his colleagues of the America
First Committee must face. Whether they admit it or not, whether they
like it or not, whether, indeed, that is any part of their purpose,
they are working for Hitler. Have you any doubt--any doubt at all--that
Hitler would have been glad to pay Lindbergh an immense amount,
millions, for the work he has done in the past year?
“Indeed, if Lindbergh shares the opinion of Hitler held by the rest
of us--on this point, to be sure, he has thus far been ominously
silent--his heart must skip a beat when, in the still watches of the
night, he realizes that if he had returned to this country as Hitler’s
paid and trusted agent, his public activity would have been in every
particular just what it has been to date.
“Now don’t get me wrong about this. I doubt that Lindbergh has taken or
would take German money. It so happens that we do not know, and, thanks
to the reticence of General Wood, have been unable to find out just
who has put up all the money for the costly goings-on of the America
First Committee. But I should be greatly surprised to learn that any
considerable part of that money came directly or indirectly from
Hitler. That does not alter the fact that they are all working for him.
For they, like the rest of us, are trapped in a tragic irony. In this
world today there is no such thing as neutrality. You are either for
Hitler or against him. You either fight him or you help him.”
Q. _Why can’t we put Lindbergh away somewhere now, so he can’t do any
more harm?_
A. It is certainly an index to the feelings of the vast majority of
the American people that despite the fact that Lindbergh and Senator
Wheeler can draw large crowds of their Copperhead followers, I have
received hundreds of questions like the one you ask, and there seems to
be little sectional, geographical difference in American feelings on
the subject.
Just as many have made the inquiry in California as in Texas or
Pennsylvania. The answer is that we cannot, and if we reflect upon it,
we do not want to put any limitations upon free speech for American
citizens in peacetime. Until we are actually at war it is the right of
every American to advocate, if he likes, that we should ally ourselves
with Germany and go to war against Great Britain. The distinguishing
characteristic of democracy is not merely that the majority shall
govern, but that the majority should always give to the minority
exactly the same rights and privileges as the majority enjoys.
We often overlook the fact that this is the essential nature
of democracy. Rule by majority may obtain under any successful
dictatorship. Hitler undoubtedly has a strong majority of Germans
behind him and will probably continue to have it until he falls by
force from abroad. But that does not make his rule democratic. He
refuses to give the minority opposing him any rights whatever. He
considers it contemptible weakness of the democracies that they should
protect the rights of their minorities, and even of minority groups
who, if they were to come to power, would abolish democracy.
Here is our central difficulty. We recognize that Lindbergh and his
followers, the Nazis and Fascists, as well as that other antidemocratic
group, the American Communists, would destroy America as we know it if
they were successful in their policies. Yet if we suppress them for
anything less than formally treasonable acts, we shall have violated
the most precious tenet of democracy. Giving aid and comfort to the
enemy in wartime is a formally treasonable act, and we may take
consolation in the fact that Wheeler and Lindbergh and their lesser
associates are not likely to be able to continue after we have gone
to war to render to Hitler the aid and comfort they now render him.
At this moment, when we are not yet in a formal state of war, about
the most effective control that can be exercised over Lindbergh and
his associates is for the President to have identified him publicly
as a “Vallandigham,” and for others to do what they can to expose his
purposes.
Q. _Why do you single out Lindbergh for special attention, since there
are many others of equal prominence who are also helping Hitler, such
as ex-President Hoover, Senators Wheeler and Nye, Congressman Fish, and
so on?_
A. No, they are not of equal prominence, not even the ex-President,
because Lindbergh had something that appealed so profoundly to America
that he has not lost it all yet, and he towers in influence above our
other isolationists, some of whom are plainly patriotic but deluded
citizens. Lindbergh, however, is, I am convinced, mainly responsible
for the long hesitation of this country to go to war to defend its
life. I do not intend to impugn Lindbergh’s sincerity, but surely there
is something wrong with a man who declares as he does that we should
not go to war, among other reasons, because we are not united, then
does his utmost to disunite us still further.
Mayor La Guardia, in his capacity as Director of Civilian Defense,
pleaded at a mass meeting in Philadelphia for all Americans not in
agreement with the Administration’s foreign policy not to do or
say anything that might give aid or comfort to a potential enemy.
Exactly twenty-four hours later, stepping on La Guardia’s heels,
Lindbergh addressed another mass meeting in Philadelphia and attacked
the President of the United States in terms so violent that they
were widely interpreted as calling for a revolution against the
Administration.
It was that famous speech which he was compelled to retract in part
since it alarmed so many even of his followers. Mrs. Kathleen Norris,
the novelist, a prominent member of the America First Committee, and
present on the platform with Lindbergh, told reporters that afternoon,
in answer to a question, that she could “swear that no member of the
committee is mixed up with any subversive activity.” “Subversive” means
“tending to overthrow, upset, or destroy,” which is precisely what
Lindbergh’s speeches attempt to do to the Administration of the United
States.
None of the isolationist crowd can compare with Lindbergh in
importance to the Fifth Column in America. From the point of view
of American national security and the future of this country he is
America’s Public Enemy Number One, because he was once so incomparably
America’s National Hero of Heroes, and some American people still hope
that now from their former idol, politically unbranded, apparently
disinterested, they can finally get the truth and the light. For
the most part, Americans do not realize what has happened to their
National Hero, although fortunately throughout the country there is a
deep-seated distrust of anyone who has taken up an attitude so palpably
favorable to the nation’s enemies.
Q. _What is the reason for the divorce between Lindbergh and the
American people who used to worship him unanimously? The crowds he
has at America First rallies may number thousands--mostly Nazis and
their sympathizers, I take it--but Lindbergh used to have 130,000,000
Americans cheering him._
A. Yes, what is it that has happened to Lindbergh to cause such a
radical change? In 1927 Coolidge called him “noble”; in 1941 Roosevelt
said he was “not wanted.” What a contrast! I have just finished reading
for the first time Lindbergh’s book called _We_, as he referred to
himself and his airplane, the _Spirit of St. Louis_, containing
the story of his life and flight. It moves one to sadness to look
back and remember the way that world of long ago reacted to the
twenty-five-year-old American’s feat. Many of us have forgotten that
the flight itself became secondary to the world’s intoxication over the
event.
Lindbergh received a more spectacular ovation, attended by more
persons, who were more excited, in France, Belgium, England, and the
United States than had ever been given any human being in the history
of the world by any of the multitudes which have welcomed conquerors
and kings.
Consider the terms used by President Coolidge in referring to
Lindbergh; “this sincere and genuine exemplar of fine and noble
virtues”; “illustrious citizen”; “this genial, modest American youth
with the naturalness, the simplicity and the poise of true greatness”;
“this wholesome, earnest, fearless, courageous product of America.” And
as if this were not enough, Coolidge read off a list of “some of his
qualities noted by the Army officers who examined him for promotion,
as shown by reports in the files of the Militia Bureau of the War
Department:
“‘Intelligent,’ ‘industrious,’ ‘energetic,’ ‘dependable,’ ‘purposeful,’
‘alert,’ ‘quick of reaction,’ ‘serious,’ ‘deliberate,’ ‘stable,’
‘efficient,’ ‘frank,’ ‘modest,’ ‘congenial,’ ‘a man of good moral
habits and regular in all his business transactions.’”
And then President Coolidge went on to say that “One of his officers
expressed his belief that the young man ‘would successfully complete
everything he undertakes.’ This reads like a prophecy.”
Heaven protect the American people if Lindbergh succeeds in his present
undertaking, because he has undertaken now to keep America from meeting
her peril before it becomes overwhelming. He wants us to wait until the
only allies left in the world for us are stricken down and we stand
by ourselves to face a combination of powers stronger than we and
unappeasably resolved to destroy us.
He has undertaken this task apparently as a sort of crusade. We are
assured that his father before him, Charles Lindbergh, Congressman
from Minnesota, also possessed the Lindbergh sincerity as he declaimed
throughout the last war against American participation. We recognize
sincerity, persistence, and courage as admirable qualities when linked
with a just cause, but the possession of them only makes the matter
worse when they are associated with a disastrous and cynical policy.
You ask “cynical”? Yes, Hitler, for example is a sincere cynic, and
so is Lindbergh. His policy shamelessly declares we should withdraw
aid from Britain, coolly watch her fall, and then as quickly as
possible trade with Hitler and make what we can out of the defeat
of civilization. Lindbergh genuinely sees nothing to be ashamed of
in advocating such a policy, and that makes him deserve the title
“sincere.” It is nevertheless as cynical as any Nazi could invent. We
could stomach that if the cynicism were realistic. It is not. This
would-be smart policy has no more chance to succeed than the would-be
Machiavellian policy of Mussolini, who has given the world its least
appetizing sight of the war: the avowed brute too feeble to be brutal.
Lindbergh’s personality is important to us all, since he has assumed
office as a member of what they would call in England “the disloyal
opposition,” and so it is not too minor a point to note that of all
the qualities he was ever credited with, the quality of generosity is
lacking. Witness his experience with France and England. To France
and the French people he owed the beginning of the ovation which was
to make his fame and fortune, and he acknowledged his debt this way
in _We_: “The whole-hearted welcome to me--an American--touched me
beyond any point that words can express. I left France with a debt of
gratitude which, though I cannot repay it, I shall always remember.”
That was the old Lindbergh, or rather the young one, still unspoiled.
Thirteen years later, when France stood more in need of a friend than
ever in her long and troubled history; when a mere gesture of American
solidarity with her cause might have put heart in her bewildered troops
and kept the enemy at bay; when the word of a Lindbergh could have been
effective in the awakening of American public opinion to our obligation
not to let France fall, for our own sake as well as for hers; Lindbergh
spoke. He spoke against America’s giving France any aid whatever.
It was May 20, 1940 and the Germans stood on the Somme. Lindbergh’s
broadcast summarized everything he has had to say since: “Years ago we
decided to stay out of foreign wars. We based our military policy on
that decision. We must not waver now that the crisis is at hand. There
is no longer time for us to enter this war successfully.”
I was with the French at that time and can testify that Lindbergh’s
words struck France like a blow between the eyes. The famous Lafayette
Escadrille announced that it had deprived Lindbergh of his honorary
membership. Lindbergh’s response to England was identical. He took
his child to England after he had suffered his great family tragedy
in America, and in England he received everything he desired: quiet
hospitality and all the privacy he has said he wanted. But when
England stood with her back to the wall, and once again the American
attitude to the war became decisive; and once again the voice of a
Lindbergh could have worked powerfully to shake our people into the
tardy realization that this time would be the last time and that if
we did not awaken now we might never be given the chance again; when
our people needed to realize that the fate of America was inextricably
bound up with the fate of Britain, and that if Britain fell our hopes
would all become forlorn; then Lindbergh spoke.
Now, he declared, we should cease to aid Britain in any manner, because
Britain was beaten, Germany had won, and we had better make the best
terms we could with the conqueror. With the total lack of shame
which characterizes Hitler’s and Lindbergh’s political philosophy he
declaimed in the same speech of June 16, 1940 that, “Fortunately, the
wide wall of the Atlantic stands between us and the shooting that is
going on.” It is, of course, the strong wall of the British Navy that
stands between us and the shooting that is going on, but Lindbergh has
never admitted that the British Navy plays any role in keeping the
Germans from crossing the Atlantic; his implication is that the water
of the Atlantic constitutes the sole hindrance to German passage.
This incomprehension sometimes reaches a degree which is puzzling to
an observer convinced that “at any rate Lindbergh is sincere.” Some
obviously honest Americans argue that we can successfully hold aloof,
but can any American really believe as Lindbergh said in his speech
at the opening of the war, September 16, 1939: “These wars in Europe
are not wars in which civilization is defending herself against some
Asiatic intruder. There is no Genghis Khan or Xerxes marching against
our Western nations. This is not a question of banding together to
defend the white race against foreign invasion. This is simply one more
of those age-old struggles within our family of nations.”
If Lindbergh believes this, he has failed utterly to understand what
Hitlerism is, or if he understands it, then he must approve of it; and
we surmised some months later with the publication of Anne Lindbergh’s
_The Wave of the Future_, that he was indeed a convert. Surely it is
not the color of Hitler’s skin and of his Nazi warriors that make
the difference, nor their geographic home. Lindbergh implies that if
they were yellow-skinned and came from Tibet, he would understand and
perhaps not oppose our fighting them, but being white and living in
Central Europe they cannot, he implies, be enemies of civilization.
This and other examples of Lindbergh’s apparent naïveté, or as Raymond
Clapper put it once, his childishness, are not the result of an obtuse
mind, but the consequence of his having constantly to hide one element,
the most important element in his political attitude, and that is his
secret approval of the totalitarian idea and of the German Nazis’ right
to conquer.
This is too unpopular an idea to admit publicly now, and the
concealment of it leads to the most glaring discrepancies in his
arguments. Only a person who approved of Hitler could deny that he is
waging a war against civilization. Only Lindbergh can tell how far he
approves of Hitler’s right to conquer. We can observe that in other
countries, as France, men who talked before the defeat as Lindbergh
does now, were elevated to power in Hitler’s puppet government.
I was in England when Lindbergh delivered the first of his broadcasts
calling it “just another war,” and putting both belligerents on the
same level. The British were hurt. They felt that a man whom they had
considered a friend had let them down. They did not know that he had
never been a friend, but beneath a serene, impenetrable demeanor had
harbored an antipathy for England which has contributed to making him
“the way he is.”
This antipathy he has more than once documented, as in the _Collier’s_
article when he wrote the astounding sentence: “We in America should
not be discussing whether we will enter _the war that England
declared in Europe_.” Let those who set such store by the quality of
sincerity ask themselves if anyone on earth, including a German, could
_sincerely_ define the present war as one “that England declared in
Europe.”
Q. _But you still have not explained why Lindbergh is the way he is.
You have only defined what he is._
A. Very well, but this is merely a personal interpretation of what
built his character and formed his motives. I believe in the importance
of emotional causes for most of men’s attitudes, and so I should
like to mention these causes first. The young Lindbergh, as one can
discover from _We_, seems really to have been possessed of the virtues
catalogued by President Coolidge. He became the Lindbergh of today
only after his flight. First came the initial impact of the hysterical
reaction of the world to his accomplishment. It is bound to have
affected him, and it did, despite the fact that he appeared to the
public as still the simple, modest, somewhat shy boy who carried with
him on his flight an introduction to the American Ambassador to Paris.
It took the public a long time to learn otherwise, because from the
moment of his landing in Paris until only a comparatively short time
ago, Lindbergh was protected by the press of America in a way that
could happen only in this youthful country of hero-worshipers. When
America has a hero, he remains a hero of purest ray serene, and no flaw
may be found in him, and if any are privately discovered by newspaper
reporters, or others, they are carefully hidden. This is our standard
behavior toward heroes, but in the case of America’s hero of heroes the
inhibitions voluntarily imposed by the press upon itself were Spartan.
In newspaper parlance a sacred cow is an individual who for reasons of
policy must be protected from criticism. Every newspaper has its sacred
cows. Lindbergh became the Supreme Sacred Cow of all the newspapers
in America. Long after it became apparent to the working newspapermen
who came in contact with him that he had succumbed to the adulation
poured upon him and had completely lost that original modesty which
had endeared him to the American public, perhaps above all his other
qualities, and that he had, in fact, become impatiently egotistic,
and convinced that he “knew it all,” he still was represented as the
unassuming young man who aspired only to be left alone. He complained
that the press would not let him alone, gave him no privacy, harassed
him. Publicity, he declared, he hated worse than anything in the world.
Newspapermen nevertheless observed that he and Greta Garbo appeared to
have the same technique, and that he managed always to behave himself
in such a way as to receive the greatest amount of public attention.
The normal cycle of publicity received by a celebrity of the type of
Lindbergh was summed up by Sinclair Lewis. He and I were standing
at the bar in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin a few days after Lindbergh
landed in Paris, and the world had gone mad over him. It seemed as
though never had such adulation been poured upon the head of any young
man, and those who were not joining in the almost universal blaze of
hysterical feeling were curiously examining the blaze, wondering what
made the world go crazy.
Surely there had been more heroic exploits, even in the realm of
aviation. The flight of Bleriot over the Channel in the primitive
machine at his disposal in 1909 has been estimated a more important
feat; while the flight of John Alcock and A. W. Brown from Newfoundland
to Ireland, June 14, 1919, although almost forgotten in the din of
Lindbergh’s ovation, was not only the first transoceanic flight, but
considering that it was made eight years before Lindbergh’s with a
machine correspondingly less modern, should rank as a greater feat. All
these things were subjects of discussion, but Sinclair Lewis settled
the matter by saying: “It doesn’t matter. Lindbergh is the best-known
man in the world today, but ten years from now he will go into a hotel
in Detroit and sign the register, ‘Charles A. Lindbergh,’ and the room
clerk will say ‘Lindbergh? Yes, Mr. Lindbergh, Room 502. Boy! Show Mr.
Lindbergh his room,’ and the clerk won’t know him from Adam’s off ox.
That’s the way it is with fame. He has come by his with incredible
speed; it will go the same way.”
But it did not. Lindbergh saw to that by behaving so eccentrically at
times that even his mother-in-law, Mrs. Dwight Morrow, has been heard
to complain of it. I was in London at the time of the birth of his baby
there. Lindbergh for reasons of his own withheld formal announcement of
the birth until long after it had taken place and the fact was known to
so many persons that eventually the newspapers, although with British
reticence, carried the report and queried Lindbergh to his great
annoyance.
“I said to Charles,” Mrs. Morrow exclaimed to a friend, “if you want to
avoid being bothered by the press, why don’t you simply announce the
birth of your child? After all he’s normal and born within wedlock.”
Douglas Corrigan confirmed the judgment of Lindbergh’s mother-in-law.
“Wrong-way Corrigan,” who flew to Ireland in the alleged belief that he
was flying to California, was a devoted disciple of Lindbergh. I met
Corrigan in Dublin shortly after he landed, and I remember two things
he told me which shed some light on Lindbergh’s character. I was
almost the first newspaperman to see Corrigan, and in our introductory
conversation the little Irish flyer, whose flight in many ways was more
remarkable than Lindbergh’s, said: “I’m not going to do like Lindbergh
and be hounded to death by newspapermen. He refuses to see them and
won’t say anything for quotation and makes himself so mysterious that
they never have stopped going after him. If he had only opened up to
them from the very first and never refused to see them, very soon
they would have let him alone. That’s what I’m going to do--tell you
anything you want to know, and go on seeing anybody who wants to see
me, and pretty soon you will all get tired of it.”
Corrigan did just that and it all worked out exactly as he had
planned. He was soon left in peace and never suffered from Lindbergh’s
complaint. If Lindbergh had behaved as Corrigan did, there never would
have grown up between American newspapermen and himself the secret feud
that required all his prestige as national hero to keep under cover.
You may say that Corrigan’s flight could not be compared to Lindbergh’s
in its sensational appeal as the first solo flight across the ocean.
Yes, but in another way the obscure little Irishman’s flight was the
more audacious of the two. Lindbergh had a plane specially constructed,
the finest money could buy. He had lavish financial backing, friends
to help him at every turn. Corrigan had nothing but his own ambition,
courage, and ability. His plane, a nine-year-old Curtis Robin, was the
most wretched-looking jalopy.
As I looked over it at the Dublin airdrome I really marveled that
anyone should have been rash enough even to go in the air with it, much
less try to fly the Atlantic. He built it, or rebuilt it, practically
as a boy would build a scooter out of a soapbox and a pair of old
roller skates. It looked it. The nose of the engine hood was a mass of
patches soldered by Corrigan himself into a crazy-quilt design. The
door behind which Corrigan crouched for twenty-eight hours was fastened
together with a piece of baling wire. The reserve gasoline tanks
put together by Corrigan, left him so little room that he had to sit
hunched forward with his knees cramped, and not enough window space to
see the ground when landing. It had cost Corrigan $325, saved nickel by
nickel.
The inspiration for all of Corrigan’s sacrifice was his hero worship of
Lindbergh. As a young mechanic Corrigan had helped build the _Spirit
of St. Louis_ in the Ryan Airlines plant in San Diego, California, and
from that time on he had lived for but one ambition, to emulate his
hero. The older flyer had millions of admirers but none could have been
more fervent than the little mechanic who once wrote, “It was often
necessary to work till midnight on the _Spirit of St. Louis_ and then
come back at eight the next morning, but everyone was glad to do that
as they all seemed to be inspired by the fellow that the plane was
being built for--Lindbergh.”
When Corrigan landed in Dublin, it was an event sufficiently
sensational, and the “wrong-way” aspect of it so eccentric, that the
world gave its attention and hundreds of cables and radiograms poured
into the American Legation where the Minister, John Cudahy, had given
Corrigan quarters. Every hour scores of congratulations were reaching
Corrigan but he was visibly unhappy. I asked him what was the matter.
“No cable from Lindbergh,” Corrigan replied. “That was the thing I
wanted most of all. Maybe it will come later.” It never did come.
Lindbergh never found time nor inclination to send the single word
which would have meant more to Corrigan than all the other applause and
rewards he won. I have related this to friends of Lindbergh and their
answer was, “Typical.”
After the first uproar over Lindbergh’s greatest flight had subsided
somewhat, he made his good-will flights. His marriage to the gifted
Anne Morrow, daughter of the brilliant Morgan partner, Dwight Morrow,
linked him now with America’s greatest financial house, and put the
Swedish immigrant’s son definitely in the category of those who have
a stake to protect against social disturbance, and the consequences
of war. The fact that the marriage was a love match, and that his wife
had every quality of a distinguished person and was a poet in her own
right, helped establish Lindbergh even more firmly in the affections of
the American public. The American feeling toward him had mellowed from
hysterical hero worship to what seemed to be a love which would endure.
Then came the heart-breaking tragedy of the kidnaping and murder of his
child. All fathers, all mothers, throughout the world suffered with
the Lindberghs. Years later during the Spanish Civil War, when I was
imprisoned by orders of the Gestapo in San Sebastian, with me was a
Spanish workman who that night was taken from the cell and shot, and
I remember how just before the door opened and he was summoned by his
executioners, he was discussing the Lindbergh kidnaping.
The world-wide outpouring of sympathy with the Lindberghs during
that woeful period of their lives was surpassed only by the intense,
personal, national compassion of America for them in their pain. Now
Lindbergh had become no longer just the national hero, but one for
whom the nation felt the intimacy of suffering shared. He responded by
leaving the country with his family to quit the scene of their sorrow,
to find a sanctuary to heal their wounds, to escape public attention,
and to find a safety for his children he felt he could not find in the
United States.
This was the turning point of his relationship with his country. His
country was ready to forgive because it felt it could understand his
need for a refuge, but for Lindbergh his residence abroad was a true
renunciation of democratic America, and this I believe to be the key to
his subsequent political activity and his present defiance of the vast
majority of his fellow citizens.
He found his sought-for refuge in England where he was given every
consideration. The door of every home from Buckingham Palace down
was open to him, but the British afforded him all the privacy he
wanted. If it had been only privacy he sought, he could have led a
restful secluded life in the country home of Harold Nicolson, his
father-in-law’s biographer, and could have remained at peace until
Hitler disturbed it. Lindbergh spent just enough time in England to
convince him that England was soft, England couldn’t take it, England
would lose if it ever went to war. It was bad luck that Lindbergh
should have lived in England during a time when it _was_ soft, just
as we are soft today. It was the England of pacifism, faith in the
principle that if you want peace badly enough you can have it, just
by refusing to fight. It was the England of the Oxford Union when the
debating society boys voted not to fight “for King and Country.” It was
the England which needed waking up, just as we need it today. It was
an England that could get hard, if it had the time, just as we can get
hard too, if we have the time.
But Lindbergh formed his opinion of England then, and from his public
speeches he seems too stubborn to allow even the epic heroism of
England today in battle to change his judgment. Nicolson, long-standing
family friend of the Morrows, mailed Lindbergh a postcard every
week during the Battle of Britain, when the people of England were
persevering under a hurricane of bombs and were calling it their
“finest hour.” Each postcard had the one sentence: “Do you still think
we are soft?” Perhaps he still thinks so, long after the Germans
have stopped thinking so. At any rate, he left England for a tour of
the continent, and thereupon came the second turning point in the
development of his political views.
When he left America he left it embittered by the tragedy of his child,
and he left convinced that it would never have happened except in a
corrupt, gang-ridden democracy. It was, indeed, one of the lowest
periods in America’s public life, when kidnaping for ransom had become
widespread for the first time in any modern civilized state, and the
power of the gangs was a national humiliation. In a sense it was true
that it was the fault of democracy, but the virtue of democracy is
that slowly but almost always sooner or later we correct the faults
and bring under control the license which ever threatens democratic
liberty. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, had not grown up
when Lindbergh fled America.
He visited many places on the continent, but the visits to Germany and
the Soviet Union were decisive. Here were crystallized the political
ideas which had been fermenting within him ever since he felt the
thrill that came with the first taste of power over the throngs of
Americans gathered to adore him. In Russia he found the object of his
political hatred: the poverty, squalor, dirt, inefficiency, and cruelty
of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. He was treated well by the
Bolshevik authorities, who as Russians regarded him as an artist, a
genius of the air, a man who, like a great singer, could be considered
outside of politics.
His political slate was up to that time blank. The Russians often
welcome foreign celebrities supposed to be without politics. They gave
Harpo Marx a cordial reception. Lindbergh was shown the Red Army, its
Air Corps, the aviation factories, and no doubt the Bolsheviks thought
he was impressed. A layman traveling through Russia is shocked at the
wretched state of the people, their poor clothing, bad food, their
brutal overcrowding. You may be sure that this was not the prime object
of Lindbergh’s attention. Lindbergh is not interested in human beings.
He is interested in machines. In Russia he saw the poorest machine
he had ever seen. He observed that the ponderous Bolshevik society
operated with an unparalleled waste of man power and with unmatched
inefficiency. He saw the Soviet Air factories, and declared he detected
the slovenly workmanship which mars all Soviet production. He reviewed
portions of the Red Army Air Corps and registered his opinion that most
of the planes were obsolete or obsolescent.
In Nazi Germany Lindbergh found the object of his political admiration,
even affection, for here at last he had found the perfect machine.
Not only was it the antithesis in every material respect of the
Soviet Union, a streamlined, chromium-plated, eighteen-jewel model of
totalitarian clockwork, compared with the dilapidated Soviet jalopy,
but the Nazi machine also promised to banish the Soviet menace from the
face of the earth. Lindbergh had in Germany first an aesthetic delight
in the efficiency of the machine, then a moral satisfaction in the
thought that it would eradicate the blot of Bolshevism.
Finally a personal consideration came to him. The kidnaping and death
of his baby could never have happened in Nazi Germany. Common crime
was almost unknown in Nazi Germany. He failed to reflect that under
the dictators crime is reserved as the monopoly of the State, and that
from any normal human standpoint there is more crime committed in Nazi
Germany in a year than in America in ten years of its most besotted
gangster period, only in Germany it is all committed by the State.
Lindbergh loved Germany.
He saw the great Army, then in the last stages of readying itself to
spring upon Europe and set out to conquer the world. He saw the great
Luftwaffe, and Goering himself “surprised” him by pinning the Service
Cross of the Order of the German Eagle with Star on his breast before
he could help himself. Lindbergh has not yet divested himself of his
Nazi decoration. He laid down his commission because he quarreled with
the President of the United States, but he has no quarrel with Hitler.
Lindbergh was so delighted with the whole atmosphere of this perfectly
functioning totalitarian machine that he was contemplating making
his residence in Berlin, where an American news agency reported
that the apartment of a Jew, liquidated in the monster pogrom of
November 1938, had been offered him. He stayed long enough to become
convinced that the Nazis were the wave, which, whether we liked it
or not, would eventually engulf the world. Lindbergh liked it. Here
were no democratic gangsterism, corruption, private crime. Here were
no Bolshevik slackness, squalor, waste. Here was the New Order, of
superior men, like himself, of tall, blond, blue-eyed Aryans, like
himself, of Nordics, like himself. He felt among his own kind.
The Terror, the concentration camps, the murderous persecution of the
Jews and political opponents, the suppression of free speech, of the
press, of worship, even of thought and conscience! What of it! This was
only the scum on the wave of the future, and as for the suppression
of the press, _that_ at least was no scum, that was sheer progress.
The literal enslavement of a whole population! Well, they like it,
don’t they? What of the fact that the entire machine and every part
of it was built for war, and for war which if successful in Europe
would eventually reach and thrust at the heart of America? Nonsense,
the Germans could whip Europe all right, indeed Lindbergh declared his
conviction they would, but they intended no harm to America. He knew,
because hadn’t they been nice to him, an American? Anyway, he wouldn’t
say anything about it in public, but if the truth be known, America
could go a long way and do worse than by emulating some of the Nazis’
virtues.
Liberty? Bah, Lindbergh would take order and efficiency any day ahead
of liberty and inefficiency. Besides, Lindbergh was one of the class of
superior men, superior in talent, ability, and comprehension of what
society needs, who in a totalitarian state would enjoy all the freedom
he wanted since his ideas would conform with those of the rulers and he
would belong to the company of masters of the New Order. He had nothing
to fear from a Nazi conquest.
With these thoughts in mind Lindbergh returned first to England
and told them they had better give up because the Russians were no
good and the Germans knew it, and the Germans were strong enough to
conquer all Europe, and the proof was in the air forces he had just
inspected. His advice was believed to have had something to do with the
disaster of Munich, when Britain and France, convinced their cause
was hopeless, lost a war without fighting it. In every point of his
argument Lindbergh had agreed with Hitler, and in every point Lindbergh
and Hitler were correct, save in one point. They made a mistake about
England.
When England recovered from the shock of Munich, she began to throw
off her weakness and get tough. But Lindbergh had left for America. He
did not have time to see England recover the manhood which seemed lost
when he was there. Lindbergh came home now bursting with a message,
eager to lead, anxious to play a political role, and resolved as he has
been all his life to be content with nothing less than the greatest
role. “Lindbergh will be the next President of the United States. He
is our man.” So said the Belgian friend of the Nazis. The British
Lindbergh, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, is
on the political bottom; he is in Brixton prison. Mosley is no less
sincere a man than Lindbergh. Vidkun Quisling is on the political top;
he is Hitler’s man in Norway. The political future of Lindbergh will
obviously depend largely upon whether Germany or our side wins the war.
Q. _Why did Lindbergh attack the Jews?_
A. Because anti-Semitism is an integral part of Hitlerism. If you
are not against Hitler you are for him, and if you are for Hitler
you will be compelled, sooner or later, and whether you intend it or
not, to become an anti-Semite. Every country now under Hitler’s heel
has officially sponsored and promoted anti-Semitism. It was easy to
read Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism between the lines of his references to
the “foreign” influences at work in America. He waited only until he
thought the time ripe for his public announcement, but the results
proved his calculation wrong. His statement against the Jews brought a
roar of repudiation from all creeds and classes of the nation, and the
only approval came from the group around Lindbergh who constitute what
might be called the America First’s Quisling Committee. Lindbergh’s
anti-Semitism could be sufficiently explained on the ground of
temperament. He admires, he understands, and loves only machines and
he could hardly be expected to understand or appreciate, much less
approve, the spiritual values which for thousands of years have upheld
the Jews through adversities which would have annihilated scores of
more numerous but less faithful communities.
Q. _What is to be the fate of the Jews?_
A. If Hitler’s power is not destroyed, if Hitler were to win, all Jews
under his domination would be condemned to slow death. Why slow? Why
doesn’t Hitler kill them all at once? Because he enjoys watching them
suffer, has a sadistic pleasure in it; because he needs their labor
power for the menial tasks to which he assigns them; and because he
probably feels that until he conquers the whole world it would be wiser
not to outrage what there is left of world opinion.
Besides, Hitler finds the Jews useful wherever he wishes to divide a
conquered population, as in France where the hostages he shoots are for
the most part called Jews or Communists. Every time he shoots a Jewish
hostage he says to the non-Jews, “You see, if it were not for your
Jews, you and I could get along perfectly together!” By this device of
making the Jew the scapegoat, he works to arouse anti-Semitism among
the vanquished and anti-Semitism in any form anywhere is the most
faithful handmaid of Hitlerism.
Therefore, he has not completely eliminated the Jews from any part of
his territories, but has allowed to remain, under conditions of the
most abject servitude, 200,000 out of the original 660,000 in Germany
proper; 40,000 out of the original 190,000 in Austria; 100,000 out of
380,000 in Czechoslovakia; 20,000 out of 156,000 in Holland; 30,000 out
of 63,000 in Belgium; an estimated 380,000 native and foreign Jews in
France, occupied and unoccupied; 750,000 in Hungary, including everyone
with one-quarter Jewish blood; 300,000 in truncated Rumania; 97,000 in
Latvia; 177,000 in Lithuania; 5,000 in Esthonia; and 100,000 in Greece.
These figures are cited by _The American Hebrew_. Poland must come
in a separate category since there Hitler has apparently set out to
exterminate the 3,000,000 Jews without the restraint he seems to have
put on himself elsewhere.
Nobody knows how many of the Polish Jews have died; their fate is only
more dreadful than that inflicted upon the entire Polish population.
Sober observers believe that twenty per cent of the Polish population
as a whole have been killed or have died as a result of the two
years of German and Russian occupation. If this is true, then of the
6,000,000 dead, one must reckon that at least 1,000,000 are Jews.
Whether this figure is too high or too low, the obvious intent of the
Germans in Poland is to wipe out the Jews altogether, and the wonder is
that any at all are living today.
In Soviet Russia the 5,000,000 Jews are not subject to any official
discrimination, but suffer as the rest of the population from the
generally wretched conditions of life aggravated by the war. These
conditions of life in the Soviet Union would be intolerable under
normal circumstances, especially since the Jews, like other faiths,
have been deprived of the facilities formally to practice their
religion, but now that Europe under the Nazis has become a charnel
house for Jews, the Soviet Union must seem like a haven of refuge.
There seems to be no alternative for the Jews except that they suffer
death at the hands of Hitlerism, or that Hitlerism be destroyed. It can
be destroyed better with the outspoken, avowed help of the Jews of the
world, and especially the Jews of America.
It is shocking, indeed, to observe the names of a few Jews on
isolationist committees, and one wonders what mental processes have
brought them there. Do they imagine that if America remains aloof
and Hitler wins the rest of the world, that the Jews, or any other
Americans, will be safe? No, if Hitler wins the rest of the world, the
Lindberghs of America will boldly put their anti-Semitism to work, and
the fate of the Jews in America will approximate that of their brothers
abroad. There is no choice for the Jews of America but to put all the
strength of their bodies and souls and purses to work against the enemy
of all mankind. There is no reason for them to apologize for fighting
the universal scourge. The anti-Semite is a friend of Hitler. The
friend of Hitler is the enemy of the United States.
Q. _I would like to read you a passage from a speech of Lindbergh
delivered shortly after the German invasion of Russia, and ask you
what you think of it, as it is quite confusing to me. The passage
reads: “The longer this war in Europe continues, the more confused its
issues become. When it started Germany and Russia were lined up against
England and France. Now, less than two years later we find Russia and
England fighting France and Germany. Winter before last, when Russia
was fighting Finland, the interventionists demanded that we send all
possible aid to Finland. Now, when Russia is fighting Finland again
they demand that we send all possible aid to Russia.... Finland and
France are now our enemies; Russia our friend. We have been asked to
defend the English way of life, and the Chinese way of life. We are
now asked to defend the Russian way of life.... Judging from Europe’s
record, if we enter this war, we can’t be sure whether we will have
Germany or Russia for a partner by the time we finish it. We don’t even
know whether we will end up with France or England on our side. It is
quite possible that we would find ourselves alone fighting the entire
world before it was over.”_
A. The confusion is of Lindbergh’s own making. There is a simple key
to all the apparent contradictions he brings out. The key is that
Hitler Germany was, is, and will remain the enemy until Hitlerism is
destroyed. The correct way to express the relationships which Lindbergh
has put so confusingly is: All nations fighting Germany are fighting
on our side; all nations fighting on the side of Germany are fighting
against us. When a nation, for any reason, switches sides, for or
against Germany, it automatically switches sides for or against us.
The question of friendship, of liking for any of these nations, or of
approval of their “way of life” does not decide the matter. The matter
is decided solely by the effect the particular nation is having on
Germany’s war.
Let us examine each of Lindbergh’s statements in turn. He says the
longer the war continues, the more confused its issues become. Not at
all--the longer it lasts the more plain it becomes that the issue is:
Germany against the world. Do not be confused by the fact that some
countries which were fighting Germany, now come out on Germany’s side.
As Germany conquers one country after another, she attempts to force
them into fighting for her, as in the case of France. No matter what
Hitler’s puppet government in France does, we know that the true France
is no friend of Germany, but an implacable enemy. Napoleon at one time
had half a dozen armies raised from among the peoples he had conquered,
marching under his banners. But the moment Napoleon suffered reverses,
they revolted. So it will be with Hitler.
Finland’s position is easy to understand if you reflect that she was
so much subject to Hitler’s coercion that she had to behave almost
as though she too had been conquered. It would have been suicide if
Finland, resisting Germany’s demands that she join the German side,
should have had to fight both the German and the Russian armies. That
way Poland was torn to pieces. It would have been unthinkable that
Finland, so recently mutilated by Russia, should have admitted the Red
Army to her territories. It was inevitable that Finland should choose
the lesser of two evils. And so we, understanding Finland’s plight,
must classify her on Germany’s side and embargo goods to her. But we
can still think of her as a friend, and only as a technical enemy by
force of circumstances.
The position of Russia is equally clear. Bolshevik Russia, the Soviet
Union, is nobody’s friend, and never pretended to be. She, like
Germany, is “against the world,” and by making the pact with Germany
at the beginning of the war she expected to see the world eventually
collapse and become her loot. Now that Germany has forced Russia to
fight, Russia should enjoy every material aid we can give her. As long
as she continues to fight Germany, we should do all we can to help
her blows injure our enemy. So it is only in order to confuse us that
Lindbergh phrases it the way he does: “Finland and France are now our
enemies; Russia our friend.”
Lindbergh says we are asked to defend the English, the Chinese, and now
the Russian way of life. It would not make any difference to us if the
English, the Chinese, and the Russians lived like lizards, crocodiles,
and alligators, so long as they were aiding directly and willingly
as the British, or directly though unwillingly, as the Russians, or
indirectly as the Chinese, to protect us by opposing our enemies. We
are only helping ourselves when we help them.
Lindbergh ends: “It is quite possible that we would find ourselves
alone fighting the entire world before it was over.” No, it is not just
“quite possible,” it is absolutely certain that we will find ourselves
fighting the entire world if we do not intervene to save some part of
the world to fight on our side.
Q. _In one of Lindbergh’s speeches he made the statement that “the only
reason we are in danger of becoming involved in this war is because
there are powerful elements who desire us to take a part.” Is this
true?_
A. There are powerful elements who desire us to take part, namely all
the intelligent patriotic Americans who wish to defend their country
while there is yet time, but that is not what Lindbergh meant. He is
using veiled language to express what his admirers, the Nazi Bundists,
the Fascists, and the Kluxers say openly when they charge that America
is being “driven into war by the Jews, the international bankers, and
the armaments manufacturers.” It is a rule of the politics of this era,
as Alexander Woollcott pointed out, that if you are not against Hitler,
you are for him, and sooner or later, willingly or unwillingly you
become lined up for all the things he stands for, some of which you may
not have wished to embrace, as racial hatred, anti-Semitism, and the
rule of the man with the gun.
The rich men in the America First Committee of Lindbergh and General
Wood, fancy they are protecting their investments by lining up against
beating Hitler, but if they permit him to win they will lose their
wealth as surely as if they had helped run up the Red Flag.
Q. _Can you give us a brief, objective resumé of Lindbergh’s argument
against our entering the war?_
A. Yes, he has set it forth very clearly in his “Letter to America”
published in _Collier’s_ magazine, where his principal ideas are
summed up, without any omission save the fact of his contempt for
the democracies and his admiration for the totalitarian system. It
runs as follows: England and France have only themselves to blame for
their defeat. (He takes for granted that England is defeated.) First,
because they did not make a reasonable adjustment with Germany while
there was still time. Second, because they made the Versailles treaty
too harsh to appease Germany and too lenient to hold her down. Third,
because when Germany rose under Hitler they did not take advantage of
the last chance to stop him when they could, at his reoccupation of the
Rhineland in 1936. They were always too late, and now we in America are
too late to stop him. We are unarmed and unable to fight. We have not
as many thoroughly modern fighting planes in our Army and Navy combined
as Germany produces in a single week. “If we enter the war now, it
would mean humiliation and defeat.” It is impossible for us to invade
Europe. On the other hand, it is impossible for Germany to invade us.
They cannot invade us by air over Greenland because it is too cold, nor
by way of South America because it is too far, and the South Americans
with our aid could prevent them from constructing landing fields. We
can stay out of the war, make ourselves impregnable, and afterward
force other nations to trade with us. That should be our policy.
Counterattacking, he demands to know if we enter the war, first, how
are we to defeat Germany? Second, how are we to “impose our ideology”
on our enemies? Third, what would it cost to win the war in American
lives and how long would the war last? Fourth, what are our war aims?
But he always comes back to the question: “How could we win the war if
we entered it?”
Q. _How can we win?_
A. I have an answer. There are too many surprises in warfare--witness
the German attack on Russia--for anyone, including the military
experts, to be sure of anything, and I am not a military expert. But
I should like to preface my reply to Lindbergh’s whole argument by
remarking that he assumes we have a choice in the matter, and that we
can avoid going to war if we want to. I do not believe we have any
choice except in the matter of timing. I should like to ask Lindbergh
if he believes that by adopting his complete program, even withdrawal
of all aid to Britain, thus insuring British defeat, we could thereby
induce Hitler to grant us better terms? Leaving aside all national
honor and pride, suppose we were to switch our policy completely and
not only abandoned Britain but like Vichy France made clandestine war
upon her, or openly stabbed her in the back with a declaration of war
à la Mussolini. Even in that case can anyone believe we would receive
any better treatment than Hitler has in store for Vichy France or his
ally Italy? It is plain that all we should gain by such conduct would
be an increase in the unbounded contempt he already has for us.
We have not the choice of war or isolation. We have only the choice of
war or surrender.
Let us take his points one by one. First, that England and France have
only themselves to blame for their defeat. But England is not defeated,
and I am convinced that she can be defeated only by our defection on
the lines advocated by Lindbergh. She was to blame for her refusal
to see her danger in time, and for the same reason France was to
blame for her defeat. I agree to this, but to waste time now in such
recriminations is folly. Lindbergh says England and France were always
too late and that now we in America are too late to save England. But
it is our Lindberghs who are making us late. We are still not armed,
agreed, but how can we win the time to arm? We can gain the time to
arm only by upholding Britain, keeping her fighting, and keeping the
Germans out of control of the Atlantic. We can do that now by going
to war with Germany and reinforcing Britain with all the force at our
disposal, which is adequate when ranged beside the present strength of
Britain but inadequate to fight alone. Only our entry into the war now,
before it is too late, can guarantee that Britain stands, and as long
as Britain stands we can build our arms in perfect security until the
combined British and American might is strong enough to defeat Germany.
Lindbergh’s argument is that if we fight beside Britain now we lose; if
we fight alone later, we win.
He says we cannot be invaded: “I believe that we can build a military
and commercial position on this continent that is impregnable to
attack.” But in the preceding paragraph he says that for us to win a
war we must prepare for it “not for one year, or for two, but for ten
years or for twenty as Germany has done.” Does he imagine that Hitler
would give us twenty years to prepare for war, or ten, or two, or even
one after he had beaten Britain?
But they cannot get at us, says Lindbergh, citing the difficulty of
air-borne invasion by Greenland or South America. Nobody imagines an
exclusively air-borne invasion of America is possible. But if the
British lose the war before we complete our two-ocean navy in 1947,
sea power goes to the Germans. Lindbergh at no time discussed this
all-important fact. Nor the fact that a defeated Britain, like defeated
France, would be yoked into the Nazi war machine to be used against
the last enemy, ourselves. Does he really believe that if this happens
within the next year or eighteen months, much less in shorter time, we
shall be able alone to repel a German attack on this hemisphere, an
attack supported by all the navies and warplanes left on earth except
our own? We have already set forth the fact that after conquest of
Britain Germany would possess shipping to transport millions, twenty
to thirty thousand tanks, five or six times the number of warplanes we
shall be able to produce in eighteen months, and the most formidable
army the world has ever seen, driven by the indomitable will of Hitler
to conquer the globe or die.
Leave aside, though, the possibility of direct invasion of the
continental United States, and let us discuss with Lindbergh the
possibility of German invasion of South America. He declares this, too,
would be impossible “in opposition to the armed forces of Brazil backed
by our own Army, Navy and Air Corps.” But it is 4,258 miles from New
York to Pernambuco, Brazil, the place nearest to us where the Germans
might want to land, while it is only 3,847 miles from New York to
London. Lindbergh advocates that we should attempt to defend Pernambuco
though it is 400 miles farther from New York than London, which he says
we should not defend because, among other things, of the difficulty
of sending an expeditionary force so far. Does Lindbergh truly think
Pernambuco easier and more worth while for us to defend than London?
Does he really believe after Germany had conquered Europe and Britain
that Brazil or any other South American state would oppose Germany or
invite us to help it fight Germany?
But he demands to know, how can we defeat Germany if we do go to war?
He knows the answer to that better than anyone. We can defeat Germany
only by obtaining mastery of the air over Germany, then destroying
the German air force; once the Luftwaffe is destroyed, the impact of
that blow alone may cause the first crack in the military and civilian
morale of Germany and lift the morale of the conquered peoples to aid
in expelling their conquerors. Let me reiterate that the conquered
peoples will never revolt until they see the possibility of successful
revolt and that will come only with the first serious military setback
of the Germans.
Would we have to send an expeditionary land army? We probably shall
have to send our best units, and do it quickly, to prevent German
seizure of the West African ports and islands affording springboards
to America. Our troops would be useful now in North Africa and the
Near East. Wherever contact with the enemy can be had, we should be
represented as strongly as possible. It is also likely that we shall
need to send an A.E.F. to the continent, although not necessarily as
large as in the last war. If we can get air superiority, it will mean
the war is practically won. I should expect Germany then to crack up.
Even if she did not break down at once, the demoralization entailed
by loss of control of the air would be so great that landings on the
continent should be feasible at almost any place the Allies chose.
Lindbergh persistently asks where we could land an expeditionary force.
The answer is that if we get there in time we shall have an excellent
base of operations across the seas, Great Britain. From there the coast
of Nazi Europe presents hundreds of opportunities for invasion, once
the Nazi air force is eliminated.
Lindbergh demands to know how long it would take to win if we think,
contrary to his judgment, that we can win. I should think it would take
a minimum of three years after we enter the war, maybe four, possibly
five or six. It can be accomplished only by expanding our present
aircraft production program, which has orders now for 80,000 planes, to
whatever dimensions prove necessary. This depends on how many planes
the Germans are able to produce from their own and conquered factories,
including all the facilities of their conquests in the East. We shall
certainly have to think in terms of hundreds of thousands of planes.
We and the British will have to supply the pilots and crews and ground
crews for these planes, and it may be that our Air Corps will number
upwards of a million before we are through. We have the men and the
machines to do it.
“How much would it cost in American lives?” Lindbergh demands. Who
can tell? We know only that until the Germans went into Russia the
casualties in this war had been inconsiderable compared with the
last war. As long as combat was confined to the air and the sea, the
numbers of combatant lives lost were in the thousands compared with
the hundreds of thousands of soldier lives lost in comparable periods
in the land fighting of the last war. The bombardment of civilians
has been ghastly, but the number of lives lost has been on the whole
surprisingly small--41,900 persons killed in Britain from January 1940
to June 1941. It has even been asserted that in Britain, despite the
hardships, war has so elevated the tone, the spirit of the population,
that death by disease has declined until the gain has made up for the
loss of life by bombardment. The relatively small number of deaths
is explained by Mr. Churchill as the result of air raid precautions.
After the bloodiest month of the Battle of Britain, September 1940, Mr.
Churchill made a remarkable analysis.
“We are told,” he said, “by the Germans that 251 tons of explosives
were thrown upon London in a single night, that is to say, only a few
tons less than the total dropped on the whole country throughout the
last war. Now we know exactly what our casualties have been. On that
particular Thursday night 180 persons were killed in London as a result
of 251 tons of bombs. That is to say it took one ton of bombs to kill
three-quarters of a person. We know, of course, exactly the ratio of
loss in the last war, because all the facts were ascertained after it
was over. In that war the small bombs of early patterns which were used
killed ten persons for every ton discharged in the built-up areas. That
is, the mortality is now less than one-tenth of the mortality attaching
to the German bombing attacks in the last war....
“What is the explanation? There can only be one, namely the vastly
improved methods of shelter which have been adopted.... Whereas when we
entered this war at the call of duty and honor we expected to sustain
losses which would amount to 3,000 killed in a single night and 12,000
wounded, night after night, and made hospital arrangements on the basis
of a quarter of a million casualties merely as a first provision;
whereas that is what we did at the beginning of the war, we have
actually had since it began, up to last Saturday, as a result of air
bombing, about 8,500 killed and 13,000 wounded.” This was after three
months of the Blitz; today with the figure of 41,900 as the total dead,
the Prime Minister’s point is all the stronger as he concluded: “This
shows that things do not always turn out as badly as one expects.” Mr.
Churchill might have been speaking directly to Lindbergh.
Q. _But if air bombardment is as ineffective as these figures of
Churchill indicate, how do you expect us to be able to beat Germany
by winning air superiority and destroying the German air force? Isn’t
there a discrepancy in your argument?_
A. No, because Britain has come off so lightly precisely because the
Germans never have gotten air supremacy over Britain. If they ever
did, it would mean they would win the war, just as if we ever get
air supremacy over Germany, it will mean that we will win the war.
Air supremacy means you can come over in the daytime, and bomb with
precision. Antiaircraft guns are unable to prevent bombing. If there
are no fighters to beat off the bombers, the bombers can do just
about as they like. They can dive-bomb and destroy any objective they
choose with about ninety per cent accuracy. If the Luftwaffe is ever
destroyed, British and American planes can annihilate the entire German
war industry and then what will it avail Hitler to be the conqueror of
all Europe, or of Asia, too?
The R.A.F. has never been out to bomb civilians. The Germans have
proved how useless civilian bombing is against a brave people. The
R.A.F. has preferred the more difficult job of bombing military
objectives and already it has affected the Reich’s war-making capacity.
British bombs on the invasion ports had much to do with Hitler’s
postponement of his trip to England. With the addition to the R.A.F. of
hundreds of thousands of American machines, and with our own hundreds
of thousands in the American Air Force, there is no reason to doubt
that eventually the German military apparatus can be smashed.
Q. _What damage have the Germans done to the British war machine; or to
the buildings of London? Lindbergh insists Britain is already beaten to
her knees._
A. Exactly! Well, you have seen the loss of civilian life, amazingly
small. Now Mr. Churchill has given us an interesting estimate on the
damage to London. He said: “Statisticians may amuse themselves by
calculating that after making allowance for the working of the law of
diminishing returns, through the same house being struck twice or three
times over, it would take ten years at the present rate, for half of
the houses of London to be demolished. After that, of course, progress
would be much slower. Quite a lot of things are going to happen to
Herr Hitler and the Nazi regime before ten years are up.... Neither by
material damage nor by slaughter will the people of the British Empire
be turned from their solemn and inexorable purpose.” Does Lindbergh
really think the British are beaten?
But you may object, surely we shall not have to suffer bombing of
our civilian population. No, not if we enter the war in time to keep
it on the other side of the ocean. The oddest thing of all about the
Lindbergh policy is that it would wait for the war to come to us,
so that the bombs should fall on our homes, not on the homes of our
enemies. He represents precisely the fatal “Maginot line policy” which
he so decries in the French. He advises us to sit behind our Maginot
Atlantic and dream of our security until the Germans break through.
Finally Lindbergh demands that we “define our war aims,” and tell “how
we are to impose our ideology on Germany, Russia, Italy and Japan.”
We do not wish to “impose our ideology” on anyone. All we wish at the
moment is to preserve our nation, keep from becoming slaves of the
Nazis, and prevent Hitler from imposing his ideology upon us. We want
only to make the world safe for the United States, which means also for
the friends and allies of the United States, and if victory is ours we
shall attempt to include in the circle of security all the nations of
good will on earth. If this means “policing the earth,” let it mean
that. The first step to organize common security was taken when men
agreed to have a police force and for it sacrificed their individual
right to exercise individual justice, and agreed to pay taxes for the
protection. We are just now vigilantes trying to rid the community of
bandits.
It is a troublesome matter and after it is settled we may have sense
enough to organize at least for transient tranquillity and hope against
hope that education may help us to permanent peace. I have not much
hope of that myself, but if we, the United States of America, were to
put our heart into the effort, I would have hope. Unless we do there is
no hope at all.
Q. _But how many lives could it cost America?_
A. Nobody can say how many lives it will cost us to preserve
our liberty and independence. Maybe surprisingly few, maybe
heart-breakingly many. But is this a matter for bargaining? Does
Lindbergh ask us to say: “We, the United States of America will give
so and so many American lives in order to preserve our national
independence, our institutions, our children’s lives and our liberty,
but we will give so many and no more? If it costs more, we will
surrender! If it takes two years to win, we will make the trade; if it
costs ten, we give in!” If that is our attitude, we are beaten before
we begin. It is not America’s attitude. It was Vallandigham’s, but not
America’s.
Index
Abetz, Otto, 243, 251
America First Committee, 311, 345, 346, 361-362, 367
American Expeditionary Force, 278, 293, 314, 333, 371
Anabaptists, 56
Angell, Sir Norman, 193-194
Anti-Semitism, in Germany, 13-14, 64-65,82, 360
in Lindbergh’s philosophy, 361-362
Assassinations, political, 60-79, 239
Atlantic Charter, 184, 185-187, 200-202,227, 333-334
Atrocity stories, 79-83
Australian armed forces, 155
Austria, Dollfuss Putsch, 8-10
independence guaranteed, 7-8
seizure of, 27
Baltic states, fate of, 193, 227-228
Baruch, Bernard, 170
Bayes, William D., 43
_Berliner Illustrierte_, 42
Bernstein, Henri, 148-149
Bezbozhnik Society, 99
Birdsall, Paul, 286
Black Guards, 15, 39, 56, 62-63, 83
Blood Purge (June 30, 1934), 12, 32, 34, 39-40, 64, 78
Blum, Leon, 267, 279
Brest-Litovsk treaty, 58, 107
British Expeditionary Force, 21-22
British Intelligence Service, 66-68
British Navy, and American safety, 276
Churchill’s tribute to, 168-169
as a fighting force, 152-156
Bucharest treaty, 58
Cagoulard movement, 243, 251-259
Canada, and the war effort, 152, 154, 155, 204
China, 320, 366
war economy, 109
Churchill, Randolph, 26, 166, 172, 176, 177-178
Churchill, Winston, 139-183
address to French people, 284
Atlantic meeting with Roosevelt, 184-185
aversions, 176-177
as a bricklayer, 178-179
characteristics, 144, 148-151
on effect of air bombardment, 372-375
gift of prophecy, 148
military judgment, 156-161, 182-183
opinion of Roosevelt and the New Deal, 145-148
opinion of United States, 144-145
as a painter, 179
place in history, 139
popularity in England, 139-142
principal interests, 166-183
realist and idealist, 142-144
secret of success, 163-166
as a speaker, 171-174
speeches on defense of Britain, 151-153, 160, 164-166
as a writer, 163-164, 169, 170, 179
Ciano, Count, 7
Clapper, Raymond, 350
Cole, G. D. H., 141-142
Communism, compared with England’s wartime socialism, 231-233
compared with Nazism, 84-87
economic failure in Russia, 116-134
in France, 241, 249-250
in Germany, 13-14, 214-215
in Spain, 98
threat of revolution in Europe, 101-103
in the United States, 273-274
Compiègne armistice, 283
Conant, James B., 323
Conscientious objectors, 321-324
Cooper, Hugh, 107
Corrigan, Douglas, 353-355
Crete, battle of, 153, 158, 303
Croix de Feu, 250
Curie, Eve, 281, 318
Czechoslovakia, 51-52
occupied by Germany, 27-28
Darlan, Admiral, 266-268, 272
Darre, Walther, 54, 309
_Das Kapital_, 85
Deloncle, Colonel Eugene, 243
Deuxième Bureau, 243, 251-256
Dneiper dam, 107-108
Dollfuss Putsch, 8-10
Dunkirk, evacuation of, 21, 22, 151, 152, 303, 316
Duranty, Walter, 90
Dusseigneur, General, 243, 251
Einstein, Albert, 323
England, at war, 139-183
defense against Hitler, 300-306
and wartime socialism, 231-233
Fayard, Arthème, 252-253
Faymonville, Colonel, 135
Fifth Columnists, 339-376
Finland, 100, 105, 175, 364-366
Fish, Hamilton, 344-345
Foreign trade, effect of Nazi slave labor on, 192-197, 208-212
and Nazi economy, 53-54
France, compared with America, 273-280
declining birth rate, 234, 263, 277-278
future under Nazis, 283-284, 290-291
hope for, 281-282
indemnity and reparations to Germans, 285-292
Maginot line complex, 234, 240, 274-275, 296, 375
reasons for fall of, 30, 234-273
venality of press, 234, 280-281
French Army, equipment of, 234-235
morale of, 235-238
treason in, 238-262
Franco, General, 264
Fuller, Colonel Horace M., 20
de Gaulle, General, 266, 315
recognition of government, 292
Garvin, J. L., 174
Gaxotte, Pierre, 252-253, 256
George, General, 243
Georgiev, Vlada, 63, 77
German Air Force, strength of, 299, 333, 359, 372-374
German Army, 16, 297
Hitler’s ascendancy over, 8-9, 17-34
German people, attitude toward America, 329-331
character of, 55-58, 217-218, 226-227, 282
Hitler’s relation to, 36-38
Germany, 1-87
Communism in, 15-16, 214-215
deindustrialization vs. military occupation, 219-226
postwar reconstruction, 56-58
Gestapo, 15, 62, 67-68, 228, 243
in Holland, 67
murder monopoly of, 79, 83-84
and Nazi economy, 53-54
political position of, 74-76
in Spain, 25, 356
Goebbels, Joseph, 8, 15, 33, 163
and propaganda, 80, 243, 330-331
as a public speaker, 37
Goering, Hermann, 14-16, 24, 32, 163, 359
Glass, Senator Carter, 51
G. P. U., 70-71, 83-85, 119-120, 133, 228
political position of, 74-77
Greece, 158-159
Hackett, Francis, 43-44
Haushofer, Karl, 17
Hayes, Carlton J., 357
Hemingway, Ernest, 97
Hess’s flight to England, 15, 161-163
Hillenkoetter, Lieutenant-Commander, 20
Himmler, Heinrich, 15, 64, 67, 163, 243
Hitler, Adolf, 1-69
assassination attempts analyzed, 60-69
attack on Russia, 23, 30, 110-111, 160-161
compared with Hohenzollerns, 263-264, 328
and homosexuality, 34-35
impressions of, 1-3, 10-12, 43-51
military mistakes, 19-30
and Mussolini, 4-10
and Napoleon, 17, 30, 113-114
occupation of Czechoslovakia, 27-28
personal bravery, 30-33
physical appearance, 1-3, 43-44
plans for invasion of Britain, 300-305
principal interests, 167
as a public speaker, 37-41
relation to German people, 35-36, 60
reoccupation of Rhineland, 24-26, 148, 226
responsibility for war, 12-14
successors to, 14-17
seizure of Austria, 8-10, 27
treatment if beaten, 58-60
and the United States, 306-309
as war lord, 17-19
and women, 36-37
and world conquest, 37, 190-199, 202-209, 213-214, 323-325
Homosexuality, 33-35
Hoover, Herbert, 344-345
Huntziger, General Charles, 235-238
Hutchins’ Four Freedoms, 309-313
Imro, 77-78
Irish neutrality, 144, 305-306
Jankowsky, Frau Marie, 81-83
Japan, 112, 316
publishes Axis peace terms, 199, 202-207
_Je Suis Partout_, 243, 251-258
Jews, persecution of, 64-65, 82, 360, 362-364
John of Leyden, 56
Jung, Dr. Carl G., analysis of Hitler and Nazism, 45-51, 54-55
Keynes, John Maynard, 286-287
Kirov, Sergei, assassination of, 69-71
Korff, resigns from Ullstein Verlag, 41-42
Labor party in England, 141-142
La Guardia, F. H., 345
Laval, Pierre, 239, 269-273
League of Nations, 143, 287, 334, 336-337
proposed, 223, 230
Lenin, Nikolai, 69, 98-99, 123
on morality, 103
Lewis, Sinclair, 353
Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, 81-83, 350, 355-356
Lindbergh, Charles A., 339-361, 364-376
admiration for Nazi Germany, 358-360
anti-Semitism, 361-362
character and personality, 347, 348, 351-353
classed as Copperhead, 339-341
and free speech, 343-344
ingratitude to France and England, 349-351
isolationist arguments answered, 368-376
kidnaping and murder of child, 356-357
“Letter to America,” 367-368
and newspaper publicity, 352-354
as one-time national hero, 346-348
political philosophy, 273-274, 350-351, 359, 361
praised by President Coolidge, 346-347
propagandist for Hitler, 198-200, 214
supporters of, 341, 343, 346, 367
visit to Soviet Union, 358-359
von Lossow, General, 11-12, 39
Ludendorff, General, 11, 32, 67, 327
Maginot line complex, 234, 240, 274-275, 296, 375
Mandel, Georges, 253-255
Masaryk, Thomas G., 51-52
Master race doctrine, 37, 191-192
_Mein Kampf_, 1, 31, 37, 41-42, 85, 283-284
Hackett’s index to, 44-45
Miller, Douglas, 111, 213
Morrow, Mrs. Dwight, 353
Mowrer, Edgar, 20, 60
Mosley, Oswald, 361
Munich Beer Hall, bombing attempt, 67-69
Munich Beer Hall Putsch, 1, 32
Munich pact, 28, 61, 360-361
Mussolini, Benito, 4-5, 49, 173
and Dollfuss Putsch, 8-10
first meeting with Hitler, 3-7
and political assassinations, 72-74
and yes-staff, 18
Napoleon, and Hitler, 17, 30
and Mussolini, 4-5
National Socialist German Workers Party, 13-14
Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, 9-10, 61-63
Nazi propaganda, 79-83, 239, 243, 248-262, 275-276
Nazism, 51-53, 83, 360
compared with Communism, 84-87
Nelson, Donald M., 294
Newspapers, American and French, 279-281
Nicolson, Harold, 174, 357
NKVD defined, 119-120
Norris, Kathleen, 345
Norway, invasion of, 30, 157-160
Nye, Senator Gerald P., 149, 214, 344-345
Okhrana, 75-76
von der Osten, Major, 25-26
_Out of the Night_, 68, 83-84, 163
Pax Anglo-Americana, 146, 229-230
Peace conference, 191-192, 214-231
Atlantic Charter, 200-202, 221, 334
Axis terms, 198-199, 202-208
Pétain, Marshal, character of, 262-265, 272
dupe of German propaganda, 239, 255-262
as head of Vichy government, 265-266, 292, 315
Hitler’s promise to, 284-285
request for armistice, 243-245
_Petit Journal_, 250-251
Poison gas, 302
Poland, attack on planned, 18
conquest by Nazis, 29-30, 191-193, 195, 322, 365
fate of, 184-185
and Russia, 100, 174-175
Prioux, General, 241-242
Raleigh, John McCutcheon, 45
Rauschning, Hermann, 160, 309
Reichstag fire, 68
Rhineland, reoccupation of, 24-26, 148, 226
von Ribbentrop, Joachim, 15, 29, 243, 251
Roehm, Ernst, 32-34, 39
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 145-147, 296
meeting with Churchill, 184-185
re-election and German morale, 330
verdict on Lindbergh, 339-341, 344
Rosenberg, Alfred, 15, 163
Royal Air Force, 22-23, 301, 303, 304, 332, 374
Churchill’s tribute to, 166
Russell, Bertrand, 323
Russia, 88-139
approval of Atlantic Charter, 227-228
and defeat of Germany, 101-103
development of Red Army, 92-94, 134-137
failure of Planned National Economy, 116, 121-123, 130-131
Five-Year Plans, 107-108, 116, 122
freedom of worship, 99-100
monetary system, 129-130
morale of people, 95-99
political assassinations in, 67-79
reasons for resistance to Nazi attack, 90-99
as refuge for Jews, 363-364
standard of living, 92, 118-123, 129
Terror under political police, 115-120, 125-128, 131-134
U. S. help for, 88-90, 100-104, 137-138
weaknesses of Soviet system, 115-134
Russo-German pact, 29, 100, 112
Schieffer, Colonel, 242, 277-278, 326
Schuman, Frederick L., defines dictatorship, 146
Selassie, Haile, 76
Shipbuilding capacities, 155-156
Siegfried line, 26, 28
Socialism, in wartime England, 231-233
South America, and the Nazis, 49, 191, 205, 208, 370-371
Soviet Union, _see_ Russia
Spanish Civil War, 25-26, 52-53, 97-98, 356
Stalin, Joseph, 88-115, 133-138
agreement with Churchill, 103-104
and compromise peace with Germany, 106-112
and political assassinations, 69-72, 76, 78
quarrel with Trotzky, 133-134
system of army espionage, 105-106
Stoddard, Lothrop, 44
Storm Troopers, 10, 32-34, 39, 54-55, 83
Swing, Raymond, 157, 299
Third Reich, symbolism of, 54-55
Thompson, Dorothy, 43-44
Tolischus, Otto, 43
Trotzky, Leon, 42-43, 123, 133-134, 176, 180
United States, 292-337
army morale, 318-326
Atlantic Ocean complex, 274-277, 375
battleground for war against Nazis, 331-333
choice of war or surrender, 369-373
and Communists, 273
comparison with France, 273-280
conditions after German defeat, 337-338
dangers to, 197-198, 293-294, 306-309
effect of declaration of war against Nazis, 313-321, 330-331
and the first World War, 326-328, 335-336, 338
and the League of Nations, 334, 336-337
lease-lend appropriations, 190, 292, 294, 317
military preparedness, 296-300
national morale, 295-296
Neutrality Acts, 317, 330
postwar economic condition, 189-190
representation in Peace Conference, 332-334
and Russia, 88-90, 100-104, 137-138
Vallandigham, Clement L., 339-341, 344, 376
Valtin, Jan, 68, 83-84, 163
Versailles treaty, 220, 224, 334, 336
denounced, 24, 25, 40, 290
leniency of, 58, 286-287
War Aims, 184-233
Wave of the Future, 83, 87, 349, 360
Weimar Republic, 12-13, 336
Weygand, General, 151, 242
_What Mein Kampf Means to America_, 43
Wheeler, Senator Burton K., 198, 200, 214, 273-274, 343-345
Wilson’s Fourteen Points, 186-187
Woollcott, Alexander, on Churchill, 164
on Lindbergh, 342-343, 376
World War, first, cost and reparations, 57-58, 193, 286-287, 335-336
_You Can’t Do Business with Hitler_, 213
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation has been made consistent.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in
the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have
been corrected.
The one footnote has been moved to the end of its section and relabeled.
The following change was made:
p. 41: XIV changed to XVI (Louis XVI had)
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