Part 19

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.