I.
The temporary achievement of nine-tenths of the Pangerman plan in accordance with the programme of 1911 serves to refute the lies disseminated by the German propaganda as to the cause and authors of the war.
The intellectual mobilization of Germany, as powerfully organized and carried out as her military organization, has enabled her utterly to deceive many neutrals in the world as to the responsibilities for the outbreak and prolongation of the war. The Allies do not yet fully understand how prejudicial to them this German propaganda has been, and what dangers it still involves for the conduct of the struggle and the conclusion of peace.
This German propaganda has been all the more successful because for a very long time it encountered no serious opposition on the side of the Allies. For they, ingenuously confident in the justice of their cause, which seemed to them self-evident, have not attempted any real intellectual mobilization. Only quite lately have the Allies begun to organize the propaganda which must and ought to be carried on in foreign countries; substantial progress may be anticipated in this direction.
Six main arguments have been employed to back the German propaganda.
1º. Germany has been forced to wage the war in order to resist a coalition treacherously contrived by England. Therefore Germany, a country of intellectual, scientific, and economic activity, obliged to right for its existence, deserves the sympathies of the whole world.
2º. If the neutrals are seriously injured by the war and its prolongation the responsibility rests on the Allies, who desire to destroy the German people. The neutrals should therefore take common action and bring pressure to bear on the Allies for the purpose of inducing them to acquiesce in the German victory, thus ensuring the speedy restoration of peace.
3º. To hasten this result the neutrals, and especially the United States, ought to oppose the maritime blockade which England is maintaining, under conditions the legitimacy of which, from the point of view of international law, is open to question. By refusing to supply munitions to the Allies, the United States would put an end to the butchery and thus serve the cause of humanity.
4º. Germany is really conciliatory, she wants nothing but an equitable peace. “We Germans,” declared Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg, December 11th, 1915, “do not wish to set the peoples by the ears; on the contrary each will bear his share in the peaceful labour of all and in the progress of the nations.”
5º. The neutrals ought all the more to help Germany because she is fighting to ensure for all the freedom of the seas, which at present hateful England keeps in her own hands. The Berliner Tageblatt (quoted by Le Matin of February 18th, 1916), did not scruple to assert that the achievement by Germany of her favourite scheme “from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf” would secure for all nations the freedom of the sea. “If the economic mission of Germany,” said that journal, “is to guard the freedom of the road which leads from the North Sea through Central Europe to Asia Minor, and to render it more and more accessible, in the interest of all who reside along the road in question, then it is a necessary consequence of this our mission that we should have a vital interest in the sea likewise, since the Continental road in Central Europe is merely its continuation. Our interest requires that the sea shall be freed from the supremacy of a single people, that it shall be open to all honest competition.”
6º. The Allies pretended that they made war on Germany because we violated the neutrality of Belgium. This cant only serves as a cloak for their own hypocritical cupidity. It is not for the Allies to reproach Germany, seeing that they have themselves violated the neutrality of Greece.
To the Allies, who can have no doubt as to the premeditated character of the German aggression, these main arguments, on which the German propaganda rests, of course, are nothing more nor less than “colossal” lies, as absurd as they are cynical. Nevertheless we must bear in mind that repeated indefatigably under every form to Germanophile neutrals in Europe or to neutrals in America and Asia, who naturally have but vague ideas on the complex affairs of Europe, they have enabled the Germans gravely to prejudice the cause of the Allies through the moral, economic, and military effects which they have produced. Hence the Allies are deeply concerned in frustrating the world-wide German propaganda with all possible speed. Now that great object, as we shall see later on, the Allied Governments could, if they chose, very quickly accomplish by pointing to the temporary success of the Pangerman plot.
Pangermanism and the dangers which it involves for the future are now well enough known in some neutral countries, but the knowledge is still somewhat vague, it still lacks that clear definition and that sense of imminent peril which arouse strong convictions and prompt actions. But if the Pangerman plan of 1911, in all its definiteness and extent, has been ignored down to a very recent date in the Allied countries, which nevertheless above all others are interested in knowing it, we can easily understand that this nefarious plot for enslaving the whole world has not yet been fully apprehended by neutral nations. But the temporary accomplishment of the Pangerman plan in Europe, to the enormous extent of nine-tenths, furnishes the Allies with demonstrative arguments of the utmost cogency, and thus puts it in their power speedily to counteract the effect of the German lies all over the world, and to prove the danger which Pangermanism creates for all civilized States.
To achieve this object it would be enough if the Allied propaganda, which has begun to be organized, were to be co-ordinated and founded on a small number of positive arguments drawn from the results already attained by Pangermanism; for these results would reveal to everybody Germany’s long premeditation, and therefore her responsibility and the scheme of world-wide domination which she pursues.
This Allied propaganda ought to be firmly established by the practical and indisputable proof afforded by the geographical superposition of the 1911 plan on the territories actually taken possession of by Germany in the course of the war; thus compared, it will be seen that the plan and its execution tally almost exactly.
RELATION BETWEEN THE PANGERMAN PLAN OF 1911 AND THE PANGERMAN GAINS AT THE BEGINNING OF 1916.
The accompanying map exhibits this incontestable truth in a graphic form by showing the outlines of the actual German fortress compared with the outlines contemplated by the 1911 plan. According to it the German conquests were to have extended to 3,474,288 square kilometres, in addition to Germany itself. But these conquests and seizures at the beginning of 1916 were accomplished over an area of 3,035,572 square kilometres. This geographical proof is confirmed by many manifestoes which have appeared on the other side of the Rhine advocating a policy of annexation. Amongst these may particularly be noted:—
1º. The famous memorial of May 20th, 1915, which the Imperial Chancellor caused to be presented to himself by the most important associations of Germany (see p. 17).
2º. Germany’s manifest desire to get possession successively of Riga, Calais, Verdun, Belfort, and Salonika, in order to complete the plan of 1911 by holding the strategical points necessary for the preservation of the territories over which she has cast her net.
3º. The declarations made in the Reichstag on April 5th, 1916, by the Imperial Chancellor, Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg, which lend the force of demonstration to the geographical proof.
To any plain man these declarations appear to amount to an official avowal of Germany’s intention to execute the Pangerman plan. The phrases of the Imperial Chancellor leave no room for ambiguity.
“After the war Poland will no longer be the Poland out of which the Russian usurers have been cleared.... No. Never again must Russia be able to march her armies to the defenceless frontier of East Prussia, nay, of West Prussia (thunders of applause). Just as little is it to be supposed that in the West we shall give up the lands where our people’s blood has flowed, unless we receive solid guarantees for the future. We mean to create solid guarantees in order that Belgium should not become a vassal State of England and France, that it should not be turned into an outwork against Germany from the military as well as the economic point of view.” (Loud applause.) (Quoted by Le Temps, April 8th, 1916.)
The Imperial Chancellor could not assert more categorically the territorial claims of Germany on the East and on the West. As for the claims towards the South and South-East, consequent upon Germany’s seizure of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Turkey, Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg made no allusion to them. His silence is intelligible. In the first place, it was too much to expect that the Imperial Chancellor should make a clean breast of the burglaries which Germany has committed on the territories of her own Allies; in the second place, Berlin affects to consider these forcible acquisitions to the South and South-East as permanent and therefore beyond the reach of discussion.
Moreover, Deputy Spahn, leader of the Centre, who on April 5th, 1914, and again on December 11th, 1915, took on himself to reply to the Chancellor and to say outright what the exigencies of office obliged that gentleman only to hint at, left no doubt as to Germany’s intentions with regard to Central Europe. “We must,” said Herr Spahn, “bring about a lasting union with Austria-Hungary. We must have at our command territories larger than the German Empire. This war, which has been forced upon us, must secure for us a position of world-wide power.” (See Le Temps, April 7th, 1916.)
Thus irrefragable proofs, both material and moral, combine to demonstrate, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Germany made and continues to wage the war for the purpose of carrying out the Pangerman plan which she elaborated from 1895 to 1911.