Is Tomorrow Hitler's? 200 Questions on the Battle of Mankind

by H. R. Knickerbocker

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.”

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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.