5. FRANCE
Q. Why did France fall?
A. Because the French people were hypnotized by their low birth rate; because their Maginot line had imprisoned their army; because, ignorant of the character and intentions of their enemy, they did not know why they had to fight the Germans and so preferred to fight among themselves; because they had no Churchill; because they were betrayed by a powerful group of their leaders including senior officers of the Army; and because the French were stultified by their debased and venal press.
Q. But I thought they lost chiefly because they lacked the proper weapons: airplanes and tanks.
A. They did not possess anything like the number of tanks and airplanes used by the Germans; but I would rank this deficiency at the bottom of any list of causes of the French defeat. If they had ignored their birth rate, been willing to spend lives, had retained the old offensive spirit traditional in the French Army, had known that they had to win or perish, had possessed a Churchill to inspire and lead them, and had had no traitors in their ranks, their comparative lack of weapons would not have mattered; they would still be fighting the Germans in France. The inferiority of their equipment consisted, as you indicate, in the lack of a sufficient number of planes and tanks, but if they had had the spirit to win they could have held the Germans until the deficiency could be made up.
Tanks cannot cross properly defended rivers, and there were several sets of rivers which the French could have held if they chose: the Meuse, the Somme and the Oise, the Aisne, the Marne, the Seine, and finally the Loire, but they held not at all at any of these natural barriers. At most of these rivers I was present during the retreat, and it astonished all of us, including United States officers, to visit a French position along a river one day and observe how strong it was, and how difficult it would be to take, and then the next day learn the Germans had taken it within a few hours of our departure.
Q. But surely the reason was the German dive bombers who could fly across the rivers and drive the defenders away. I have heard that they were the principal weapon used to break the French who didn’t have enough pursuit planes to down them. It seems to me that if the dive bomber is anything like as lethal as it is said to be, you must put more of the blame for the French collapse on it than on the failure of French morale.
A. No, the dive bombers are not effective against brave determined troops. They are not as effective as artillery. I have an authority for that, General Charles Huntziger, now Minister of War of the Vichy government. I met him when he was Commander of the Second Army occupying the left wing of the Maginot line. It was about May 31, 1940 in the second week after the German break-through.
General Huntziger received me in his headquarters, an old fortress of Verdun. He explained that he had now taught his men how to meet the terrible German tank-plus-dive-bomber attack. He said that he had explained to his men that the dive bomber was not nearly so deadly as artillery, and that its effect was chiefly psychological, and that if the soldiers could master their first fright they could hold their ground and win. The great thing was to hold long enough to learn that your chance of being killed by dive bombers was much less than your chance of being killed by artillery fire, since artillery shells may fall uninterruptedly for an indefinite time, while a dive bomber has only one or at the most a few bombs to discharge, and once it has dropped them, has to return to its base for more, and the number of dive bombers is limited.
He emphasized that French soldiers had never been afraid to stand artillery fire, so why should they run from the less dangerous dive bombers? He said he instructed all soldiers not serving antiaircraft guns to go under cover for the few seconds while the dive bombers dived, but to emerge immediately upon hearing the detonation of the bombs, and meet the advancing tanks. If they were small thinly armored tanks, and the French possessed adequate antitank guns, they should attempt to destroy the tanks. If the tanks were too large and heavily armored, the French should permit the tanks to go through and emerge in time to stop the German infantry following the tanks.
General Huntziger admitted that it had been extremely difficult at first to persuade his troops of the comparative harmlessness of the dive bombers and mentioned the fact that in the first thirteen days of the German attack his troops had been overwhelmed and he had lost fifty per cent of his effectives, more than ninety per cent of whom were captured, but he believed that now the troops were experienced and could not be frightened as they were at first. As we were soon to observe, the French troops never did get used to the dive bomber which is truly the most terrifying weapon ever invented. General Huntziger compared it to a locomotive with its whistle wide open falling upon you from the sky.
“You are certain it is coming just for you,” the General said, “and you believe it is not merely going to drop bombs upon you, but you are sure the plane itself is going to crash upon you and leave you smashed like a beetle.”
The noise of the dive bomber is its most terrifying quality. An ordinary airplane diving makes a loud rushing noise familiar to everyone nowadays, but many of the German dive bombers were equipped with sirens attached to loud-speakers, so that when they dived each plane screamed with the noise of a score of ordinary diving planes. In addition to that they were often equipped with screaming bombs. General Touchon, commander of the Sixth Army, showed me one at his headquarters. It had four whistles, each about the size of a cannon cracker, in the vanes of its tail. They made each falling bomb sound as loud as four American locomotives with the whistles open. “But,” General Huntziger said, “all you have to do is to realize that noise doesn’t hurt anyone, and I have explained that to my soldiers and from now on they will stand firm.”
Huntziger gave me a copy of his orders of the day. I cannot read it even now without feeling the terrible weight of despair that settled upon all of us as we realized that the end of France was near. It is dated May 18, 1940 and begins: “The war has commenced,”—it was to be all over in exactly thirty days—“and, in order to win, the enemy always attacks your morale. In this first shock, his tactic, his ruses of warfare and his weapons have but one object, to demoralize you. The enemy is reckoning only upon fighting you with fright. It is necessary therefore that you know this.
“Know also that the massive bombardments of the enemy aviation, no matter how impressive they are, make few victims, as you may have already noted. You know the total lost; they are a minimum. Take refuge when the enemy aircraft passes and immediately afterward take up again your combat post. Never forget our aviation protects you. Even when you cannot see it. Know that our airplanes have knocked down more than a thousand enemy machines in less than eight days and that among the enemy our bombers are giving blow for blow.
“Know that against infantry the tank is not able to accomplish big things if you hide yourself and the tanks cannot see you. Let them pass without showing yourself, then fire on the guides who accompany them. Without them the tank is almost blind; sooner or later it will have to abandon the field to refuel if our antitank guns have not already knocked it out.
“These guns are very efficient; they have given many proofs of it in the last few days.
“Do not allow yourself to be influenced by tales of parachutists but if you actually find some, remember that an armed man can always beat them. Guard yourself against imaginary dangers. As though you were in active combat, you have to defend yourself against false rumors which may be spread by a traitor or an imbecile seized with panic.
“If you listen to such tales they may be able to provoke serious defection. Listen to no one but your superior officers and those you know.
“A man can overcome his fear. It is his duty to surmount it and to combat the fears of others. If a man spreads fear he not only commits an act of cowardice. He commits treason.
“Know finally that the enemy is not so strong as some people think. Oppose to him your will. It is your will which will sweep the enemy away. Never forget what you are defending. If you let the enemy pass you will lose more than your life. You will be pitilessly separated from your families to suffer far from them a slavery worse than death.”
The intelligence and courage of Huntziger as displayed in these orders were of no avail, because he could not, as Churchill can, transmit his spirit to others. His soldiers listened to his talk and read his orders of the day but still they yielded to their fear. It must be seldom in military history that a commanding general has to devote his principal orders to adjuring his troops not to be afraid. The French Army was already panic-stricken.
Q. You say there was treachery among senior officers of the French Army and among the government. Why do you say that and what proof of it have you?
A. There were both treachery and treason. High French officers and officials conspired to overthrow the Republic. Pétain himself was their leader. They were so fanatical in their desire to destroy the Republic that they fell into the German trap and acquiesced in what the Germans told them would be a fake defeat, after which they would set up the Fascist government which they did set up at Vichy. After that Hitler would withdraw his troops and restore France to all her old power and glory, an equal partner and friend of Nazi Germany. They were of course deceived and now most of them must realize they were deceived, and that Hitler has no intention of ever allowing France to be a great power again. But this awakening is too late and the guilty men, many of them now in Pétain’s government, have a life-and-death interest in preserving their secret, since in the present temper of the French people if the truth were known many another assassination would follow the attempts on Laval and Deat.
This is a rough outline of what I believe to have happened in France. I will be glad to give you all the evidence I have, admitting that it probably is not sufficient to win a verdict of guilty in a court of law, but maintaining that it is convincing to one who witnessed the debacle and was bewildered by the lack of adequate explanation. You see, after we had added up all the other reasons for the fall of France, there was still something lacking; something to explain the fact that the French Army of nearly five million men, with its centuries of glorious tradition, and its reputation among experts as the best in the world, never once held firm after the Germans broke through the Low Countries, never once stopped the enemy for as much as a day, but steadily, day by day retreated, crumbled, broke up, and at the end of five weeks ceased to exist.
Review our list of causes now and see if all of them put together explain this phenomenon. Complacency and trust in the Maginot line and the softening effect of eight months of inactivity, comparative lack of leadership, man power and planes and tanks; lack of faith, anger, and the spirit to fight to kill; conflict between communists and conservatives. No, all these reasons together do not explain the conduct of the French Army between May 11 and June 17, 1940.
Q. But the thesis you present is too astounding. That French Army officers should have conspired with the enemy is almost beyond belief. Do you mean the French General Staff?
A. Yes, the French General Staff. Not all of it; only a few members were necessary. If you find it difficult to believe, remember that the French officers and officials concerned did not believe they were betraying France; they believed that Hitler would keep his word and restore France as soon as the Republic was overthrown. To make this aspect of the matter clear: suppose you were a young Frenchman today, would you think of it as treason if you worked to overthrow the Vichy government? Would you think of yourself as a traitor if you conspired with the British to throw out Pétain and reorganize a democratic government? No.
Well, in so far as one can credit such Fascists with sincerity, we have to admit that these men also thought they were serving the best interests of France when they conspired to overthrow the Republic. Remember that French officers as a class have generally been anti-Republican. Napoleon’s officers soon forgot Republican principles in their devotion to the Emperor. The hierarchy of the Army did not favor the equalitarianism of the French Republic. Aristocratic officers generally set the tone for the majority of the higher ranks. Time and again I was astonished to note that upper-class Frenchmen seemed to remember as though it had been yesterday the bloody events of the French Revolution, and were more afraid of their own working class than of any foreign enemy.
I visited once the famous deep cellar vaults of the Bank of France where they kept the gold, and while walking through the doorway, piercing its twenty-foot thick steel and concrete walls, I asked why they needed such formidable and expensive protection. Was it against the Germans? It could not be, because if ever the Germans occupied Paris, as they do today, no underground fortification such as these vaults could prevent them from getting the gold, especially since the Germans would be holding as hostages the men with the keys. No, it was not against a foreign enemy; the vaults were built against the Paris mob, against revolutionaries, against another 1789.
This spirit was shared by many French senior officers, and it is ironic that their conspiracy to bring about a feigned defeat in order to overthrow the Republic was greatly helped by the defection of the Parisian Communist troops in Corap’s Ninth Army at the Meuse. The very workingmen who had most to lose by the fall of the Republic and the establishment of a Fascist France, helped bring about their own downfall under the mistaken guidance of Moscow. The treachery to France came from the two opposite poles of French society.
Q. How did this treason manifest itself in the operations of the army?
A. I will give you one example, from personal experience and the testimony of French friends. You remember the Germans, when they broke through the Low Countries and across the Meuse, dashed with their Panzer divisions for the coast, pell-mell, at top speed, not bothering or wasting time at first to widen their column of penetration, which was still only a few miles wide for much of its length when the first German detachments reached the sea at Abbeville. North of this thin German column was the strong French Army under General Prioux, while south of it were the main French forces. It was the constant fervid hope of the French that their armies would cut across the German column, roll it up in two directions, and win not merely the battle of France but perhaps the war.
Military experts, foremost our own, thought it possible; some held it probable. This hope reached its climax after Weygand made an inspection flight to the Low Countries and returned to Paris. That day at the Ministry of Information as I was waiting in the office for Colonel Schieffer, in charge of American correspondents, the gaunt, one-eyed, black-monocled, fiercely patriotic Colonel came in with a bang, dropped his customary stillness and exclaimed: “Weygand says he won’t leave a German alive, not one. He’s going to cut the column and bottle them up and he says there won’t be left one living.” Like wildfire the word of Weygand spread through the building, through Paris, through France. It was the only bright moment in the whole Battle of France.
But it did not happen. Why didn’t it? A captain from General Prioux’s staff may have the answer. This is the story he told. “After the Germans reached Abbeville and cut us off from the South, General Prioux called us all together one day and said, ‘I have orders from General Headquarters that you must blow up your tanks and guns and retreat as speedily as possible to the seashore. I must tell you that personally I do not approve these orders. I am convinced we are strong enough to make an offensive southward and cut the Germans and reunite with our troops in France. However, orders are orders and one does not discuss orders. You will do as I have told you and I shall stay here where I am.’
“We did as we were told and Prioux became a prisoner of war. That was our last chance. The failure to cut the German column was the end of the Battle of France. We could have done it; we were ordered not to.”
Counterattack, always we waited for the famous French counterattack, the fulfillment of the French Army tradition of aggression, à la baionette! but it never came. Orders stopped it.
Q. Who gave the orders? Pétain was not an active officer then.
A. No, but General George was. I want to give you my evidence in the form of a firsthand quotation from a French friend, but before I do so it is important to point out that between General Gamelin, commander in chief of all the Allied land forces, and General George, commander of the French armies fighting against Germany, there existed a jealousy so strong that it amounted to hatred, and their headquarters staffs became so permeated with it that they actually withheld information from each other.
Here then, were the principal elements and forces involved in the great conspiracy: First, Pétain, towering above all other figures and forces; then the Deuxième Bureau, the famous Second Bureau in charge of Intelligence of the French Army; General George and General Dusseigneur and Colonel Eugene Deloncle; the Cagoulards, that secret society of so-called Hooded Men, which most people considered merely absurd but whose importance turned out to be greater than that of any French secret society since the Revolution; the group operating the Fascist weekly, Je Suis Partout; and on the German side Otto Abetz, now Hitler’s ambassador to France, and the unlimited money and propaganda of Himmler’s Gestapo, Goebbels’ Ministry, Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office, and the Ausland’s Buro.
Now I shall let my French friend talk. This is his report: from here to [page 262] he is speaking in the first person.
On June 17, 1940, I found myself standing outside a wayside tavern in France. I was one of the millions retreating southward from occupied Paris ahead of the German Army. I had stopped by the roadside because, through the open window of the inn, I heard a radio broadcasting the pathetic voice of an old man. Marshal Pétain was telling the French nation that he had decided to ask Hitler to grant France an armistice.
Standing beside me was a young artillery lieutenant. As the last words of the old Marshal died away, he turned toward me, pale as ivory, and exclaimed: “Now I begin to understand! They forced us to retreat so that we would have to accept this armistice, so that the Germans could come in to do their dirty work for them!”
I didn’t dare understand. “How do you mean?” I asked him.
“Don’t be so naive!” he exploded. “Can’t you see what’s happened? Don’t you remember that handful of enthusiastic young fools who were always shouting ‘Pétain in power!’ Well, now he is in power. He can govern with the aid of German troops. He has opened the way for them to occupy the country. The Germans will make the arrests and carry out the executions, and when their opponents have all been put out of the way, Pétain and his friends will be in possession of the kind of Nazified country they like. Mark my words—this is not the end, but only the beginning. This is not war; it’s a domestic political maneuver!”
At that moment it seemed that only a man completely out of his mind could have believed what the young officer had just said. A higher officer who had been listening broke in to correct him. Pétain, he said, was very old and possibly not very intelligent. But he certainly could not be a traitor.
“His first consideration,” this officer went on, “will be to obtain reasonable terms from the enemy. I doubt very much whether he will give any time at all to internal political questions. All Frenchmen, all the legislators, all the people, will be behind him in his struggle against the Germans. What greater power could he gain by bringing about an internal political transformation?”
I said nothing but I was deeply anxious. Why had Pétain announced publicly that he had asked for an armistice before he was sure that honorable conditions would be granted? The mere fact of an announcement’s having been made would complete the shattering of army morale and all hope of further resistance, and make it impossible, in case satisfactory terms could not be achieved, to reshape a fighting army and resume the struggle. Pétain’s radio speech seemed at the very least unwise—unless its object were to eliminate the slightest chance that the armistice might not go through. And in that case, the young officer was probably right.
Two dominant theories to explain the fall of France emerge: (1) France’s rapid debacle was due to complete unpreparedness, both physical and spiritual; (2) France was sold out, and what happened is to be explained primarily by the operations of treason. Both explanations are a part of the truth; neither of them is the whole truth.
There was a lack of matériel of all sorts—infantry weapons and artillery, ammunition, tanks, planes, etc. It was true also that production in the munitions factories was increasing slowly, and that the pace would have been insufficient if the intense warfare of the last five weeks had had to be continued over a long period. But the fact was that the period of intense warfare was very short; and it is hardly logical to say that France was beaten because she would have lacked ammunition if the war had lasted longer.
Some observers have imagined that France lacked munitions even for so short a war, for it has been established that there were shortages at many vital points. I talked with literally hundreds of soldiers and officers during the retreat of June. Infantrymen complained that they were given only three or four bullets per rifle; artillerymen said that whole batteries were left without shells; tanks ran out of gasoline at the very beginning of action and had no chance to refuel, and worst of all (everyone stressed this as having been the most discouraging factor), German planes had complete and undisputed freedom in the air. Again and again soldiers told me that during engagements, with hundreds of German planes above, on not one occasion did French aviation come to the aid of the infantry. It was not surprising, under such conditions, that morale gave way, and that the army was psychologically prepared for the final collapse.
But was this lack of matériel at points essential to the defense the result of a general shortage or simply of failure to get existing munitions to the necessary centers? It seems indisputable that it was the distributing system which was at fault. And was this breakdown of the supply lines simply due to lack of organization, or to a much more serious cause—treason? Whatever the case, it is a fact that the retreating soldiers and officers, drawing their conclusions from such facts as they had been able to witness, were unanimous in exclaiming: “We have been sold out!”
Now listen to the story of a reserve officer, a captain of a machine-gun detachment, one of the many with whom I talked.
“Don’t tell me,” he said, “that our General Headquarters lacked experience in supply problems, or that they forgot to send us cartridges for our machine guns. In 1914-1918 they had no trouble of this kind. There were situations quite as complicated as this one again and again during that war, but the ammunition always arrived. This short action hasn’t exhausted our reserve of matériel. The depots are still full. Yet we at the front lines had to destroy our machine guns to save them from the enemy when we ran out of ammunition for them and had to fall back. The same thing happened all along the front, for machine guns, artillery of all calibers, and antitank guns. You can call it disorganization, if you want. I call it intentional disorganization—sabotage, directed, probably, from the same central point. But I don’t dare yet to try to form any conclusions, to understand why such sabotage took place. Perhaps one day we shall all understand.”
On the roads choked with retreating columns and fleeing refugees, where military trucks and civilian cars were inextricably mingled, soldiers talked of their misgivings during the waits, often hours long, for jammed highways to be cleared so that traffic could resume its interminable southward crawl. Scores of times, caught in such blocks, I heard soldiers or officers say: “Why are we constantly ordered to retreat? We haven’t been in any real engagement since the Somme. We’re not afraid to fight, but the retreat orders keep us moving to the rear as fast as we can get over these encumbered roads. What is the cause of this continual flight? Aren’t they ever going to establish a line of resistance and order us to hold it?”
They never did. One June 16, two days after Paris had been occupied by the Germans, I found myself on the right bank of the Loire, at the Nevers bridge. My car, heavily loaded with the members of my family and all our luggage, had developed motor trouble. Our most urgent need was to get across that river; for we supposed of course, that the retreating troops would stop on the other side of the natural line of defense constituted by the Loire, which it should have been possible to hold for weeks, and possibly forever. Across that bridge, we thought, lay safety.
We tried to persuade passing cars to tow us across. All of them, civilian and military vehicles alike, passed us by. Their occupants intent on the pursuing Germans, had no thought for anything except to get across that bridge themselves. So we all got out except a young girl who took the steering wheel, and pushed the car over what seemed to be the longest bridge in the world.
We felt better when we got to the other side, with the wide river between us and the enemy. I found a colonel supervising the retreat of his troops, and asked him if he could direct me to the officer in charge of the sector, thinking that he could probably let me have a mechanic to repair the car.
“There is no officer in charge here,” the colonel said. “We are all passing through without stopping, so there is no organization at this point. I’m sorry I can’t do anything for you. You had better get out of here as quickly as you can. The Germans will probably be here in an hour.” From these words I realized with a shock that the defense of the left bank of the Loire was not even being considered, and that the army was retreating indefinitely. I looked up and down the long banks of the river. There were no fortified positions whatsoever. I saw only one lonely soldier standing by the side of a machine gun. He seemed to be wondering whether he had been forgotten there.
South of the Loire, the bewilderment of the troops deepened, for all of them had expected that that line would be held. Time and again I heard the question asked: “Where are we going?” Those who clung to hope to the last declared desperately: “The generals must have a plan. Our orders are to retreat as quickly as we can. There must be reasons for it.” But most of them simply gave up the attempt to understand what was going on, and why no effort was being made to resist.
For three months after the armistice I remained in France. I wanted to find out the story behind the defeat. What I have to tell is not pure hypothesis. It is the only possible explanation which can be deduced from a number of unknown or little known facts which I took the greatest trouble to verify. Here is the story:
There has been ample occasion in recent years to observe Nazi propaganda tactics, among them the method which consists in selecting the most appropriate arguments to convince any group the Nazis wish to win over, even when those arguments are directly contrary to those used with another group. Such a procedure would seem on the surface likely to defeat its own aims; but it is the tendency of each group to believe what it wants to believe, that Hitler is telling the truth, while deceiving its adversaries. It is the same state of mentality which confidence men evoke in such tested swindles as the rosary game, in which the sucker is led to see himself as the accomplice in victimizing someone else and thus never imagines that he is marked for the role of victim himself.
It was in this fashion that Germany laid the foundation for France’s defeat by corrupting different groups of the population in different ways. Agents of Berlin told the French Communists, for instance, that Germany was Soviet Russia’s ally, and that if Hitler won the war, he would not oppose a Communist Revolution in France. The new French Soviet Republic could then conclude an alliance with Germany, Russia, and Italy and take part in the totalitarian reconstruction of postwar Europe. French Communist leaders swallowed this propaganda, and the result was slowing down of production in munitions plants due to insidious Communist propaganda against which the Interior Ministry tried in vain to take effective measures.
There were many evidences that Communists believed they were working in accord with Germany. After the armistice, Communist factory workers in the occupied region on several occasions started the singing of the Internationale in the factories where they were employed with the idea that this would please their new masters, and were surprised that it didn’t.
During the war, the Communists had been given reasons for believing that they were on the side of the Germans. Some of the French Bolshevik leaders who deserted during the war fled to Germany. Findings of French radiogoniometric services proved that Communist short-wave stations broadcasting in French were operating from Germany. After the German troops reached Paris, several young French writers known for their Communist sympathies, who had remained behind when most other Leftists had fled, were immediately given important places, such as the editing of Paris daily papers, by the Nazi authorities. These incidents demonstrate that the Germans had succeeded in establishing relationships with French Communist leaders during the war; but it must be recorded that the majority of Communist workmen remained definitely hostile to the Nazis.
This failure to enlist the support among the Communist rank and file which had been found among the leaders convinced the German secret service early that there was no real chance of bringing about the defeat of France by fomenting a Bolshevik revolution. If such a method had been feasible, Nazi Germany would certainly not have hesitated to apply it, just as Imperial Germany did not hesitate to send Lenin and his companions in their famous sealed railroad coach into Russia in 1917.
Under the circumstances, the Communist movement was taken advantage of by the Germans only to the extent of being employed to create as much unrest as possible among French workers, who did not even realize to what influences they were being exposed. The chief effort of German secret agents was concentrated on conservative circles, which, according to reports received at the Wilhelmstrasse, were in a much better position to exert effective influence on the outcome of the war.
There was nothing contradictory about this willingness on the part of the Nazis to cooperate with either the extreme Left or the extreme Right, or even with both simultaneously, since their object, whatever their dupes might think, was not to help them to victory, but to use them as a tool to weaken the unity and the power of the government. Nazi propaganda welcomed any loophole through which it might penetrate into the vitals of a foreign country with the aid of any resistance to the regime which might already exist there.
For years before the war, the Nazis had established contact with reactionary Rightist circles in France. One such circle which in America has been accused of having been influenced by the Germans and having perhaps contributed to France’s downfall is the Croix de Feu, at one time generally considered as the future Fascist movement of France. I must say that I could find neither proof nor indication that the Croix de Feu had played Germany’s game. On the contrary, the Petit Journal, published by Colonel François de la Rocque, the Croix de Feu leader, assumed a more courageously anti-German attitude after the armistice than did most other papers published under the control of the Vichy government.
Two other less conspicuous, but perhaps more influential Right-wing groups were, however, definitely approached by the Germans during the prewar years. One of them was the secret revolutionary organization popularly known as the Cagoulards (the Hooded ones); the other was the group which published the weekly, Je Suis Partout. These contacts were established chiefly by Otto Abetz, infamous “special delegate” of Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, who was expelled from France shortly before the war. On his initiative, members of both groups undertook several trips to Berlin between 1937 and 1939 to discuss means of action.
The German secret service had a particular interest in these two groups because, while entirely independent of each other, they had one thing in common—far-reaching ties with the French Army.
The Cagoulard group was headed by French officers of high rank—majors, colonels, and even generals. General Dusseigneur was among those arrested when the Cagoulard movement was uncovered shortly before the war after it had planted bombs in Paris. The dissolution of the movement made its members more cautious, but its underground activities continued.
If any further evidence of German support for the Cagoulards had been needed beyond that already turned up by the French police, it was provided by the Germans themselves. When they occupied Paris, one of the first things they did was to demand that the French national police turn over the files on the Cagoulard case. From these files, the Germans learned the names of the police commissioners who had unearthed the Cagoulard plot, and immediately arrested those who were in occupied territory.
This was in striking contrast to the treatment of the arrested Cagoulard leaders, all of whom had been released by the French government by the beginning of the war. Shortly after the start of hostilities I met in the train the brother of one of the Cagoulards who had been arrested. In the ensuing conversation, I remarked that I was astonished that responsible adults should have indulged at such a time in what then appeared to have been a somewhat childish imitation of a motion picture conspiracy. Nettled by my attitude, my interlocutor answered:
“You don’t understand how serious this movement was. It was organized by the Deuxième Bureau (the department of the army concerned with espionage and counterespionage). It was at the instigation of the military secret service that my brother and his friends organized the Cagoulards. That can’t be told now, of course, but the day will come when all the truth will be known, and my brother will be considered a hero for the time he has spent in prison.”
“The Deuxième Bureau!” I exclaimed incredulously. “Why in the world should the Deuxième Bureau want to foster a revolutionary movement when it’s already so near the power itself?”
“Ever since the 1936 elections,” he answered, “important members of the French secret service have been very much worried about the influence the Communist movement has gained in this country, and so they decided to take matters into their own hands. The Cagoulard movement was formed to do that. The Popular Front ministers got my brother and his friends put in jail, but you’ll see that they haven’t said their last word yet.”
Je Suis Partout, the weekly which was another outpost of German propaganda in France, belonged originally to the publishing house of Fayard, which put out books and another and more prosperous political weekly, Candide. Je Suis Partout was a money loser and publisher Arthème Fayard decided several years ago to discontinue it. When the news got out, Pierre Gaxotte, editor of the paper, proposed to Fayard that he turn the paper’s name over to him instead of giving him severance pay, since he thought he might be able to keep the magazine going himself. Fayard agreed, and Je Suis Partout continued to appear without interruption, and so far as the public knew, without any change in its control. Circulation did not increase. Advertising continued low. The paper showed no signs of prosperity—but it did not show any signs of having financial difficulties any more either.
Pierre Gaxotte, as well as some other members of his editorial staff, had begun his political career in the Royalist Action Française movement, but had apparently decided to strike out for himself and cut his own political tracks. Under Gaxotte’s direction, Je Suis Partout assumed a definitely pro-German attitude, arguing that France and Germany should come to an understanding between themselves as the two great continental powers, leaving England out in the cold. Paul Ferdonnet, who won fame later as the “traitor of Stuttgart” delivering propaganda broadcasts in French from the Stuttgart radio station during the war (he is now supervisor of the French radio in Paris), was also on the editorial staff until he went to Berlin to establish his permanent residence and his own press syndicate there. From that time on, he was the secret liaison agent between the German authorities and Gaxotte’s paper.
The German sympathies of Je Suis Partout were apparent enough, but no one bothered much about it, for circulation was low and the paper’s influence was considered to be negligible. This must have been the viewpoint of the Daladier government also, for except for friendly arguments with the censors, the paper was able to continue publishing unhampered even after the war broke out.
When Daladier resigned and Paul Reynaud came in, he appointed Georges Mandel Minister of the Interior, and thus head of the French police organization. Although Mandel, zealous, patriotic, and uncompromising, like his master Clemenceau whose secretary he had been during the last war, undertook to hunt down defeatists of all descriptions, Je Suis Partout continued to appear as usual. Mandel also apparently considered it too insignificant to be dangerous.
But one day a well-known French journalist brought to Mandel the proof that the principal members of the editorial staff of Je Suis Partout were simultaneously agents of the Deuxième Bureau. Mandel was astounded. He who knew all the undercurrents of French political life, who for years had kept secret files about all public figures, had not dreamed that any connection could have existed between this outspokenly pro-German magazine and one of the most influential departments of the French Army. He had put the editors of Je Suis Partout down as innocuous fools. He now realized that though the circulation of the paper was small, the private influence of its editors might have been both great and disastrous.
He did not hesitate an instant. He ordered immediately the arrest of five members of the staff. Among them was an obscure journalist, not generally known as a member of the staff, named Pierre Mouton, who some years before had founded a small press syndicate called Prima Presse in partnership with Ferdonnet. Mandel quickly obtained proof that the two men were still cooperating. Mouton, while maintaining permanent contact with Je Suis Partout, was also flooding the French daily press with cleverly prepared pro-German articles which were supplied to the newspapers free of charge.
With the known leaders of the Je Suis Partout group in jail, Mandel apparently thought that there was no immediate urgency for delving further into this particular case when so many other vital matters pressed for attention. The same attitude had been taken a few years before in regard to the Cagoulards, who seemed to have been set down as definitely muzzled because their figureheads had been imprisoned. Neither the stern and Spartan Mandel, who had arrested the Je Suis Partout group, nor the vivacious and epicurean Albert Sarraut, his predecessor, who had handled the Cagoulard case, imagined that either of these two groups had achieved a real and lasting penetration into the high command—a penetration which seems to have contributed largely to the debacle of May and June.
Possibly the two cases had never been laid side by side so that the telltale fact that both times a trail led to the Deuxième Bureau had not been observed. Perhaps also the two Interior Ministers had hesitated each time before venturing to have civilian authorities investigate the most powerful of the military departments. The Deuxième Bureau of the French Army was sometimes called “a state within the state.” It might more exactly have been called “several states within the state,” for it was a complicated organism with its own currents and undercurrents, comprising a number of competing groups. Somewhere within this complicated office existed the only link between the pro-German Je Suis Partout and the German-inspired Cagoulards; but on the surface, at least at the beginning, no relation seemed to exist between these two separate activities.
The Cagoulard movement, although it had started in the Deuxième Bureau, soon succeeded through the interlinking relationships of high officers, some of whom supported its activities, in putting out tentacles into the first and third bureaus of the army as well—those concerned respectively with direction of operations and supplies—in other words the two departments which in June were responsible respectively for the orders to retreat and for the failure of the front-line troops to receive ammunition and aid from the aviation.
It may be noted also that several of these high officers who were sympathetic to the Cagoulard movement were in particularly close contact with Marshal Pétain who had his own devoted followers in the army, just as all other first-rank military leaders, like Gamelin and Weygand, had also, whether they were on the active list or retired.
All this may seem incredible. It is difficult to believe that French officers of high rank should have acted in the interests of Germany during the war, thus contributing to bring about their country’s downfall. Even though the Cagoulards, an emanation of the Deuxième Bureau, may have maintained contact with the Germans several years before the war; even if unsuccessful newspapermen like Gaxotte may have made up for deficits by accepting subsidies from the Nazis, it still seems fantastic that the military leaders of France, whose patriotism no one has ever doubted, should have acted as traitors in time of war. It seems to be a moral impossibility.
The explanation is simple. Neither the Cagoulards, nor the editors of Je Suis Partout, nor the French officers who were in relations with them, ever believed at any moment that they were traitors. If history sets them down as having betrayed France, the verdict will be incomprehensible to them. They believed themselves to be patriots. It is our privilege, if we wish, to see them rather as pitiful victims of German Propaganda.
What happened was this: Long before the war, the Nazi secret service realized that both the Cagoulards and the staff of Je Suis Partout were worth cultivating because of their connections with members of the French General Staff, and with officers of influence close to such leaders as Pétain, among others.
Friendly relations were established, and the Germans hammered away with arguments like these:
“You Frenchmen consider that we Germans are your hereditary enemies. There’s no reason why you should think so. Our two peoples should be able to live and work side by side without friction. It’s true we’ve had trouble in the past, but why? Because England, who can only maintain her influence on the continent if the continental nations are divided, has constantly stirred us up against each other.
“Besides that, we have not fought against the real France. Our wars were against the French Republic. For 150 years that regime has usurped the place of the real France. In 1789 the English provoked the French Revolution to weaken your nation, and since then your people seem to have forgotten its great destiny.
“The Revolution of France started in the lodges of Freemasonry, which were implanted in your country by England. The Freemasons operated with English and Jewish help; for the last 150 years, you have been under the control of the same powers. For the last twenty years these powers have been cooperating with international Communism and thus have brought another danger into your country.
“Wake up! Denounce the English alliance, expel the Jews from important positions, suppress Freemasonry, as we have done in Germany. The danger of Communism will be over, and there will be no obstacle to a happy and peaceful understanding between France and Germany.”
This bait was eagerly taken. It made no difference that this account was inaccurate, and might easily have been refuted. It was the sort of thing that right-wing Frenchmen of anti-Republican and antidemocratic leanings were ready to hear, and it provided a moral basis for cooperation between them and the Germans. Supplied with a patriotic motive for destroying their domestic political opponents, convinced that in so doing they would not open the way to the hereditary enemy but on the contrary make him a friend, these Frenchmen no longer had any scruples about accepting subsidies for the arming of the Cagoulards and the publication of Je Suis Partout from an ally in the common cause of continental peace and friendship.
The Germans had found the ideal sophism with which to gain friends within the French Army. They realized, of course, that they could not hope to influence a majority of General Staff officers, but they knew also that an active minority, so convinced it is right that it is willing to use any methods to achieve its aims, can arrive at its objectives at decisive moments by obstructing the course of action decided upon by the majority. And among the officers whom German propaganda had reached were many so placed that they could easily block the complicated intermeshing gears of the army machine at the critical juncture.
Relationships between the Germans and their friends in France were maintained even after the beginning of the war through various neutral countries. Ferdonnet continued to communicate with Mouton and the staff of Je Suis Partout. Michelin, the big automobile tire manufacturer whose name was whispered all over France as that of one of the men behind the Cagoulards, sent frequent messengers to Switzerland. Pétain himself was French Ambassador to Spain, and several members of his entourage maintained contact with members of the German Embassy in Madrid. There were even rumors that Pétain had secret meetings with the German Ambassador, though this was denied. The theme the Germans were singing to their French friends now was a development of that which they had dinned into them earlier. It had evolved into this:
“We did not want this war. You yourselves did your utmost to avoid it. But now that it has come it is a fact which we cannot leave out of account. Both of us wanted to create a better understanding between our two countries, to be followed by an alliance. The war now prevents us from reaching our goal by direct means.
“If you concluded a separate peace with us, we could still become your allies. We know, of course, that you and your friends, who have the true interests of your country at heart, and can see into the future more clearly than the others, would eagerly accept this solution. But you have not the power to do it; and even if you had, the people who have been worked up by war propaganda to hate us, would never agree to it. There is only one case now in which the French people would accept a separate peace; and that, unfortunately, is if France suffers a military defeat.
“It must seem monstrous to you even to envisage a French defeat. We understand that. We sympathize with you. But suppose you knew that it would not be a real defeat. Suppose we could arrange a simulated defeat, which would bring the French people to accept the idea of an armistice whether the English are ready to fight or not?
“We can give you a binding promise that if France can be apparently defeated in this manner, she will not be treated as a defeated nation. On the contrary, you will immediately become Germany’s ally and we will cooperate to build up a new order in Europe. You have only to break definitely with England as proof of your good faith.
“Of course, a brief occupation of certain parts of France by German troops would be necessary to make the defeat look real and to persuade the population to accept it. One of the purposes of the occupation would be to purge France of the elements which you dislike just as much as we do, and which stand in your way in your task of resuscitating the real France from her torpor of a century and a half. But when it is all over, when our troops have been withdrawn, you will be in control of a new and reborn France which with the new Germany will impose upon Europe an era of strength and prosperity for both of us.”
Once again the bait was taken. Its effect was felt in extremely influential circles. I have personally been able to verify conclusively the fact that Marshal Pétain, having invited two highly placed Spaniards to dine with him in Hendaye in November 1939, said to his guests: “Do not judge France by its present appearance. Democracy is finished everywhere. Next spring will see a movement in France comparable to your own national uprising.”
Such a phrase in the mouth of a French Ambassador who was at the same time a French military leader was extremely significant. What other meaning could a revolt in wartime have except that its intent was to end the war? What other reason could there have been for waiting until spring except that this period was the best for a German offensive?
It was not necessary, as I have already noted above, to transform all or even a majority of the officers of the French General Staff, into accomplices in order to provoke a French defeat. If in a big business, a few accountants, an assistant cashier, the head of the sales department, and one or two keymen in the stock department took part in a conspiracy to ruin the firm, their simultaneous coordinated sabotage would inevitably achieve their aim—and with particular ease if the organization of the company were faulty.
There were some faults with the French Army, certainly. Was morale unsatisfactory? Was equipment inadequate? Undoubtedly, but the situation in these respects was not strikingly different from that of 1914-1918. The decisive factor seems to have been faults in the high command—important information regarding the movements of the enemy was not relayed in time, orders to army corps suffered considerable delays, the supply service left equipment and matériel of all sorts in the depots instead of sending it to strategically important points. From June 13 on, troops in good fighting shape received everywhere mysterious orders for retreat which puzzled them most of all, at the same time that French statesmen were hearing from French generals (most of them may have spoken with complete good faith), that all troops were fleeing in disorder. Confusion was so great and news of the retreat so unexpected that nobody thought to investigate the hidden causes of the disaster.
Shortly after the armistice, the same announcement was repeated in French by the Stuttgart radio several evenings in succession. It was this: “Frenchmen, in a few days we will give you the name of an outstanding countryman of yours who was our principal agent in France, and who helped to bring about your defeat.”
Everyone in the French unoccupied zone either heard this broadcast or heard about it. There was naturally a good deal of guessing as to the name that would be given by the Germans. For my part, I made a bet that no name would ever be given by Stuttgart. My reasoning was this: That there was such a man or men I didn’t doubt for an instant. But I didn’t doubt also that he had not expected the terrible armistice conditions imposed upon France. He had led his country into what he had thought would be a fake defeat on the basis of his confidence in the honesty of the Germans. By then he had discovered that they were not honest, and that it was a real defeat that had been inflicted upon the country. He saw that the Nazis intended to treat the country with all the severity of genuine conquerors, and that he and his friends had been dupes.
I supposed then, that this man had tried to force the Germans to live up to their promises and to treat France as an ally. He would have pointed out that the new Pétain government had turned against England, as had been agreed. And he would have threatened to reveal everything if Germany did not hold to her bargain, thus ending the acceptance of defeat on the part of the French people by letting them know that they had not in fact been militarily defeated.
Germany’s answer was the Stuttgart broadcast. Her French agent had tried to threaten her. She simply returned the blackmail, reminding him forcefully that the Reich no longer cared whether the French people knew how it had been defeated or not, since the Army was disbanded, the strategic points occupied, and the people helpless to resume the fight. He was reminded also what his own position would be if the story came out. He saw that he had to keep silence to save himself, and the Germans, perfectly willing that silence should be kept, never honored their promise to reveal his name.
It was on the basis of this theory that I expected in advance that the Stuttgart radio would not follow up its announcement. Since it did not, I feel justified in assuming that the reasoning which enabled me to arrive at a correct prediction was probably correct itself.
As if to confirm all this, Pétain himself later made a very mild speech in which he timidly asked the Germans whether they intended to accept the new France as a full-fledged partner in the reconstruction of Europe. France’s new rulers have kept all the promises they had given the Germans. They have cut off relationships with England, dissolved the Freemasons, attacked the Jews, delivered up anti-Hitler German refugees, fought the British at Oran, Dakar, and in Syria. They have slavishly obeyed Hitler’s commands and now they are naively surprised because Hitler has not kept his promise to free France and make her independent again. With the true psychology of a dupe they had believed that Hitler might fool others, but never themselves.
That ends the statement of my French friend.
Q. How would you sum up Pétain? Is he a patriot or a traitor, or misguided, or what?
A. He is first of all a very old, too-old man. Only a man who had lost his judgment could surrender his country to Hitler as Hindenburg did and as Pétain did, both under a profound misconception of Hitler. Pétain is intensely religious and identifies Communism with anti-Christ, the only enemy, failing to perceive that the most powerful foe of Christianity to appear on earth since Christ lived is Hitler. It is a mistake to call Pétain a Fascist; he is a medievalist. He believes the principal goal of life is to prepare for the other world, and the man who can do that best is the man whose activity is closest to nature, the peasant, and the man whose mind is not confused by learning, the illiterate peasant. Therefore he wants a France of uneducated, devout peasants; he does not mind at all the plan of Hitler to abolish French industry.
He is a defeatist at heart; the affairs of this earth are not worth fighting for. It is on record that at Verdun he several times wished to surrender. As a defeatist he believes in superior force and can be as ruthless when he is in possession of it as he can be submissive when he has lost it. His suppression of the mutinies in the French Army was notoriously harsh; the statistics of the killed have yet to be published. He accepts the French birth rate as a fact of superior force to which France must bow and his experience of the bloodletting at Verdun reinforced his conviction that France ought not to try to maintain a predominant place in Europe.
As an old man his vivid memories are of the past, and Germany, though marching under the pirate swastika, remained for him in 1940 the Germany which let France off lightly in 1871. He once told a friend how impressed he was with the behavior of the German commander at Verdun who allowed French officers to retain their swords after one of the surrenders of Douaumont. In this venerable confidence that he was dealing with gentlemen, he gave up. The most pathetic words uttered in this war were those of Pétain when he addressed his petition for an armistice to Hitler with the words, “I speak as soldier to soldier.”
Q. Why was that pathetic; isn’t Hitler a soldier?
A. Yes, indeed, but the meaning of the old marshal’s words was, “I speak to you as gentleman to gentleman,” and that is the most pathetic sentence of the war, because it contains the utter failure of the French to understand that not only is Hitler not a gentleman, but Hitler would be the first indignantly to repudiate a title he despises. The code of a gentleman is derived from the Christian code, which Hitler and his Nazi-Nietzchean followers despise. They curse Christ as a Jewish weakling whose religion is for slaves. They spit upon the elementary idea of fair play. A group of devoted young Nazis, a dozen strong, who have just beaten to death a crippled Jew, will be clear of conscience, joyful as though they had done a good deed, and utterly unable to understand the American or British notion that it is not even enjoyable sport to attack with odds of twelve to one. It is sport to them. Pétain had not the faintest notion that the sons of the Germans he had known had come to this. So with his eyes closed, and dreaming of the past, he accepted the promise of a position for France of junior partner to Germany.
Q. Is Pétain moved by personal ambition?
A. He is consumed by it. He did not accept with reluctance the post of “Chief of the Government” after Reynaud fell, but gladly, feeling that he had finally received the recognition denied him when Foch was made Commander in Chief. He does not consider himself a Fuehrer or a Duce. He is much nearer the position of his fellow clericalist, the caudillo, Franco, who never clearly understood the meaning of Nazism and was repelled by what he did understand.
Pétain does not understand Fascism or Nazism but only sees that they control the mob, and he wishes above all to see the mob controlled as an army, to be drilled and disciplined into hardworking, God-fearing Frenchmen, obedient in civil as in religious life. His religious feeling dominates all his actions. In Bordeaux, the day Reynaud resigned, I was told Pétain’s words as he heard the debacle was reaching its end: “France must suffer for her sins!” Mystically he surrendered, and mystically he still exclaimed a year later to a nation which had endured twelve months of injury and abasement with no prospect of relief, “You are suffering and must suffer for a long time still because we have not yet paid for all our mistakes.”
To the old Marshal, France’s troubles began with the Revolution of 1789, and to cure them he wants to take France back to the Ancien Regime. He wants to do away with liberty, because liberty is synonymous with license and license with sin. Theoretically he is a monarchist, but now that he has become Regent, like Horthy of Hungary, he does not want a king. This period Pétain regards as France’s purgatory, which he gladly endures, confident of a better world. Many Frenchmen recognize Pétain’s good intentions but do not believe they will save him from Hell.
Q. Why, if the Germans have such a hold over Pétain, have they not forced him to surrender the French fleet and to give them the use of the North African naval and air bases? If Pétain is in fear of being revealed by the Germans as one who helped bring about the French defeat, why can’t the Germans get anything they want from him?
A. First, because Pétain is more useful to the Germans than the French fleet and the North African bases. Who else could lead so many of the French people to submit and collaborate as they are doing today under Pétain? Pétain does Hitler’s work for him. Pétain coaxes the plunder from the French people in the form of taxes and hands it to Hitler in the form of payment for maintenance of the army of occupation. If the Germans ever exposed him, he would lose his position and they would lose their most useful servant.
Second, the more time that elapses since the armistice, the less effective is the German blackmail threat on Pétain, because as time passes people become less interested in what happened, and as experience with the Germans deepens, fewer people can be found to believe any German explanation.
Third, Pétain, with all his senility, must have realized that it is not nearly as certain now that Germany will win, as it was when he surrendered. The Russian resistance, much as Pétain hates and despises Bolshevism, must have made him think; and the growing belligerence of America must have had some effect upon him. As he becomes less and less convinced that Germany is certain to win he should logically become less submissive to the Germans. On the other hand, he is not likely to revolt openly until he is convinced Germany will lose; and the only way to give him such conviction is for the United States to enter the war.
Q. What would Hitler do if he finally tired of fooling with Vichy?
A. He would simply march in and occupy all of France. He could do it with a handful of divisions, since the French have been totally disarmed or at least as fully disarmed as it was possible for the Germans to do. But from then on he would have the trouble of administering the whole country and collecting the taxes which Pétain collects for him now. I do not think he is anxious to increase his responsibilities that way now. Pétain knows this too, and that stiffens the old man’s backbone a little. Essentially though the Vichy attitude will always depend on the question who is going to win the war. I should think that when the defeat of Hitler is assured, the Vichy government may be overthrown and another or Free French, de Gaulle government may re-enter the war on our side. Pétain and Darlan it seems to me are too compromised ever to do that.
Q. What about Darlan?
A. Darlan undoubtedly sees more clearly than Pétain, but he is less honorable; indeed I have heard highly placed Englishmen who knew him intimately curse him with concentrated bitterness as the vilest traitor of the lot. Few people would describe Pétain as consciously dishonorable. Few of the men around Pétain are spared the charge by Frenchmen who know them best.
Darlan has no respect from anybody. He has been all his life a political sailor, having had his start from his father, one-time Minister of Justice. His politics were consistently opportunistic. Today he helps head a government that has suppressed Freemasonry; yet he was a Freemason when to be a Freemason was an asset. He helps keep Leon Blum in confinement; yet he supported Blum when Blum was in power. He is now the fiercest advocate of fighting England; yet until Reynaud fell he supported the policy of moving the government to North Africa and carrying on.
He switched when he perceived the chance of becoming head man in the appeasement government. His change of heart was literally overnight. In London immediately after the fall of France, an old friend of mine, an officer of the French Navy whose ship had broken away and come to England, told me Darlan had issued an order to all vessels of the Navy that with the signing of the Armistice they should make for French African or other friendly ports and prepare to go on with the war; twenty-four hours later another code message from Darlan countermanded the order and directed all ships to make for French ports. In the interval Darlan had been promised a seat next to the Chief of the Vichy State.
Nothing in Darlan’s record indicates that he has ever acted except for the purpose of furthering his career; he is characterized by the French as the perfect careerist, and the word has even less flattering connotations in French than in English. The one instinct in him which seems to have persisted without variance is his hatred of the British, based upon the centuries-old rivalry of the French and British navies. While the French were in the war we Americans forgot that the memory of Trafalgar is for the French Navy, or for its older officers anyway, stronger than the memory of the four years of Franco-British comradeship on the battlefields of 1914-1918.
In Darlan this feeling was always strong. At the London Naval Conference of 1930 he fought for parity with the British, but they refused it to him, with a prescience blessed by the event. Suppose the French had possessed as powerful a navy as the British when the French Army fell and Darlan had commanded a force able to challenge the British! After the Battle of Oran, July 3, 1940 when the British, rightly suspecting the intentions of Darlan, attempted to disable the French Fleet at Mers-el Kebir in order to prevent its falling into the hands of the Germans, Darlan led the outcry against the “perfidious” assault. The British are convinced that if ever the chance comes Darlan will use every means in his power to injure them. Whatever his motives may have been at the beginning for joining the capitulation, Darlan like most of the men of Vichy has by now so compromised himself with the French people that, as one French friend of mine expressed it: “If Germany is defeated the best these men of Vichy could hope for would be dishonorable, furtive retirement, but I think most of them would be killed.”
And if Germany wins? For a while Darlan and his colleagues seemed to feel confident that Hitler would be good to them, but now he exclaims: “If we do not get an honorable peace, if France is cut up into many departments and deprived of important overseas territories, and enters diminished and bruised into the New Europe, it will not recover and our children will live in the misery and hatred which breed war.” These words of the appeaser indicate that he has already discerned the outlines of the fate Hitler has in store for France; yet what is the alternative for him and those like him now? Free Frenchmen declare the alternative is death, as traitors.
Q. And Laval?
A. He is wounded but he is surely enjoying himself because for the moment he can say, “I told you so.” He is probably the world’s most delighted observer of the Battle of Russia. My last glimpse of him was in Bordeaux at the restaurant “Chapon Fin” the night France capitulated. The restaurant was crowded with the wealthy, the powerful, the noted and notorious of France. The door was locked; without an introduction from at least a Cabinet Minister or a millionaire nobody could get in. That night ten thousand refugees were pounding for admission to the restaurants of Bordeaux. Our Ambassador to Poland, Tony Biddle, unmarked from his harrowing escape across Poland under Luftwaffe machine-gun fire, and as fresh here at the collapse of the world as though he were attending a bridge party at home, rescued us and with a gesture which implied we were all ambassadors, requisitioned a table for our party of American newspapermen. From one corner Otto of Habsburg greeted us in his cordial democratic way. He was one victim Hitler would have liked to catch. I looked around the grotesque dining room, decorated as an artificial rock garden of papier-mâché and now populated by as queer a throng as ever assembled to dine at the funeral of a nation. Nearly every French politician I had ever seen was there, most of them drinking copiously of the wine for which the city was famous. There was no gloom perceptible; not among the Frenchmen. The atmosphere was excited, laughter was frequent and high-pitched. Perhaps it was bravery; the gay talk and conviviality sounded very courageous or else very frivolous at that moment. Who could have realized that there were Frenchmen there calculating to improve their careers by the fall of their country? We American newspapermen looked more depressed than any of the men whose motherland was about to be strangled. Presently a waiter brought me a note from Laval inviting me to his table. I had not seen him enter. There he was, swarthy, ebony-haired, with his famous white string tie, presiding over a company of half a dozen friends, all talking, as everybody in the Western World was talking, about the fate of France.
Abruptly Laval asked, “What do you think, M. Knickerbocker?”
I spoke with all the emphasis I could muster and placing my fist on the table to help express my sincerity talked directly to him: “Mr. President, I think that if you give up, if you surrender, it will mean the end of France as a nation, the end of France forever unless another, outside power comes to your rescue. But Mr. President, if you go on fighting, if you refuse to surrender, even if you have to go to North Africa and base your government on Morocco, then France will live because she and her friends will win this war, however long it may take. But please believe me, Mr. President, when I say I know what the Nazis mean to do to France, and I know because I have lived for nine years in Germany as a professional observer and I know Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis, and the German people better than I know any politician, or political party, or people in the world, and I know they mean the utter destruction of France.”
There was dead silence, and to my gratification everybody at the table, all of Laval’s friends, nodded in agreement with me, but M. Laval himself, grave as a judge, leaned back and with that inscrutable Moorish air of his said, “No, M. Knickerbocker, you do not understand. Hitler does not want to destroy France; Hitler only wants to destroy the Soviet Union.”
That was Laval’s belief, and because this belief was shared by so many other Frenchmen, it became one of the principal reasons for the fall of France.
Whatever else one may think of him, Laval has guts and is no hypocrite. He hates democracy and says so. He is out to promote the fortunes of M. Laval and admits it. He calls himself a realist; and realistically he long ago estimated the strength of France as inadequate to stand up against Germany. He learned to hate Britain during those long years when every French move to bolster their position against the doubly powerful Reich was checked by an imbecile British Foreign Office which continued to think that the balance of power required a stronger Germany and a weaker France. So Laval’s belief in the desirability of a Franco-German “understanding” was not born of defeat alone.
He was the first French Premier to visit Germany after the war. I was in Berlin when he arrived in the autumn of 1931 with the aging and feeble but still brilliant Briand, then Foreign Minister. Bruening was Chancellor and that farsighted benevolent statesman, whom the Allies could have helped suppress the growing menace of Hitler, wished to make the visit the foundation for a new era of Franco-German friendship. How futile his hopes were came to light as the train bearing the French ministers rolled in. I was standing with a small crowd of Germans at the foot of the steps of the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof, and noticed that the streets had been cleared and roped off all the way to the Hotel Adlon. Masses of police manned the ropes but there was almost no crowd to hold back. Around the station were about five hundred people. I noticed they looked curiously alike, as though all from the same neighborhood, the same class. Presently I saw a friend, a plain-clothes man from Police Headquarters, all dressed up in his Sunday best, with gloves and a derby hat and the inevitable big detective’s shoes. I greeted him. He introduced his wife and children. A little surprised, I asked if he were such a great advocate of Franco-German friendship that he had brought his whole family to cheer the visitors from Paris. “Ja wohl!” he replied. “Orders, you see. They sent us all down here. Everybody here is from Police Headquarters, mit Frau und Kinder. Nobody else; no outsiders. We get a day off for coming.” Sure enough, that was the makeup of the entire crowd. They dutifully thronged around the steps and shouted “Hoch Frankreich!” Laval and Briand then passed through empty streets to the Hotel Adlon where another group of policemen and their wives and children cried “Hoch!” again. And that was the length and breadth and depth of Franco-German friendship.
Q. Has Laval a chance to come back?
A. Yes, if the Germans win he has the best of chances. Laval today is the only master politician left in France; Pétain is senile; Darlan is ward-heel size; none of the others in the Vichy camp is even that large, and the politicians of the Republic are dead and buried. Laval is the best-hated Frenchman alive; the shots fired into him by Colette were cheered from one end of France to the other, but he is still the only Frenchman capable of ruling France as a dictator.
He is much like Stalin, an Asiatic, with more than his share of the Eastern blood of the Auvernacs. He has the psychology of the Oriental and like Stalin he has the Oriental’s lack of human consideration. As Stalin regards Russia without love, as an object, so Laval regards France. He has few real friends but possesses a marvelous power of extemporized comradeship and can talk the language of any man with whom he converses, including, as one of his enemies suggested, “even an honest man.” Once a friend of his exclaimed, “You ought to be dictator of a South American Republic!” “How did you know?” asked Laval, genuinely surprised. “Oh, just a joke,” answered the friend. “But no,” said Laval, “I am amazed, because when I was a boy that was just what I always dreamed of becoming—dictator of a South American state.” Perhaps he may get his wish yet, as the malicious wits of the Riviera have called Vichy France, “a banana republic without bananas.”
Laval’s hatred of England is extended now to America, because American support upholds Britain, and Laval will never be safe until Britain is defeated. He is still unwavering in his conviction that Germany will win, but even if we entered the war and it became evident Germany would lose, Laval cannot now change his position. He is one of those so totally committed to the German cause that he stands or falls with it.
Q. You have said that we Americans were very much like the French; now in what way are we? Have we also traitors in our ranks?
A. No, we have not, I am convinced, any traitors among our officers, as the French had. There are many Nazi agents among us, and a few may have penetrated to positions of some importance, but I do not believe they could affect the issue of the war as they did in France. There are many Communists as well among us, probably more than there are Nazis, and we ought never to forget that whether they are native-born Americans or not makes no difference. Nor does the fact that Soviet Russia is momentarily engaged in fighting our enemy change the essential fact that Communists cannot be loyal Americans. Their loyalty is to Moscow alone, and if a change in Russia’s position should make it expedient for the Kremlin to order American Communists to sabotage America’s war effort, the order would be zealously obeyed.
Our chief danger of this sort lies in the wrongheaded activity of our isolationists who, whether they wish it or not, serve the cause of Hitler more effectively than all the paid agents of Germany and Italy and Japan could do if their numbers were multiplied many times. Consider carefully the account given you by my French friend of the way the Germans appealed to Parisian conservative circles, and ask yourself if their arguments do not sound remarkably like the speeches of Lindbergh and Wheeler.
Treason can be difficult to define. I had a French friend, whom I can call a friend no longer because he became one of the chief collaborationists with the Germans. I think—I am not sure—but I think we have no one like him in America, but he was so representative of the group that betrayed France, that I want to quote a conversation I had with him just before the war began. I said, “Jean, you seem to believe profoundly that Germany is strong enough to win a war no matter how France fights to prevent it; and you also seem to believe that the German kind of National Socialism would be a good thing for the whole continent, including France. Now what would you do, believing as you do, if France were to be at war with Germany, and you thought defeat was inevitable, and you foresaw a long and bloody conflict, and you suddenly found yourself in possession of a military secret which would end the war immediately in favor of Germany if the Germans knew it. Would you give this decisive military secret to the Germans?” Jean answered, “Yes, of course I would.” “But wouldn’t that be treason?” I asked. “Not at all,” Jean answered. “It wouldn’t be treason to France; it would only be a blow at what I consider the treasonable government of the Republic.” Now I submit that even our rabid isolationists would reject a position like Jean’s, but we ought nevertheless clearly to see the fact that Lindbergh and Wheeler by their powerful discouragement of the whole war effort of America are doing this country the same kind of harm that came to France.
Q. In what other ways do we compare with the French?
A. It is astonishing to see how many points of similarity we can discover, beginning with the well-known Maginot line complex which we parallel with our Atlantic Ocean complex. I remember back in 1930 at a cocktail party in Berlin a German Lieutenant Colonel remarked to me about the Maginot line, which the French were just completing: “That line of fortifications will be the death of France. If soldiers have such an impregnable fortress to live in, they will never willingly leave it to take the offensive, and without taking the offensive you can’t win a war. The Maginot line will give the French Army a permanent defense complex and out of its sense of security we will eventually defeat it.” Our complacency behind the Atlantic Ocean, which we fondly fancy could always protect us from attack, is precisely the same as the French had. The French also were brought down by their skepticism; they had ceased to have any faith in anything, whether the Republic, or democracy, or God, just as millions of Americans lack faith in anything and think it smart to deride any kind of ideals, particularly anything so old-fashioned as sacrifice for one’s country.
The French had up to the bitter end, so little primitive, full-blooded spirit that they neither sang on the way to battle nor cursed while in action; they harbored no anger toward the enemy, no hatred for him, and they had no will to kill. They were apologetic for being at war, until catastrophe was upon them, and it was too late. Most Americans feel apologetic about the war and behave as though they were not sure of the rightness of our cause.
Another curious and not unimportant item of coincidence is that there was a strong current of anti-British feeling in France at the beginning of the war, just as there is here. In France it was grounded largely in the argument, which had much truth in it, that Great Britain had been largely responsible for the war by her shortsighted support of Germany against France for so many years, and that the British would “fight to the last Frenchman.” This latter argument seemed silly to me when I first met it early in the Battle of France, at the front near Sedan where I picked up a little printed leaflet in French, dropped by German aviators.
It read:
“Where is Tommy? The units of the British army which had occupied certain sectors of the Maginot line were immediately withdrawn after the beginning of the German offensive. They were transported as quickly as possible in the direction of the Channel. For political reasons it was necessary to conceal this movement, so it was carried out at night. Nevertheless the population of Lorraine could observe easily enough that the English were retiring, and in various cities and towns hostile demonstrations took place against them. Several times the police and French troops had to intervene to calm the crowds and suppress the demonstrations. French Soldiers! You see how the English are trying to get out just as they did in Norway. They are taking ‘English leave.’ They are leaving you alone on the battlefield. Are you stupid enough to die for those who are quitting you to save their precious skins? You had better give the English the answer they deserve for having betrayed you.”
Now there was not a word of truth in this propaganda about trouble between British troops and French civilians, and I thought the leaflet far too crude to have any effect, but I was mistaken; it corresponded to the unreasoning feeling of many Frenchmen that the French Army was bearing all the burden. They particularly resented the fact that whereas at the beginning of the war the French mobilized all men from twenty to forty-seven years old, the British at first mobilized only those from twenty to twenty-five years old. The British Fleet, the French knew theoretically, was just as important for beating Hitler as the French Army, but the British Fleet was far away and its actions were unobserved. Just so today in America we all know theoretically that the presence of the British Fleet in the Atlantic is imperative for our safety, but the British Fleet is far away, and so even when we are sending supplies to the British Fleet and other arms standing between us and our enemy, many Americans think of it as “aiding Britain,” and feel quite unselfish about it.
A minor group in America also persists in blaming the British so heavily for their now amply admitted and fully atoned faults of the past, that some of them would almost rather see Munich revenged by German troops in England than have America defend herself there. Finally we have our anti-British Americans of Irish origin who consider Oliver Cromwell more blameworthy than Hitler, although all Irish-Americans are not so purblind by any means. Taking it all in all, however, I should say that there is an even stronger anti-British sentiment in America today than there was in France during the war, and this when coupled to the broader anti-Europe feeling of a great many Americans, increases the difficulty of our acting realistically against a powerful enemy who is taking every advantage of these enfeebling prejudices of ours.
Q. You have named so many similarities between ourselves and the French that it is discouraging indeed, but we have one undeniable advantage of a large population, and we surely are not obsessed by our birth rate.
A. It is true that we do not worry about our birth rate, although perhaps we ought to, but we suffer just the same from something very much like the French obsession with theirs. It was the French preoccupation with their inferiority in numbers, and their falling birth rate, which prevented them not merely from wasting lives, but even from using them thriftily on the battlefield, and the result was the debacle. During the Battle of France I seldom saw Colonel Schieffer, in the French Ministry of Information, that he did not exclaim, “We cannot bleed like this again. Twice in a generation is too much. We have only twenty million Frenchmen. This time we must make an end of the Boches so they can never empty our veins again.” The Colonel, who was personally most warlike, was under the impression we all had that the French Army was losing lives heavily, and he was willing that it be done to prevent ever again such bloodshed in the future, yet as a matter of fact, the impulse to save French lives had already become so strong in the Army High Command that it governed all great decisions and contributed seriously to the defeat.
Now despite the fact that we are a nation of 130,000,000 we are obsessed to an equal degree with the fear of having to fight in large numbers; we have what amounts to a phobia against sending an American Expeditionary Force to Europe. We seem not to mind nearly so much the idea of American boys in the Navy or the Air Force fighting and dying abroad, but when it comes to the Army we recoil at the idea of an A.E.F. Why the life of an infantryman should be more precious than that of an aviator or sailor is not clear. The explanation of this attitude must be found in the comparative numbers of men involved.
A.E.F. brings up the idea of millions of American boys laying down their lives on the battlefield, and most Americans completely forget, if they ever did know, that although we had 4,355,000 men mobilized during the last war, the total number of them killed in action and died of wounds received in action was 50,475. This is roughly one-half of the number of persons killed by accident in the United States every year. We nevertheless erected in every village and city of the land large expensive monuments to our war dead, and the impression became indelibly fixed in the American mind that we had lost millions, or at any rate hundreds of thousands of dead. The vision of this mass sacrifice of American youth is what moves the American people to reject so violently the idea of an expeditionary force. We ought now to be adult enough to see that our penurious attitude toward our precious American blood reflects the same feeling as the French, with more justification, had toward their birth rate, and that if persisted in, this attitude will lead us to similar disaster.
Q. Aren’t there any encouraging differences between ourselves and the unfortunate French?
A. I am glad to say there are, and enough, I devoutly hope, to save us from their fate. We have a leader; the French had none. We are not divided as badly as the French were divided. Despite the fierceness of our political passions, it would be a very exceptional American indeed who would say, “I’d rather have Hitler than Roosevelt,” as so many Frenchmen used to say, “We’d rather have Hitler than Leon Blum.” We are physically a healthier people than the French. There is hardly one of the weaknesses now perceptible in the American people that would not be swept away by the fact of our going to war, but there is hardly one of them which can be removed by any other means.
The most encouraging difference between the French and American democracies is the quality and character of our newspapers. American newspapers bring to their readers today a greater volume of news, of greater accuracy, than has ever been delivered to an audience of newspaper readers in the history of the world. It has been my job for nearly two decades to study the newspapers of a score of countries, not superficially but with the businesslike object of gleaning news. I had to read thirty-two German newspapers a day when I was correspondent in Berlin; and a dozen or so daily in Paris. It is no exaggeration to say that the reader of the New York Times, or the New York Herald-Tribune, or the Chicago Daily News, or any one of half a dozen of our great metropolitan dailies, has more detailed and true information about what is going on in the world than if he were able by magic to accumulate all the newspapers published everywhere else on earth, and were able equally by magic to read them all in the original.
Often I am asked, “How can we know the truth? Everything is so confusing. Aren’t we fed with propaganda?” The answer is you can know the truth by reading your newspapers thoroughly and exercising common sense in balancing the reports from the belligerent countries against each other.
No war has ever been fought in such a blazing light of information. Never has such a quantity of news been put before a people as we Americans have before us at breakfast every day and from then on until midnight. American newspapers are doing today the most superb job ever done by daily journals. But that is not their chief merit. Their chief merit is their honesty and incorruptibility and their sincere endeavor to be fair and objective. These qualities have enabled the American press, since the foundation of the United States, to be the equal in importance to the executive or the legislative or the judicial branch of government. It is the vigilant watchman over the functioning of the other three branches of government.
In no other country has the newspaperman the rights and privileges that he has here. He is as important for the preservation of our liberties and our security as any legislator, judge, or executive. One can almost formulate a law that one can judge the quality of a democracy and its expectancy of life by its press. By that standard France was doomed to fall. France under the Republic had the most venal newspapers on earth. As the American press is honest, so was the French press dishonest. The French government was a faithful reflection of its press, one might say almost a creation of its press. Some good Frenchmen even go so far as to lay the major responsibility for the fall of France on their newspapers whose editorial opinions for the most part were as plainly for sale as the vegetables in the market.
The reasons for their venality go back to the period at the end of the nineteenth century when all the states of Europe were floating government loans in Paris, the banking center of the continent. The French peasant, who kept his gold in his bas de laine, his woolen stocking, was the chief investor, and the French newspapers were the chief salesmen. Profits from the flotation were so enormous that the governments concerned could afford to pay very large bribes to the French newspapers to recommend their bonds. The French peasants at that time believed their newspapers, bought the bonds, and the corrupt newspapers grew rich and content. This easy money made it unnecessary for them to go out and get advertising, and from that day to this French newspapers have lacked the economic foundation that American newspapers have. After the war, the bribes from financial quarters largely disappeared and the French newspapers, without advertising, and with the habit of venality, became more unscrupulous, because hungrier than ever. French newspapermen, worse paid than ever, were reduced to selling their services cheaper than ever before, and the corruption became almost universal.
One famous French correspondent was fired by his famous newspaper because he had taken a bribe from a foreign government—and had failed to split it with the managing editor. Hardly a newspaper in Paris would refuse a subsidy from a foreign government, but all this giving and taking of bribes became trivial when Hitler came to power in 1933. From then on the French press was inundated with German money, and from then on could be dated the certainty that France would fall.
I want above all things to emphasize that there were a few honest, capable, patriotic, and incorruptible French journalists. It is sufficient commentary on the Vichy government that most of them had to flee when the Germans came.
Q. Is there any hope for the French? Do you think they can come back?
A. Yes, because they have learned to hate; the Germans have taught them. I know it sounds most un-Christian to insist upon the necessity of hatred, but the thoughtful will remember that Christ hated evil, and when he scourged the money-changers from the Temple he did it with fury. Who will dispute that Hitler is more evil than money-changers in a Temple, and that all the forces of Christianity ought to be ranged together to destroy his hateful power. You cannot win a battle, you cannot win a war, you cannot win any kind of fight that involves killing unless you have the spirit to kill. You cannot have that spirit unless you are convinced of the justice of your cause, and you know that God is on your side, and that God approves your killing your enemies.
The French never had any such spirit during the war, except perhaps at the very end, but they have it now. During the war they were all the time debating in their hearts whether it would not be better to quit and make friends with the Germans. They thought in terms of the last war. They thought of the Germans as the same sort of human beings as the Germans of 1870 or of 1914-1918. They simply failed to grasp the most important fact in the world of international affairs today, namely that the Nazi Germans under Hitler are a new species of creature never seen before in modern times, a deliberately amoral species of men who reject every tenet of Christianity or of any other religion which enjoins kindness, truth, and justice, and who are possessed of such unique talents for war that they could conceivably achieve their ambition to conquer the world if they were not stopped by a coalition of all the decent peoples on earth. The French above all failed to take seriously Hitler’s cool, considered statement that he intended to exterminate France as a nation.
Q. How about the treatment Hitler has given France so far; he hasn’t tried to exterminate them, has he?
A. No, but Hitler is not through with the French; he has not even begun to treat them the way he intends to ultimately. There are several reasons why he has been comparatively lenient to France so far. First, he wished to end French resistance immediately in order that the whole force of the German Army might be thrown at England. Second, he wished to lull the French into a belief that by collaborating with the Germans they might obtain the “honorable peace” Pétain talks about. Third, he wished to make it appear to the British and eventually to the Americans that surrender to Hitler is not so bad. Finally, he wished to get from the Vichy government several important things he either did not dare demand or was refused at the Compiègne armistice, chiefly that the French should go to war against Britain or at any rate turn over the French fleet and naval bases to the Germans for use against the British.
Q. Do you imply that later on Hitler’s treatment of France will be different?
A. I do indeed. He will eventually fulfill the one principle which has guided his foreign policy more than any other; to destroy the power of France ever to threaten Germany again. How could any Frenchman forget the words of Hitler in Mein Kampf when he wrote: “We must at last become entirely clear about this: the German people’s irreconcilable mortal enemy is and remains France”? And again: “The political testament of the German nation ... must read substantially: See an attack on Germany in any attempt to organize a military power [i.e., France] on the frontiers of Germany, be it only in the form of the creation of a state capable of becoming a military power [i.e., France] and in that case regard it not only a right but a duty to prevent the establishment of such a state [i.e., France] by all means including the application of armed force, or in the event that such a one be already founded, to repress it.” So you see what the fate of France is bound to be, now that she has given up her arms and her will to fight.
If left alone her fate will surely be that defined by Churchill in his address to the French people while Vichy still hesitated: “I tell you truly and what you must believe when I say this evil man, this monstrous abortion of hatred and deceit, has resolved on nothing less than the complete wiping out of the French nation and the disintegration of its whole life and future. By all kinds of sly and savage means he is plotting and working to crush forever the fountain of characteristic French culture and French inspiration to the world. It is not defeat that France will now be made to suffer at German hands, but the doom of complete obliteration. Army, navy, air force, religions, laws, language, culture, institutions, literature, history, tradition, all are to be effaced by the brute strength of a triumphant army and the scientific low cunning of a ruthless Police Force.”
This is true. This will be the fate of France unless the United States and Britain and Russia defeat Hitler. Of course so long as the French under the men of Vichy remain the strictly obedient vassal, Hitler will have no need for sharper measures until the time comes for him to shape France into her ultimate permanent role of coolie agricultural colony of the Reich.
Q. What did Hitler promise Pétain?
A. He promised that if Pétain would sign the armistice, very soon afterward he would give France a permanent and just peace, that German troops would evacuate France, and in the New Order of Europe Germany would help France become a free and independent partner. All this was, however, tacitly contingent on the defeat of Britain. The German excuse for not freeing France now is that the battle against Russia and Britain is still going on. France meanwhile is compelled to suffer in a slavery worse than she ever suffered in her entire national history.
Q. What do you mean by the term “slavery”? The French people are not being driven about in slave gangs, are they, with an overseer carrying a black-snake whip and all that as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin? I understood the Germans were behaving very “correctly.”
A. It is true that only the prisoners of war, who still number about a million and a half, are in this literal, physical sense enslaved. The rest of the French people, though, are just as much the slaves of the Germans as if they were housed in slave pens and driven to work in chains. Why? Because they must give up to their German masters all the fruits of their labors except a bare subsistence. The French people have been paying the Germans an indemnity of roughly ten million dollars a day, or $3,650,000,000 a year, and with this money the Germans have been buying from the French, who are forced to sell, all the property of any value in the country, from objects of art to great industrial plants. Consider the size of this indemnity. The maximum yearly reparations payment Germany had to make after the last war was $600,000,000. That is one sixth of what the French have had to pay in the first twelve months of German rule in this war.
Q. How was this indemnity fixed?
A. In the armistice agreement which Pétain so trustfully signed, it was stipulated that the French would pay for the cost of maintaining the German Army in France. No sum was named. You can imagine the astonishment of the French when, after they had laid down their arms and there was no possibility of refusing, they learned they had to pay the Germans 400,000,000 francs, or roughly $10,000,000 a day. It will give you some notion of the difference between the old-fashioned German conqueror and the new-fashioned Nazi to recollect that after the Franco-German War of 1870 Bismarck exacted a total indemnity of $1,250,000,000, or one-third of what the French of today are forced to pay yearly.
Q. How does this French payment compare with the total amounts Germany paid for reparation after the last war?
A. The maximum estimate of German reparations payments in cash and kind is about $5,000,000,000, which is almost precisely the amount of money Americans lent Germany and never got back. It is the literal truth that Germany paid no reparations. The United States paid them. I was a correspondent in Germany during all those crucial years from the French occupation of the Ruhr onward, and most of us who were on the spot agree that despite the dislocation of wealth in Germany the country as a whole had not lost wealth through payment of reparations, since for every dollar that went to France or England, an American dollar came in.
All critics of the Versailles treaty insist that its worst feature was the reparations, but if you keep in mind the fundamental fact that the Germans borrowed (and never repaid) every cent they used to meet the reparations claims, the Versailles treaty and the German complaints about it take on a very different aspect. This is so important that it cannot be overemphasized, because one of the principal reasons why the United States withdrew from the peace and why England and eventually France relaxed their vigilance and permitted Germany to arm and grow into the terrible power she is today, was the feeling that the Germans after all had been treated unjustly.
You could make a case for the argument that our own “guilt complex” about Versailles allowed Hitler to tear up the treaty and finally attack the world. Paul Birdsall has pointed out that this “guilt complex” received powerful encouragement from John Maynard Keynes, who correctly analyzed the economic impossibility of the reparations clauses, but went on from there to condemn the whole treaty as a Carthaginian peace. It has taken Hitler, who climbed to power on his denunciation of Versailles, to show us how lenient a peace it was.
Remembering that the Germans actually paid no reparations, it is instructive to examine what they formally paid in comparison with what they are now extorting from the French. The Allies at the London conference in April 1921 fixed their demands on Germany for “damage done to civilians” at $33,000,000,000—which at the time was considered insanely high, but incidentally is $11,000,000,000 less than the $44,000,000,000 the United States has now appropriated and recommended for national defense. Isn’t this a startling confirmation of the mistake the American Congress made in repudiating the League of Nations and refusing to ratify the security treaty with England and France?
It is fantastic to realize that we could have paid the entire bill for the last war and if by so doing we could have prevented this war, we would still have saved money. We will eventually learn that the isolationists’ or appeasers’ program for America is not only the most dangerous but infinitely the most costly. France has certainly learned how true this is.
At the rate they are now paying, the French will have paid the Germans in about seventeen months an amount equivalent to all the reparations payments ($5,000,000,000) made by the Germans with American money in the twelve years during which the Germans pretended to pay. They stopped even the pretense of payment you remember after the Lausanne Conference in 1932, even before Hitler came to power. This immense indemnity the French are paying now is merely an interim payment for the alleged cost of maintaining the German Army. Actually the cost of maintaining the army is estimated to be not 400,000,000 but 125,000,000 francs, so that the Germans have a surplus of 275,000,000 francs or around $7,000,000 for their daily “purchases.”
Q. Why did the Germans select the figure 400,000,000 francs daily?
A. Because this was the amount the French were spending on the war. In their 1940 war budget they allocated 106 billion francs to the air force, 36 billion to the army, and 15 billion to the navy, making a total of 157 billion, which is roughly 400,000,000 francs a day. Hitler reckoned if the French could afford to spend this sum on fighting the Germans, they could spend the same amount to feed, clothe, transport, lodge, amuse, and otherwise support the Germans as they are doing now.
Q. But if the French were spending this much money on the war anyway, how are they economically worse off by continuing the same expenditure?
A. They are incomparably worse off because formerly the proceeds of this sum were consumed by Frenchmen; today they are consumed by Germans. The money formerly circulated throughout the French economic body as healthy blood; today it is sucked and swallowed by the vast German leech. Furthermore the French expenditure on the war did not cease with their defeat; they still have large expenses besides their tribute to Germany.
Q. What means do the Germans use to buy up French businesses? Why don’t the French refuse to sell?
A. Some of them do, but the Germans always have the power to force them to sell.
Q. Why do the Germans bother to go through the form of buying, if they can confiscate whatever they want?
A. Because they can get what they want with much less trouble and in better shape and be able to make better use of it if they go through the form of purchase. They had their whole system of plundering France worked out before the war. During the prewar period thousands of Germans crisscrossed France, as tourists or traveling salesmen. They located the most desirable industrial or other properties, nearly all, incidentally, in the rich Northern half now Occupied France. When the Germans came in they rushed a specially trained corps of experts to all the banks and business houses, embargoed banking transactions and ordered every security holder in France to give a list of his property. Soon they knew the precise financial position of every important corporation or individual in France. With this knowledge they were able to buy into the control of all the businesses they wanted. Sometimes if the French owner refused to sell, the Germans could make the owner’s bank foreclose on his loan and thus force the owner to raise money by selling a share of his business. The Germans were modest; usually they wanted only 51 per cent. Sometimes the Germans would withhold raw materials from a stubborn industrialist. Sometimes the German authorities forcibly confiscated the property; just often enough to remind Frenchmen that, if they liked, the Germans could take every machine, sack of flour, and stick of furniture in the country without recompense.
Another most effective weapon used by the Germans to force the French to sell their businesses is the German edict that all concerns, from shops to factories, must remain open and keep their full roll of employees. Since almost no business is being done, and most concerns would normally have closed, this rule drives most businessmen into bankruptcy, as it was intended to do. By these and other similar means, the Germans, using the francs paid them by the French, have gone far toward buying “legal” control of the most valuable property in France. With appalling swiftness the French people are being pauperized and reduced to slaves in what used to be their own homes.
They are like the Negroes on a pre-Civil War plantation in our own South. The Germans, like the white folks, live in the big house, eat caviar and chicken, drink the wonderful wines of France, clothe their women with the creations of the great couturiers, and promenade the Boulevards while the French people, half-starving, broken, humiliated, work desperately hard to support their masters. The French are now not even being treated as well as slaves under a master considerate enough to wish to keep his slaves in good health and fit working order. I should think it would be fair to say that out of an eight-hour day the Frenchman today has to devote four hours to working for the Germans.
Q. If these are the interim armistice terms imposed on France, what will the final terms of peace be like?
A. You can be sure that the German demands will be limited only by the total wealth of France. We know Hitler intends the total productive wealth of the country to pass into German hands. Without waiting for peace, the Germans are, as we noted, already systematically stripping France of her movable valuables and taking them to Germany, and buying control of the immovable property they want. But if the time ever comes, when Hitler makes a so-called peace with France, we may expect that he will take pleasure in basing his demands partly on the Versailles treaty.
He will first demand that the reparations Germany paid after the last war be paid back; then he will demand full compensation for the German merchant and fishing fleets, and the railroad equipment, cattle, etc., turned over to the Allies after the last war to make up for similar items seized by the Germans; he will demand replacement of all the shipping Germany was compelled to build for the Allies to take the place of the ships sunk by the Imperial Navy; he will bill the Allies for the coal Germany delivered the Allies to replace the coal taken from the mines of Northern France during the war. After the broad category of claims from the last war has been put down, Hitler will then ask for reparations for this war, and of course he can set any sum he likes.
Q. But why should Hitler take so much trouble to claim formal reparations? Since he obviously intends permanently to cripple his victim, why should he bother to go through the legalistic form of itemizing his claims?
A. Because that is the way Hitler and his Nazis always do things. The German, even the Nazi, is an orderly fellow. The first principle of all Germans is “Ordnung muss sein.” Aside from that, or above it, is the fact that Hitler, deeply conscious of the illegality of all his actions, beginning with the seizure of power, has always insisted on clothing everything he does with the appearance of lawfulness. When he seized power he did it by banning the Communist and then the Socialist parties from the Reichstag, and thus obtaining a majority vote in the Reichstag. Whenever he attacks a nation he announces a long list of reasons, backed sometimes by an extraordinary array of documents, many of them forged, to prove he not only had a right to attack but was compelled to do so.
This necessity for self-justification explains also one of the queerest Nazi practices in their torture chambers. When they have finished torturing a victim, they invariably make him sign a statement testifying that he had been well treated. One would think since the Nazi power is absolute, they would not care, or bother to take this trouble, but they seem to be under a profound compulsion to make this gesture toward the justice they have in practice abolished.
Q. What is the use of our maintaining diplomatic relations with Vichy? In view of all that you have said I should think we ought to withdraw our recognition of Vichy and transfer it to de Gaulle and the Free French.
A. I suppose the chief reason we do not break diplomatic relations with Vichy is the same reason why we have not broken formal relations with Germany: in both cases we wish to keep a diplomatic observer on the scene. That is understandable in the case of Germany, since we are only formally at peace with her, and are morally at war and all the world knows it. In other words, until we begin to shoot, it would not make much difference whether we broke relations with Germany or not. But in the case of Vichy, it would make a world of difference if we took our recognition away from Pétain and gave it to de Gaulle. It is true that de Gaulle is actually in control of only some central African French territory while Pétain nominally rules all France, but we have continued our recognition of all the governments in exile and refused any kind of recognition to the Quislings and Rexists, and in this spirit we ought to withdraw our recognition from Pétain. It would immensely hearten the Free French to have our recognition and if we extended Lease-Lend aid to de Gaulle’s forces it could have important military consequences. However, I suppose Washington is still hoping against hope that we may one day be able to gain some profit from having treated Pétain as well as we have. I personally do not believe we ever will.