These various declarations, made on high authority enable us to affirm, that on the whole the annexations which the Pangermans intended to make in the West would have extended in France more or less to a line drawn from the South of Belfort to the mouth of the Somme, that is, so far as concerns France, they would comprise a total area of 50,271 square kilometres, which, before the war, held 5,768,000 inhabitants.
Further, as regards France, the intended annexations were, according to Pangerman conceptions, to have had a double effect.
1º. By taking over the richest industrial and mining French regions, Germany would secure an enormous booty.
2º. Deprived of her most productive departments, which bear the main burden of taxes, and which hold mining elements indispensable to economic life, France would have been maimed and reduced to a state from which it would have been a sheer impossibility for her to recover or ever again to become a power capable of thwarting in any shape whatsoever the future determinations of Germany.
A few figures will enable us to verify this forecast. At the beginning of 1916 the Germans were holding 138,000 hectares of the coal basin of the department of the Nord, being 41% of the total superficies worked in France (337,000 hectares), or about three-fourths of the total French production. The Germans also occupied 63,000 hectares of the iron-ore basin of Lorraine which represents 75% of the superficies of all the iron beds worked in France (83,000 hectares), and nine-tenths of the total production. It is clear, that were such a state of things to continue, economic and therefore national life would be made radically impossible in France, shorn of her vital organs. In reality France would be in a position of entire dependence on Germany in accordance with the Pangerman schemes for the future.
It is still necessary to mention that in the territories occupied by Germany in the West, as well as everywhere else, the measures already taken by the Germans in 1916 were not merely measures of military defence, but measures for the organization and permanent possession of the said territories. These measures to ensure permanent possession may be classed in the following categories:
Measures of terrorism applied in Prussian fashion so as to bring into subjection all refractory elements.
Measures of division, such as in Belgium, the Germans take in order to rouse, by all possible means, opposition between the Flemish and the Walloons for the purpose of neutralizing the one by the other.
Measures of strict and regular administration in order, by the bait of some external or economic advantages, to accustom to the German yoke those elements of the population whose moral resistance, in the opinion of Berlin, can be most easily broken.
Measures tending to prepare the German colonization of the new territories. These have mostly consisted in applying the Pangerman theory of Evacuation, that is, by systematically transporting the unfortunate women or old people whom Germany considers absolutely useless in her future possessions. She found it, for instance, very convenient to rid herself without delay of these poor creatures especially when the question of feeding them cropped up; so these “useless mouths” were promptly transferred to the shoulders of the enemy, whom Germany already looked upon as vanquished. That is the theory of Evacuation, which explains to a large extent why the German authorities have sent back to France that part of the populations of the occupied territories in France and Belgium whom, on exact inquiry, they regarded as human wastage.