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.