Q. In what sense will the conquered people be slaves?
A. Politically, they will be disfranchised, without a vote, unable to influence their own fate except by humble petition to Berlin. For the most part they will be ruled by Nazi governors. States like Poland will also have Nazis ruling the smallest organs of government, as municipalities. States like France may be permitted to operate their own provincial and municipal governments under a Nazi Gauleiter fuer Frankreich.
Q. But Germans also have no vote under the Nazi system. How does the position of these other nationalities under the Nazis differ from that of the Germans themselves?
A. It differs as the night from day. Every ruling made and every action taken by the Nazi governors of the vassal states is intended to procure tribute for the Great German Reich, tribute which, scientifically extracted, will prove greater over the years than any amount of old-fashioned looting could have produced. This tribute, which is to be paid not merely for generations to come, but as Hitler modestly estimates, for 1,000 years, will go to elevate the standard of living of all Germans, and to depress the standard of living of all non-Germans. It makes no difference that most Germans have no voice in their government; every German will be under Hitler’s New Order, a slaveholder, and every non-German inhabitant of occupied territory is automatically a slave of the whole German tribe.
Q. How is this to be accomplished? Isn’t it difficult to extract tribute? Didn’t the Allies have trouble getting reparations from Germany?
A. The Allies were innocent children compared with the Nazis in the art of obtaining advantage from one’s beaten adversary. No one knows whether Hitler’s system will work for 1,000 years, or for ten or two years, but it certainly is a grandiose design without any parallel in the history of human conquest. First is the movement of populations. Hitler has moved upward of two million Poles from Western Poland, dumped them indiscriminately in Central Poland, and replaced them with Germans, some from the Baltic states, some from the Tyrol, some from the Reich. The Poles as a rule were visited by the Gestapo after midnight, given half an hour’s notice to leave their homes forever, allowed to take but a single suitcase with food for three days and the clothes on their backs. They were forbidden to take any of their own articles of value, not even a silver spoon from the kitchen or a rake from the barn. The German families moving in were fewer than the evacuated Poles, so that the Germans became wealthier per capita than the Poles had been. The Poles died for the most part, or else are still in process of dying from starvation and exposure; it was part of the German calculation that they should die. Similar methods were used to evacuate the French from Lorraine.
Other desirable parts of Europe contiguous to the Great German Reich will be evacuated of their native populations and settled by the Germans. This constitutes looting on a grand scale. Sir Norman Angell, profound thinker on war, once held in his Nobel prize-winning thesis “The Great Illusion,” that modern conquest cannot pay in this Christian day and age, because the acquisition of mere political control over an enemy’s territory, the advancing of the flag over foreign lands, does not pay even for the cost of the war. The usual incidental looting by the soldiery amounts of course to nothing from the point of view of the nation’s economics. Sir Norman could not be blamed for failing to foresee the grand-scale looting practiced by the Nazis. There is an evident economic advantage to the nation if a million of its farm families are moved into rich, fully equipped farms robbed from the conquered and expelled enemy. But this sort of looting is only the beginning of Nazi total plunder. In France the major part of the productive apparatus in industry, trade, and the professions is being systematically taken over by the Nazis. This is only a step toward the huge permanent system of eternal tribute, which is based upon the exploitation of the labor power of Europe.
No conqueror since the Romans has ever been able profitably to exploit the labor power of his conquests, but the Nazis propose to do so and are doing so and boast they will continue to do so for centuries. The Nazis intend to concentrate all industry in Germany, and to convert the rest of Europe into an agricultural colony growing food and raw materials for the master state, the Great German Reich. The entire population of non-German Europe is to be turned and is already being turned as fast as possible into a vast army of coolies of the soil, toiling to supply the Third Reich. The coolies will likewise be required to buy all their industrial products from Germany. The price the Germans pay for the coolies’ agricultural products and the price the coolies pay for the German goods will be fixed by the Germans. Nice calculation will arrive at the precise prices which will bring the Herrenvolk the maximum advantage. The Germans with their traditional scientific acumen will certainly find it to their advantage to pay their coolies such prices for agricultural products as will enable the coolies to buy liberally of German manufactured goods.
Thus with a little reasonableness and spirit of accommodation on the side of the coolies, who ought to be happy to give up the responsibility of liberty, and glad to dispense with the obligations connected with free speech, press, assembly, and thought, Hitler Europe might settle down into one great unhappy family, orderly as a penitentiary, quiet as a grave. It is important also to note that by turning their conquered populations into farm hands the Nazis make it much easier to keep their victims permanently disarmed, since only industry on a large scale can turn out tanks, machine guns, and warplanes necessary for insurrection against a totalitarian tyranny.
Q. But Hitler has not destroyed or removed the factories from France and not even from Poland, since we constantly read that he is obtaining considerable war supplies from the industrial plants in the occupied regions.