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

by H. R. Knickerbocker

“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.