One of the pamphlets issued many years ago fixed the countries to be conquered about 1915, and distinctly mentioned Denmark, Holland, Belgium and North France, Poland and Rumania, Hungary and Austria, Serbia and Bulgaria, and the wheat granaries of Russia, with Turkey and Armenia.
The number of people to be conquered and included after the first war was fixed at 250,000,000.
The argument states that it will take but a few years to compact this Middle-Europe Empire and that naturally Great Britain, Spain and Italy, to the west, with Norway and Sweden to the north, with Italy and Switzerland to the south, and of course Greece and Egypt would, from time to time, as crises came, fall inevitably into Germany's hand. Berlin, as the world capital, should by 1920 be the magnet, and the little particles of iron, named the Balkan States, would be drawn and held by this great German magnet in Berlin.
The first step to be taken and the first goal to be reached concerned, of course, the English Channel, the Dutch cities on the mouth of the Rhine, and the iron mines of Northern France. We know to an absolute certainty all the details of this plan.
For more than thirty years Germany had been organizing her army; she knew every road, inn, bridge, factory, shop, and wholesale store in Denmark and Holland, Belgium and France. In all of the larger ones she had German agents belonging to the Pan-German League toiling as workmen and every detail was planned out in advance.
In 1910 General von Bissing, one of the Kaiser's closest friends, was sent to Brussels. For years he spent the summer months apparently at the watering places near The Hague in Holland and Ostend in Belgium, preparatory to the hour when Germany would seize Belgium and he assume his position as Governor-General, living in Brussels.
Men nearing death tell the truth. In January of 1917 von Bissing prepared a memorandum for the direction of Belgian affairs in His Majesty's name and according to his wish. This document contains the meditations of a dying man. The statements he makes, he says, contain the views that inspired his every act in Belgium during his administration.
In his last will and testament von Bissing, in the spring of 1917, advises the German Government in Berlin that the time has come to throw off all disguises. He says that at the beginning of the war it was probably good policy to deny that the Government ever intended to annex Belgium, but, he says, "now that we are victorious there is no reason why we should not publish to the world the fact that we never intend to give up one foot of the Belgian sea-coast, nor one ton of the Belgian coal, nor one acre of the French iron mines."
He says plainly: "The annual Belgian production of 23,000,000 tons of coal has given us a monopoly on the continent which has helped to maintain our vitality. If we do not hold Belgium, administer Belgium in future for our interest and protect Belgium by force of arms, our trade and industry will lose the positions they have won in Belgium and perhaps will never recover them."
And what about Dutch cities and seaports? On page eighteen of General von Bissing's last will and testament he adds: