Part 18
A. First, because if we enter the war in time to have any Allies, we shall probably be physically undamaged. That is, as long as the British Isles, our foremost fortress, persists in its resistance it is not likely that we shall suffer any important injuries by air bombardment or otherwise. You can see how important this factor is if you consider the condition of the cities of England now, and how much money, labor, and time it will take to restore them. Second, the economic structure of the United States can more easily be transferred back from war to peace production than most countries. After this war there will be an increase in the private use of airplanes comparable to the increase in automobile ownership after the first successful Ford. Our warplane production can be easily switched to the production of private planes, and many observers would not be surprised to see American private plane production go into six figures and then into seven.
The United States, as the most self-contained of the belligerent powers, at the end of the war will have everything necessary to resume its own economic progress and to help the world recover.
Europe will be starving and desperately in need of our agricultural products, our cotton, and of almost everything else we produce. If we wish decisively to influence the organization of the world, one powerful lever will be our economic power after the war, our ability if we like, to finance the reconstruction of Europe. With wisdom and far-sight in control of our administration we ought to be able to put back into circulation some of our monstrous hoard of gold, for our own good as well as that of the world. Sometimes when one succumbs to optimism, it seems possible that there may come after this war a marvelous opportunity to reshape the affairs of mankind into a happier pattern. We shall have an opportunity such as we have never had before, not even after the last war, to make our hopes and aspirations practically effective, but only of course if we enter the war in time. There is a fourth reason why we should be economically or financially better off at the end of this war than at the end of the last one: we now have no war-debt problem. Who will deny now that everyone would have been better off after the last war if international debts, including reparations, had been canceled all around. This aspect of the Lend-Lease program may go down in history as Roosevelt’s cleverest device.
This sounds almost as though I thought the war would be a blessing to America, emerging undamaged, easily reverting to peacetime production, stored with goods for our own consumption and for export to clamoring millions abroad, and with no delinquent war debtors to confuse our financial affairs. Actually I do not think the war will be a blessing, except as it unifies us and does something to cleanse us of the scum of materialism. This view of America’s chances of coming relatively unscathed out of the war depends entirely upon comparison of our fate with that of other countries, maimed by bombardment, mutilated by the loss of millions of breadwinners, fiscally bankrupt, economically paralyzed, politically divided, and in the case of some, the prey of anarchy. Think what the problem of leadership will be in most of the countries of Europe. In Germany and Italy the tyrants have long ago executed, imprisoned, exiled or otherwise effectively removed from the political scene every possible candidate for office not in agreement with them. In France the demoralization caused by defeat and Vichy’s collaboration with the enemy has left few men with the initiative and courage to become leaders of a renascent republic. If, as so frequently happens, we become inclined to take an over-cheerful view of ourselves and our prospects, we ought to be sobered by the thought of our responsibilities in the postwar world. Whether we like it or not, and our isolationists to the contrary notwithstanding, the United States after this war is going to be compelled to assume the leadership of the Western World, not only economically but politically. But we shall be able effectively to influence the peace only if we have effectively taken part in the war.
Q. _What will the peace conference be like?_
A. It might be more instructive in the first place to discuss what the peace will be like if Hitler wins. Of course there will not be any peace _conference_ if Hitler wins. The Quislings and Darlans will be called to function for the states of Europe in the same way as Hitler’s rubber-stamp Reichstag functions for Germany. We know now what Hitler plans to impose upon the world. Let us begin with Europe. Europe is to belong exclusively to the Germans. They as a master race will occupy the top of a pyramid at the bottom of which are the Poles, Czechs, Serbs, and other “subhuman Slavs” who constitute the lowest class of slaves. Between these “untouchables” and the Germans will come all the other peoples of Europe, arranged in order depending
## partially upon their degree of racial kinship with the noble Teutons,
but more on the degree of their subservience and “collaboration.” The Dutch and Scandinavians, for example, are considered by the Nazis to be semi-Teutonic cousins, but they will not be ranked as high as the French if the Vichy appeasers succeed in their policy of “collaboration.”
Now that Italy has proved an even feebler war partner than her worst detractors had imagined, Hitler obviously is considering the grant to France of the position of First Vassal instead of Italy. Spain, if she eventually enters the war, will be given a role perhaps second to that of Italy, chiefly because Spanish influence will be helpful in the conquest of South America. Sweden and Switzerland will of course be _gleichgeschaltet_, or “coordinated” into the Nazi system and given a rank corresponding to their servility. But all are slaves, including the Axis “allies” Italy, Hungary, Spain, and they differ one from another only in the degree of their degradation. None of them will be permitted to bear arms capable of threatening their Nazi masters, and none will have a word in the formulation of the major laws which determine their lives.
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._
A. That is because the war is not over yet and Hitler has not had time to move these factories into Germany. He needs their products immediately for the war against England and Russia. After his conquest of Poland he kept many Polish factories, notably locomotive and freight-car plants, running in Poland with German supervisors, but after the fall of France, during that period when he was sure England would capitulate also, he ordered these factories transferred to Germany. Then after the British failed to surrender and as soon as it became plain that the war would last some time longer, Hitler countermanded the transfer of the Polish factories, and many of them are running today on Polish soil.
Q. _Where is Hitler going to get the man power to run such a huge industrial machine, comprising the manufactories formerly owned in all the rest of Europe?_
A. That is a question which closely concerns us all in America. Hitler will get the man power in part from his own partially demobilized armies, but in part also from the conquered coolies, millions of whom are not agricultural workers at all, but skilled mechanics and technicians. German authorities admit, or boast, that today 2,000,000 prisoners of war and “others” are working in German factories, mines, and on farms. It is against the products of this essentially slave labor that American industrial products would have to compete if Hitler after conquering Britain offered merely to compete with the United States in foreign trade.
Q. _Would we not then be at a great disadvantage? How could we compete at all?_
A. We could not compete successfully. Under the Nazi system, precisely as under its twin brother, the Soviet system, all foreign trade is carried on by a foreign trade monopoly. It has a hundred different names in Germany but in reality every foreign trade transaction is a government transaction. Competition among Germans is thus eliminated and any foreigner attempting to compete with the Nazi Colossus has as much chance to succeed as a one-well oil producer trying to trade against the Standard Oil Company. No American manufacturer, no matter how big, including our automobile manufacturers, could buck the Nazi machine, because in addition to its slave labor prices, and its government foreign trade monopoly, it would have the advantage of terrific political-military pressure on all the states in the world not yet an integral part of the Nazi Empire. What South American state do you think would have the nerve to stand up to a Germany which had just finished off the whole of Europe and the British Empire? Which one of them would refuse to give Nazi goods favored tariff treatment over American goods notwithstanding any existing treaties?
Q. _If these are Hitler’s plans for Europe, what does he intend to do with Africa, Asia, and America if he wins?_
A. He intends to swallow piece by piece the entire world, but since he cannot do so by immediate, world-wide conquest, he would like to be allowed periods of negotiated peace during which he could allow his forces to recuperate while by soothing reassurances he lulls that part of the world not yet under his dominion, into a state of helplessness. If he could, after the conquest of Russia, make a negotiated peace with Britain and tacitly, with the United States, he would expect, after a breathing spell, to be stronger relative to the combined strength of Britain and America than he is now. When his superiority in strength had reached a certain point, he would attack again.
Q. _How could Hitler expect to be stronger since we are now building our two-ocean Navy and our great Air Force and Army? Even if Hitler were now or soon to obtain negotiated peace, wouldn’t we continue to forge ahead and grow stronger? Wouldn’t we in the face of a Hitler-dominated world which would result from a negotiated peace be compelled to turn the United States into an armed camp, and wouldn’t we increase our armaments until we were invulnerable?_
A. That is not at all certain. If we continue in our present state of complacency, we might take a negotiated peace to be a sign that we could disarm. The House of Representatives passed the bill extending the service of selectees beyond one year by a vote of 203 to 202. One vote preserved the existence of our embryo army. It was not a mere technical question of how long an army man ought to serve. The question was whether we were to have an army at all. In the midst of the war, when every qualified expert declared the United States faced mortal perils, the House of Representatives could find a majority of but one-tenth of one per cent in favor of maintaining or attempting to construct an effective army. I know the majority would have been larger if the administration leaders had known the vote could come so close, but the fact remains that in this crisis of our national life, with the enemy rampant and untamed, the House took this complacent view of our defense necessities.
Now what would be the attitude of Congress if a peace should be negotiated? Would not our isolationists say this was a God-given opportunity to reduce our tremendous expenditures, whittle the Army down to police size, confine our Air Force to a few thousand planes, and stop building our two-ocean Navy? Certainly they would, and all the immense propaganda resources of the Nazis would be employed to encourage throughout the United States such a move toward “common-sense pacifism.” Now, the argument would run, the war is over, Hitler is satisfied, let us go back to normalcy. Whether we actually succumbed entirely to this temptation or not, there would be a strong isolationist campaign in favor of our disarmament, and this would surely slow up our defense effort. Meanwhile Hitler would be bringing his New Order slave states with their industries and agriculture into the service of the Reich, increasing his Navy, rebuilding his Air Force, re-equipping his Army and in general growing stronger relative to us. He would never want a negotiated peace unless he believed this would be its result.
Q. _Have you any idea what kind of negotiated peace Hitler would consider acceptable? Would such a peace be as desirable for us as Wheeler and Lindbergh say? I notice Lindbergh recently urged that the only alternative to a negotiated peace was “either a Hitler victory or a prostrate Europe or a prostrate Europe and possibly a prostrate America as well.”_
A. Fortunately Axis sources have given us a rather complete blueprint of what they would consider acceptable terms of a negotiated peace. Reduced to a few words, their terms are: Surrender by Britain and America of control of the seas by reduction of the British and American navies to parity with the Axis and demilitarization of British and American naval bases outside home waters; German dominion over all Europe, most of Africa, and parts of Asia; Japanese control of the rest of Asia; and the United States to open the doors of Latin America to Axis enterprise.
Q. _Do you mean that those are serious terms suggested for a so-called negotiated peace? What is the source of these terms?_
A. It is the version put out by the Japanese Foreign Office through its organ the _Japan Times Advertiser_, April 29, 1941, as a trial balloon. It remains the most comprehensive statement of Axis terms yet issued. Since the British government ignored it, and the British and American press derided it, Germany dropped the idea for the moment, but you may be sure it has not been dropped for good. Seven weeks after its publication Hitler sent his armies into Russia. When he has attained his goal there, it seems highly probable he will again offer peace and when he does, the general outline of his terms will probably follow this statement. One has only to remember that since the issuance of this provisional peace text Russia has been stricken from the list of “the nations called upon to settle world peace” and has been added as a victim.
Q. _But didn’t the meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt exclude the possibility of a negotiated peace, since they declared in their eight-point program that “final destruction of the Nazi tyranny” was the precondition to peace?_
A. They did, but Hitler, though he may have little hope of actually achieving a negotiated peace, may offer it in order to appeal over the heads of Churchill and Roosevelt to those elements of the British and American populations he considers vulnerable to his propaganda. There are few such elements left in England, but many here. Hitler knows by now that he has only to furnish the ammunition and Lindbergh and Wheeler will do the firing for him.
Q. _Have you the text of these Hitler terms?_
A. Yes, and it would be most instructive to compare it with the eight-point Atlantic Charter.
JOINT DECLARATION
The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future of the world.
First: Their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;
Second: They desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned;
Third: They desire to respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them;
Fourth: They will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all states, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity;
Fifth: They desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field, with the object of securing for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security;
Sixth: After the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want;
Seventh: Such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance;
Eighth: They believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.
_Franklin D. Roosevelt._ _Winston S. Churchill._