THE COMING COLLAPSE OF THE POTSDAM PACT
Villard, Oswald Garrison
The Coming Collapse Of The Potsdam Pact By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD IF Adolf Hitler had conquered a country and robbed it of all its ships, we know what we of the Allies would have said of it....
...It gives one a comfortable feeling under the belt in such circumstances to know that one's chief competitor has been eliminated for all time so that he will never even carry his own products again...
...Well, it is my judgment, frail as it is, that the collapse of the Potsdam pact in 1946 will demand a complete revision of that document and that if the Allies really wish the Germans to produce for them, as they say they do, they will have to give the Germans far more economic right than they now contemplate—including ships...
...Why, the Potsdam Pact specially provides for them...
...Finally, we are in an atomic age, when it is plain that as yet there is no possible defense against the atomic bomb...
...But the sum total of the war service of German cargo vessels is certainly a relatively small part of the total German military picture...
...Just to state the economic problem posed by the pact is to show its utter impracticability...
...5) the cost of supporting the four occupying armies (which no one can figure out as yet...
...This particular bit of vengeance we reserved for 1945, the Potsdam declaration and the enforcement of the Morgenthau-Vansittart Plan...
...6) the question of the morale of the German workers under the new conditions ; (7) the absence abroad of hundreds of thousands of German slave laborers, etc., etc...
...4) the effect of injecting 14 million Germans into the decreased territory...
...when, if war comes, it will come suddenly, with everybody trying to strike the first overwhelming blow from the air by radar-directed pilotless missiles crossing the ocean at 3,000 miles an hour or less...
...It is back to the land— if they can find vacant spots—for all the thousands of skilled shipbuilding artisans...
...They must stay on land, and be thankful we permitted that...
...The factors entering into the computation as to how many more trades and businesses Germany can give up and still supply the reparations, etc., are so variable, so beyond present analysis and estimation, that it will obviously be impossible to supply anything but wild guesses by February when the Commission is supposed to be able to say exactly what Germany can or cannot do...
...But our dividing the German merchant fleet among ourselves is righteous and just...
...Think of those concentration camps...
...But are there going to be German exports and imports, I hear some one ask...
...To the victors belong the spoils...
...And, after all, we divided up the surviving German ships in 1919, didn't we...
...Again, it is specified that the sums required for this trade shall be first levied against the export profits...
...Again, just like commercial pilots, merchant ship officers can be used by the Navy after war comes and so—oft with their heads...
...I have just been talking with two American experts on the Potsdam agreement who have recently returned from Germany...
...We base it squarely on the theory that merchant ships are capable of being turned into cruisers, just as it is possible to drop light bombs from passenger planes...
...Still we are going to take no chances and those great German shipyards which were not destroyed by bombing are closed down for good and all...
...It cannot be said, therefore, that the decision to deprive Germany of her water-borne trade has met with any opposition in British or American shipping circles...
...In the Far East the Germans pioneered and built up a number of excellently run lines that took the cream of the trade from the less enterprising British—right in those Asiatic waters which England regarded as especially her own preserves...
...German order and discipline were in evidence on all the vessels...
...The competition between us and England is going to be fiercer than ever as soon as things settle down, for the latter is practically bankrupt and more tha"n ever needs to obtain revenues in foreign currency and credits by shipping services all over the world...
...Well, how does that happen...
...Besides, what we have done to the Krauts is as nothing to what they did to the countries they conquered...
...There is no base for determining what her production can be because of the inability of using past figures because (1) the loss of 25 per cent of agricultural lands...
...There were many permanent or semi-permanent provisions in the Treaty of Versailles—they collapsed to the last one...
...When we began to reconstitute our merchant fleet from 1919 on, we gladly manned our vessels with German cooks and stewards and some seamen—with due respect to the law requiring a large percentage of American citizens...
...THUS another important source of revenue and employment is stripped from the 75 million or more Germans who are not only supposed to support themselves on a minimum scale of living, but are to support four occupying armies, after losing most of their heavy industry and 25 per cent of their agricultural lands, to say nothing of the seizure of mineral wealth...
...Thus, it is stated that: "In working out the economic balance of Germany the necessary means must be provided to pay for imports approved by the Control Commission in Germany...
...Far from it...
...if her textile plants are not to be allowed to produce far more than the German people need, if she is not to mine much more coal than before the war and turn out a much larger iron production, and if she is to have no shipping, she will not be able to support her own people, import the necessary goods for them which she does not herself produce, and earn anything like the sums we Allies propose to squeeze out of this utterly wrecked country, which 12 American generals have just jointly declared cannot be resurrected to fight another war in one hundred years...
...Now the fact is that the German merchant fleet played a very small role in both the World Wars...
...Their trans-Atlantic ships were as popular with Americans and others as the British, and if anything their safety record was superior...
...Yes, indeed...
...TAKE the effort to fix what Germany can produce within the terms set...
...In 1938 that fleet comprised only 2,328 ships of 4,243,-888 gross tons which was, by the way, 1,216,000 fewer tons than were at the Kaiser's disposal in 1914...
...How dangerous will a skeleton's merchant fleet be in this kind of a struggle...
...An obvious fact is, however, that if the heavy German industry is largely destroyed...
...3) the prompt seizure and removal by the Russians of all the machinery in their zone which they desire...
...In the Mediterranean some German ships and the Italian merchant fleet supplied the Axis armies in North Africa...
...They asked for it when they went to war and they got it...
...But these exports and imports are never to be carried In German ships—for fear lest 25 years from now the Allies will again be so stupid as to allow the Germans to imitate Hitler, reintroduce conscription, and proceed to rearm and turn over the bulk of their industry to war purposes without any protests and even with the connivance and cooperation of Allied statesmen and Allied Big Business, as happened before World War II...
...For the most part the fleet was interned in foreign harbors, or kept close in shore in the hope of preserving the ships...
...So we are not going to allow them to use anything they can ever utilize for war again...
...They both told me—separately—that in their opinion the whole effort to carry out that document will collapse within a year certainly, and quite possibly in six to eight months...
...A few ships became ocean raiders in the fashion of the Confederate cruiser Alabama during our Civil War...
...IF they are correct, then why should the Germans not be allowed to build and operate ships for peaceful purposes ? At least for their own coastal trade, for their fisheries, for traffic to their Scandinavian neighbors...
...We are going to make the Krauts understand this time that they lost the war...
...They were very proud of the fact that up to World War I they were given no subsidies to speak of by the Government except mail payments...
...Never again," are, of course, ridiculous words to us in a world such as ours of 1945...
...Undoubtedly the German occupying troops in Norway were largely moved there by transports and subsequently considerably supplied by them...
...The American merchant fleet has had to be bolstered by one subsidy after another, so that it has been largely mortgaged and supported by the Government...
...Hereafter all German imports and exports are to be carried in Allied ships—a nice little victory plum for our British, American and French shipping magnates...
...There is to be a so delicately adjusted scale of foreign trade that, the instant it shows signs of bringing in more money than the Germans need for their minimum cost of living, either the trade will be curtailed or the Allies will have a greater surplus from the enslaved German labor for Allied reparations...
...Yes, there are...
...2) the destruction of factories and other properties...
...They can feel themselves lucky we have left them anything...
...Wicked criminality" would have been the mildest of our epithets...
...No more aviators and no more mariners for the Huns...
...THE Germans are natural-born seamen and they built up their merchant fleet long before they had a navy by sheer individual enterprise, ability, and initiative...
...And if, by any chance, reason, common sense, and economic sanity should return to the Allies, they will tear up the pact themselves because they will realize that as it stands today it is cleverly devised to do the maximum of injury not only to the Allies themselves but to prostrate and dying Europe...
...Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter could not have conceived anything more impossible...
...So what are you grousing about ?" Well, we did take Germany's naval and merchant fleets from her after the first World War, but it never occurred to us to say to this great maritime nation: "Because the Kaiser and the militarists went to war and violated Belgium, you'll never sail another ship...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 47
