SHALL WE CARVE UP GERMANY?

...Any attempt at outside mental regimentation will only drive the Nazi doctrinaires underground...

...Sumner Welles is for dividing it into three parts, and so is a book by "five Hollanders," otherwise nameless...

...Peace Of Moderation' The Economist in its issue of August 12, as The Progressive pointed out recently, demands "a peace of moderation" as the only one possible of enforcement...

...By this time I suppose my readers are demanding my exact program for Germany, and are asking me whether I want these terrible people to escape all punishment...

...It is a question which should be decided coldbloodedly, with no other thought than how the peace of Europe can best be assured, as a business proposition, if you please, but one governed by a knowledge of history and of the lessons taught by the whole tragic story of Europe...

...The only question between rational men is which measures will achieve the end we all have in view, namely, a warless and a just world...

...Its aim is the one that all of us should have, the prevention of another such catastrophe in the world and the devising of some machinery for the reorganization of the world that will make it impossible for Germany or any other country to be carried into war by a group of utterly ruthless criminals, or by old-school statesmen of the type that surrounded the Kaiser in 1914 and ruled Britain at the same time...

...After The Last War All through the debate one hears the latest cliche— that we did not do a thorough enough job the last time and so must clean up the Huns this time...

...Finally, this is a question which will never be settled right if it is to be settled only with hate and passion for vengeance...

...Roosevelt has indicated through the Saturday Evening Post that he wants a separate republic for the Kiel Canal...

...Since the Economist has supported the war from the day that it began, it will hardly be accused of pro-Germanism, or of wanting to coddle the Germans...

...We were too easy-going, too kind, and generous...

...The Spaniards rose against these terrible French oppressors...

...They have incontestable evidence that there is a fine, spiritual Germany, as demonstrated by the determination of the Protestant and Catholic Churches not to yield to the Nazis...

...It declares that a peace treaty founded on indemnities, territorial annexations, and transfers of population would make the return of war a certainty instead of banishing it...

...They must also be made to understand that any further efforts to intrigue abroad, as in South America and elsewhere, will be dealt with severely by the-international organization which is to be set up by the victors—a better and more efficient one than the last, let us hope...

...As I was the first American correspondent into Germany to stay for any length of time, I can testify that the country was war wrecked and in despair, and thoroughly convinced that it had been overwhelmingly defeated...

...In conclusion, the editorial says "hard facts, not the morals of the case, or the goodness or the badness of the Germans, are the compelling reasons why, in a settlement with Germany, it is absolutely necessary to go the way of moderation...

...The French have revived the Foch plan of taking the left bank of the Rhine...

...It is only the moderate, that will be enforced—not now, but in the 15 or 20 years' time when the fat and lazy habits of peacetime have returned...

...that it is part of the old British game of dividing to rule, of restoring the old Europe in order that there may be someone to divide and rule and a balance of power to be adjusted as it sees fit by 10 Downing Street...

...But so did much else...

...For six months almost everybody starved more or less...

...If there should be after this war any remaining Nazis, militarists, or geographically-minded Germans still dreaming of world domination, they will surely be so convinced by the completeness of their defeat and of the wreck of their country, and the utter humiliation of their military overthrow by Russia and the Allies, that it will be generations before any Germans will think about anything but holding the Reich together...

...Your terribly severe treaties do not last...

...But Russia, too, will have to be watched, because it was the Russians who made it so easy for the Germans to rearm secretly—they supplied the airfields upon which German aviators were trained and given practice, while German officers developed the Russian troops and laid the groundwork for the marvelous Russian forces which made Hitler's defeat inevitable...

...It declares that a "Carthaginian peace" is in the making with part of East Prussia and Konigs-berg going to Russia, while the rest, with large slices of Pomerania and Silesia, is to be Poland's share...

...All the power of the ruthless, autocratic Germany of Bismarck could not accomplish that or silence the voices of Polish spokesmen in the Reichstag...

...It, too, is aware of the proposal to move 10 millions of people...

...This Germany is ready to be called upon, given the fair-play which was not vouchsafed to Germany by the Treaty of Versailles and the conduct of the Allies thereafter...

...We must go back 100 years to the German aspirations of 1848, which I believe have never been wholly extinguished in the German people, and help them to build anew, as the magnificent group of patriots in 1848, so many of whom found their way to the United States to enrich our American life, wished to build a free Germany...

...Or, it could be phrased that we tried the methods of force and vengeance and that they failed, and for once we ought to be Christians and try offering to the beaten peoples participation in a new world order so desirable that it will be entirely to their interest to become a part, and an enthusiastic part, of it...

...I am tempted to summarize what we should do about Germany by simply saying that we should study what we did after the last war.and then do precisely the opposite...

...Just as was the case when I was at the making of the Versailles peace, I want the Germans disarmed to the last man and denied a naval force—incidentally, two of the greatest boons that could possibly be bestowed upon a people striving to come back after such economic, physical, and moral disaster as is theirs today...

...What Not To Do I do not deny that there will be justification for clear-cut international supervision of Germany for a time if we should again make the mistake of giving Germany a single soldier or warship...

...The result was that there ensued one of the longest periods of peace Europe has ever enjoyed, and it was not long before everybody forgot and forgave, and the French were no longer considered the cutthroat bolsheviks of that time...

...No other kind of a peace treaty will survive than ona which is self-enforcing...

...I know the explanations that will be given for it, that it is part of the striving of British capitalism to build up Germany as a bulwark against Bolshevism...

...My answer is that punishment is upon them and has been upon them ever since 1939, for they have lost a generation of their young men, their largest cities have been ruined, their working people have been driven to exhaustion, and they have become, because of their cruelties and misgovernment of the countries they seized and plundered, the worst hated people in Europe, which will call for a long period of peace, indeed, before it is forgotten—it never will be condoned...

...There was no effort to reeducate the French people and get them out of the habit of ravaging Europe whenever one of their leaders, whether a king or a revolutionist or a Napoleon, ordered them to do so...

...For European Peace The mere doing of these things will be deadly blows to the remaining democratic forces in Germany upon which we must count for the rebuilding of a liberal republican State upon the lines of an improved Weimar Constitution...

...Their special objective is Prussia...

...She lost all of her colonies, millions of her people, much of her soil, half of her coal supply, three-fourths of her iron ore, all her great steamships, the free use of her railways, and the free disposal of her industrial products, and more than that, we and our Allies starved some 250,000 Germans to death, directly or indirectly, because of our continuance of our hunger blockade in the six months from Armistice Day to the signing of the treaty...

...The greatest lesson from history is, however, what happened after Waterloo...

...Of course I am not in favor of their going wholly without punishment...

...Every dismemberment of Germany will- strengthen and not weaken the evil forces within Germany and the survivors of the Nazi doctrinaires, whether above ground or underground...

...It adds : "Further, parts of Western Germany are, it seems, to be annexed to France, Belgium, and Holland...

...When the air is full of these proposals that we make exactly the same mistakes that we did at Versailles, and write another and more severe treaty of peace and vengeance, it is refreshing, indeed, to find a different note in the London Economist, one of the greatest and ablest weeklies in the world...

...Any attempt to force democratic ideas upon them in the schools through foreign teachers will fail as completely as did Bismarck's efforts to force the Polish minority in East Prussia to become German, and to replace the Polish language with that of their rulers...

...I want them to undo so far as that is possible their bestial crimes against the Jews, to whom should be restored the worth of their property robbed by the Nazi leaders and government—restored to all who are still alive, or their children...

...If anyone doubts that there are still such forces in Germany, let him talk with the many fine refugees in this country, who left their homeland at great sacrifice well before the war came, because of principle, because of their devotion to republican ideals...

...Well, the horrors of the Russian campaign, the burning of innocent Russian villages, the throwing in some cases of whole village populations (according to the latest French historian of Napoleon's war upon Russia) into the flames by the retreating French, testified to that...

...This is the voice of sanity...

...It calls for the punishment of war criminals, a period of physical reparation and possibly some frontier rectifications in the East, but asks only for exchanges of population as opposed to wholesale transfers...

...I want the Germans to make reparations in so far as that is humanly possible without the reparations creating chaos in all Europe, and inviting the same sort of economic disaster as came to the whole world in 1929...

...It was just this lack of moral backing by the Allies which had so much to do with the collapse of the republic before Hitler's hosts...

...These men now over here realize that Germany must pay a price, and that it will have to demonstrate that it can and will keep in check the evil elements to be found within every country and they are certain that it will meet the test...

...By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD HARDLY a day passes without some new suggestion tor the partition of Germany and for the punishment not only of the Nazi criminals, but of all the Germans, innocent and guilty alike...

...they are mere incentives to wars of liberation...

...Actually a terrific punishment was imposed upon Germany...

...Admittingothat there are other motives in the making of the treaty than avoiding the recurrence of war, it nonetheless says, "by no other criterion can the effectiveness of a proposed treaty be judged...

...Of course the Germans must be told that they will never have any colonies again—no country should be allowed to have any...

...One very prominent American artist demands that we cure the Prussian evil by simply removing the P. from the name and turning it over to Stalin...

...There was no effort to garrison France by foreign armies to any extent...

...He can be counted on to make no objection to the turning over of East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia to the Poles and the expatriation of some 10 millions of Germans from these Eastern provinces into what will be left of Germany...

...The Palatinate, for example, that beautiful part of Germany that was for centuries regularly ravaged by the French, is to be put under French rule, and Baden, the Rhineland, and doubtless the Saar Basin, will be thrown in for good measure...

...Everything will, however, depend upon the manner in which the supervision is enforced lest it create a bitter hostility more to be feared than some of the evils against which it is to guard...

...The French were tha Huns of that hour, and as for their atrocities in the conduct of war...

...For it they demand "deservedly harsh treatment" because "that country can be regarded as the cause of most of the misery which swept over Europe repeatedly in the course of the last 80 years...

...Well, of course, the people who say that are either completely ignorant or deliberately uttering untruths...

...Villard's Program For Germany Yet when the end came after Waterloo, no one counselled the breaking up of France though it had been the scourge of Europe, as said, for centuries...

...The filling up of East Prussia with Poles and the removal of its population, the handing over of the Palatinate and of the Rhineland to France, will simply create new problems for war-torn Europe and create a new war...

...If large-scale financial reparations are no more possible now than after the last war, there are dozens of ways in which the decent Germans, who will, I believe, take over Germany, as the Social Democrats threw themselves into the breach in 1918, can give proof of contrition and even practical repentance to the Dutch, the Belgians, the French, and the Norwegians, if they are but given the opportunity and proper moral backing by the victors...

...Wellington himself stated that the horrible cruelties of the French to the civilians of that part of Spain which they occupied contributed much to the French disasters in the Peninsula in 1813...

...Will it preserve peace, not perhaps in perpetuity, but at least for a reasonable span, the full lifetime of a man or the passage of a century...

...The feeling against France at that time after Europe had been for so long ravaged by Napoleon was akin in bitterness and hatred to the feeling against Germany today...

...It was then that the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, exclaimed exultantly that Germany had been rendered impotent for all time...

...Whatever the explanations or reasons, all history is on the side of the Economist's position...