THE EDITOR RESERVES THE LAST COLUMN
The Editor Reserves . . . The Last Column THE premature release of Henry Morgenthau's fiendish blueprint for the economic dismemberment and enslavement of postwar Germany is having a salutary...
...He demanded to know what the German mission wanted...
...The German Republic, which was built on the ashes of World War I, never broke away from the chains of Versailles...
...Hitler's Biggest Issue But the 14 Points were dishonored at Versailles...
...M.H.R...
...And in England, John Maynard Keynes, the distinguished British political economist, warned in The Economic Consequences of the Peace that the harsh provisions of the Versailles Treaty could not endure because they were founded on hate and vengeance and power politics, rather than on the social and economic needs of Central Europe...
...The Germans capitulated, hoping that even if the terms of the armistice were unconditional surrender, the peace settlement itself might embrace the 14 Points...
...The plea for a peace settlement which will enable democratic forces to re-establish control in Germany and guide the long, uphill struggle for social and economic reconstruction has nothing whatever to do with the acknowledged need for punishing the Nazi gangsters, uprooting the barbaric institutions of fascism, and disarming the Reich...
...We wish to learn what your armistice conditions are...
...Even so Administration-worshipping a daily as Marshall Field's Chicago Sun and so cordial a columnist as Marquis Childs expressed pained surprise that the Administration could harbor such dangerous nonsense and shocked amazement that it would be made public just in time to help Dr...
...The hostile reaction of the nation generally to the Morgenthau plan caught the Administration unawares...
...When the Germans sought to explain that they were seeking peace based on Wilson's 14 Points, Foch shut them up, called on an associate to read his harsh armistice terms, and told the German mission to take them or leave them...
...One of our chief trade competitors has been seriously crippled and our Allies are about to become her biggest creditors...
...On Nov...
...Here, indeed, is the lesson of the "last time," the legend of the "soft peace...
...Adolf Hitler made that peace settlement his most effective campaign issue and he smashed the whole Versailles system when he captured power...
...Lloyd George, the British spokesman at the peace table, admits repeatedly in his Memoirs, as does Col...
...Countless Americans who have been bemused into accepting the Administration's foreign policies on faith were shocked by the realization that Morgenthau's madness may be only a sample of dangerous hysteria- and cockeyed confusion in the higher councils of our Government...
...Oberndorff took up the conversation for the Germans...
...Robert M..La Follette, Sr., and others predicted that the peace of revenge and humiliation could not last, that it would be followed in a generation by another and bloodier war...
...The French commander was in his private car on a siding in the woods...
...Another distortion which the hate cult is trying to palm off on the unwary is the myth that "last time" we let the Germans get away with a "soft peace" and we must not let that happen again...
...The Germany Navy has been handed over, the German mercantile shipping has been handed over, and the German colonies have been given up...
...We have come to receive the Allied peace proposition," said Erzberger...
...The need for these basic cleansing operations is disputed by nobody that I know about in the camp of those who oppose a peace of total revenge, dismemberment, and enslavement...
...11, 1918, the German emissaries, including Erzberger and Count von Oberndorff, called on Marshal Foch at-Compiegne...
...House in his Papers, that the settlement imposed on conquered Germany was needlessly harsh and oppressive...
...Nothing, of course, could be further from the facts...
...Goebbels rally faltering German, morale...
...Foch snapped back: "I have no proposition to make...
...Far from being an improvement over the procedure of the last war, the Roosevelt-Churchill demand for unconditional surrender is repeating the fatal course of 1918...
...The reverse, of course, is true...
...The truth is that we have got our way," Lloyd George said...
...In this country the late Sen...
...I have no conditions to offer," Foch retorted icily...
...Myth Of The Soft Peace' It seems incredible that one of the basic questions which the victorious powers must soon answer—what shall be done with Germany?—should be so completely surrounded by myths, distortions, falsehoods, and hysterical mumbo-j umbo as to make calm, intelligent discussion virtually impossible...
...The Editor Reserves . . . The Last Column THE premature release of Henry Morgenthau's fiendish blueprint for the economic dismemberment and enslavement of postwar Germany is having a salutary effect on public opinion in the United States...
...It is true that Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points presented a more hopeful, idealistic approach than the cold insistence of unconditional surrender, but the 14 Points were more honored in the breach than in the observance...
...Those who read only the headlines or who get their information from the hate cult commentators on the radio have been falsely led to* believe that the issue was one between those who wanted a "hard peace" and those who wanted a "soft peace," with the latter portrayed by the hate cult as an appeasement school bent on "whitewashing" the Nazis...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 41
