II. A PLEA FOR INDUSTRIAL RESTORATION
Hankins, Dr. Frank H.
What Shall We Do With Germany? II. A Plea For Industrial Restoration By DR. FRANK H. HANKINS IN the previous article we advanced some reasons why a magnanimous peace is psychologically sound and...
...We envisage the United States supplying the tools, machines, and equipment that will make the rest of the world as productive as we are," he said recently...
...Militarism and racialism are deeply imbedded in German national psychology, but recent events have prepared the ground for their disillusionment with both...
...The South has taken some of New England's cotton industry, but Southern prosperity has more than compensated by increased purchases of the thousand and one products of other New England industries...
...All northwest and central Europe (all countries west of Russia except Poland and Lithuania) will have only 30 million of the same ages, of which Germany's portion will be about one-third...
...Colossal unemployment and internal disorganization in the world's second greatest industrial nation was the result...
...The population changes make the dominant race myth no longer tenable...
...Nothing can prevent rearmament when such determination ceases...
...What Baruch really advocates is scarcity all around...
...The second World War—as will very probably the third—arose out of the inevitable conflicts of national interests, the violence of patriotic sentiments in the modern world, and the lack of any effective means of adjusting flexibly the alterations in the distribution of force on the international scene...
...HERE we come to the crux of the matter, for the restoration of German industry means the restoration of an industrial competitor, and largely by Anglo-American aid...
...This is said to be for the purpose of preventing her military resurgence...
...The reader may not agree with all I have said, but I hope he will weigh carefully my main contentions...
...Germany had the highest standard outside the English-speaking nations...
...Above all is the desirability of integrating Germany with the West...
...IT is argued that the German Republic lacked strong leadership...
...These figures take no 'account of the effects of World War II...
...By 1970, according to the Office of Population Research, Russia (1940 area) will have 43 million young men of ages 15 to 35...
...Japan the highest among the billion population of Asia...
...Two theories here contend for acceptance...
...She was largely excluded from her greatest markets...
...This view neglects the importance of German industry for the general rehabilitation of Europe, which is demanded on both humanitarian and political grounds...
...people voted for him for all sorts of reasons...
...It follows that shifts in national privileges in international matters are made usually by force rather than reason...
...few of those who did so foresaw that his elevation meant the end of the rule of law...
...To be sure, the German middle class was never strong...
...As events seem to be shaping themselves we shall need a strong, democratic Germany during the coming generation...
...In doing so, they necessarily appear as criminals to those nations whose power and privilege is affected...
...Of course he says nothing about the overindustrialization of his own country and her economic vassals...
...WHEN, therefore, new centers of power arise, as they have in recent times in Germany and Japan, and just now in Russia, they almost of necessity resort to force to alter the international scene...
...The British blockade prolonged famine conditions...
...One need not be too hopeful...
...The alternative view favors the speedy rehabilitation of German industry...
...However, the Republic was never voted out...
...We cannot make a pariah of a nation and expect it to become a useful member of the international community...
...and that various policies of the Allied nations were contributing directly to the renewal of hostilities...
...The hope, especially cultivated in England, of taking over former German markets in southeastern Europe has waned since Russia blithely laid hands on those promised lands...
...Does anybody...
...Writing in the Transatlantic Edition of the London Daily Mail on May 30, Lord Vansittart contends that Germany was "over-industrialized" and "her former economic vassals" should be emancipated...
...He stakes the future peace and prosperity of the world on the disarmament and industrial crippling of Germany and Japan...
...A Social Democrat of high standing recently stated in London that in his district only about 20 per cent were Nazis, while 35 per cent were definitely opposed...
...He would prevent the products of their "sweated labor" from entering our markets and thus reducing our standard of living...
...With a few successes it would have grown in prestige, in numbers, experience, and power...
...It may, therefore, be worth recalling, what was almost universally recognized during the 1920's, that Germany was not solely responsible for the first World War...
...We might, and doubtless shall, capture some of them, but on balance we are bound to lose...
...Rut that there is something basically wrong in the Baruch policies seems to me certain...
...As the New Statesman and Nation of London, noting the widespread fear of a third world war, said: "The real cause of alarm is that no one of the surviving great powers is restrained in its doings by obedience to a code of principles...
...Germany was thus the criminal in 1914 and 1939...
...The basic reason for this is political: to increase hope and cultivate a new political orientation, to check further social disorganization in Germany, and facilitate the restoration of civilized life throughout central Europe...
...In our dynamic world any established status quo must change from time to time to take account of changes in economic development, population growth, and social integration within nations...
...That word "all" must make the devil laugh...
...It also neglects the effects of unilateral action by Russia in coordinating German interests with her own...
...A large part of his report, however, lends credence to the view that a major part of the support for the war sprang from the desire of Great Britain to destroy an economic rival, with the United States dragged in to help save a tottering Empire...
...but international trade, in its economic aspects, is exactly like internal trade between sections of this country...
...One holds that Germany should be de-industrialized...
...I see nothing here except a devilish brew of illogicalities...
...These facts are here recalled in support of the view that the Allies were in part responsible for the Nazis and that one need not despair of the restoration of free institutions in Germany...
...If a better world is to emerge, America must rise to new heights of common sense and humanism...
...Then just as world-wide depression was setting in came the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, to be followed 2 years later by the British Ottawa Agreement...
...It is as reasonable as anything can be that a magnanimous peace in 1919, with reasonable support of the Republic, would have saved it and avoided Hitler and World War II...
...Whether this can be done is perhaps an academic question in view of the division of the country into 4 occupational zones...
...The stage is set for Germany's conversion to new ideals, but whether this is accomplished will depend largely on British and American aid in the rebuilding of German prosperity...
...Will the standard of living of the world be raised by cutting off their trade...
...In a world led by far-seeing statesmen, that class would have been helped in the firm establishment of democratic institutions...
...With her industries almost completely destroyed and her cities reduced to stone quarries and masses of rubble, German militarism will be no threat for a long time...
...These were only part of the methods whereby the German Republic was sabotaged and its prestige destroyed in the minds of its citizens...
...This question of war guilt must be cleared somewhat .before entering on a discussion of Germany's industrial restoration...
...Industrial nations have long found in each other their best markets...
...To be sure, Germany has been a competitor...
...but it is also, in part, a rationalization of the desire to capture German markets...
...If Germany sells less, she will buy less, so that we shall find our own sales reduced both in Germany and among her own customers...
...The restoration of German industry involves many difficult questions and I do not pretend to know all the answers...
...War on the economic and financial fronts intensified the almost fatal inflation, making recovery more difficult...
...German rearmament can be prevented by factory inspection as long as effective will to do so lasts...
...You cannot convert a people to reason and morality by proving to them that their own philosophy of force is after all sound...
...This latter view taints Vansittartism...
...It was politically inexperienced...
...With some concessions on the tariff frontier, Germany can absorb nearly as much of our exports as all South America, and she would be as good a credit risk...
...Hitler's appeals stirred hope and swung the pendulum of national sentiments from the depth of despair and humiliation to the excesses of national aggression...
...FRANK H. HANKINS IN the previous article we advanced some reasons why a magnanimous peace is psychologically sound and politically desirable...
...A nation that is humiliated and rebuffed in its international relations cannot grow strong at home...
...it had never carried through a successful bourgeois revolution...
...What to do with Germany is obviously a mighty thorny problem...
...For this reason Emil Ludwig's view that the moral regeneration of Germany requires us to adopt Nazi attitudes toward the German people does not make sense...
...Recall that Lloyd George, having stated in Paris that extensive reparations could not be secured without making Germany the most prosperous nation in Europe, returned home to win the "khaki election" with the fervent promise that the Germans would be made to pay the entire cost of the war...
...Most international trade is 3-cornered...
...By 1933 the Nazis had pretty well liquidated the Communists, but there were millions of other anti-Nazis among the liberals, laborites, Catholics, farmers, business classes, and others...
...The fiasco at San Francisco and the separation of Russia from collaboration make one cynically pessimistic...
...The senseless and dishonest reparations program defeated the efforts of the saner and more cooperative elements within Germany...
...Nor is it true, as Baruch contends, that by destroying German industry we will increase our prosperity by capturing her former markets...
...Russia seems likely soon to become the villain throughout the English-speaking world...
...Europe has long been our greatest buyer, and after Great Britain has come Germany...
...AH those eloquent arguments against Nazism and Fascism, recently so convincing, now apply with specially pointed pertinence to the first and the most revolutionary of all recent totalitarianisms...
...He advocates the theft of German technical secrets "to learn what Germany has that can be used for the benefit of all...
...WITH what Baruch has to say regarding the return of Nazi loot, all must agree...
...Those nations that dominate world affairs find it almost impossible to make needed concessions peacefully because their action is considered traitorous by mass opinion, and the government that yields something to foreign demands is turned out of office in an upsurge of righteous patriotism...
...One section does not profit by the impoverishment of another, even when it gets some of the latter's industries...
...There was the "war guilt" error and the reverberations in German minds of the "Hun" epithet...
...If we must cease trade with all nations with lower standards of living, then we can trade with none...
...Even by his most extraordinary techniques, he won only a plurality...
...which will reduce the figures for Germany disproportionately, nor of the vast additions to Russian-dominated territory since 1940...
...He would thus raise the standard of living of the entire world—except, of course, in those 2 countries...
...We must not forget that the Allies, notably France and Great Britain, continued to war long after the armistice...
...There were the "14 Points" that proved as illusory as the Atlantic Charter of recent vintage...
...These are: First, that a magnanimous treatment of the German people is psychologically sound and politically astute, and, Second, that the restoration of German industrial prosperity is both politically and economically wise from the standpoint of our own interests...
...Germany lost heavily by both measures...
...For this Allied policies were in part responsible...
...It is for this reason that our tariff and the Ottawa Agreement proved so fatal in the '30's...
...it was weakened and disorganized by the postwar inflation...
...The compulsory admission of guilt in 1919 did not prove guilt, but it laid a firm basis for deep-seated resentment in German national psychology...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 27
