THE POSTSDAM PACT: DISASTER FOR EUROPE

...Nothing was decided—as far as we are privileged to know—about bringing Soviet Russia into the war against Japan, although the Communists, of course, raised a terrific din for a "second" and third front in the war against Germany...

...It will do so again...

...But all of this has been accepted after a few days' examination and discussion, by the 3 men who dominate the world and parcel out territories and peoples in secret meeting...

...Josephus Daniels triumphantly said then that Germany was finished, tied down for 50 years, and would never again trouble the world, and I have no doubt that his views were shared by Mr...

...Today all Europe is heading straight to a Winter of famine, misery, despair, with innumerable deaths from hunger or cold...

...Already Anne O'Hare McCormick writes for the New York Times—with evident doubts that the plan is wise and just—that the full result of the Potsdam decision "will not be felt in the lifetime of the men who make them...

...If it did complete justice to the Germans, it would still be necessary wholly to oppose it in the interest of the rest of the Continent...

...We denounced it as wicked, imperialistic, and land-grabbing, as certain to lead to more war, and we demanded its rejection by the Senate...

...You cannot suppress human souls and human aspirations...

...Nothing was decided, it seems, about the urgent need for some semblance of economic unity for Europe, or for a measure of political federation...

...The latter admits that the plan for Germany is "awesome in its proportions, so novel and far-reaching in its implications as to overshadow everything else...

...That alone will make the utter folly and stupidity of Potsdam apparent wherever men read— and think...

...It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest not permanently but only as upon quicksand...

...and it requires much more than a first hurried reading to pass any intelligent judgment on how it is likely to work out...

...Nothing definite at all was offered to the little countries of Western Europe—Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Belgium...

...Yet within 3 decades Europe rocked with the resurgence of democratic ideas...

...It will be a quite novel kind of organization...

...But it would be, if millions of unemployed Germans produced a social explosion in Europe...

...The spirit of new life, the victory of the great human ideals for which the people have shed their blood and their treasure without stint, the fulfillment of their aspirations toward a new international order, and a fairer and better world are not written in this treaty, and will not be written in treaties...

...Of course there are pious words about democracy and the destruction of cartels, but the acts of the Big 3 at Potsdam make a mockery of their lofty declarations...

...THE sins of omission in the Pact of Potsdam are almost as great as the sins of commission...

...THAT is the terrible tragedy of it—that it is going to affect adversely every nation in Europe...

...It is so unheard of, that such defenders of a "hard peace" as the New York Times and Herald-Tribune gag over it...

...It looked in 1919 as if the Treaty of Versailles, just completed, would control Germany indefinitely...

...They proceeded to hold down the liberal elements...

...It has been tried again and again in history...

...It did not work, and it has never worked in all human history...

...Here the organism is dissolved, the old Germany...

...It is calmly assumed that after a long period of years of complete domination by Russia of its section of the conquered land, it will be ready to announce some day that the happy hour has arrived when the German people have so far adopted Russian ways of thought, politics, and life, and have become such good pacifists that Mr...

...Thus the Poles were divided among Austria, Russia, and Prussia to be reformed, to be amalgamated, to be crushed so that their nationality and their language would disappear...

...For economic Germany, whatever may be said of its people and their criminal leaders, has been the economic heart of Europe, from which great arteries of trade and traffic have pumped necessary goods and products throughout Eastern Europe, to Italy, and to a very considerable degree to every other nation of Europe...

...When the Treaty of Versailles was published, The Nation, then under my editorship, declared that it divided the world into 2 parts, those who were for it and those who opposed it...

...It is Vansittartism and Morgenthau-ism almost to the limit, stopping only short—and not very far short—of complete enslavement and extermination...

...The "Pact of Potsdam" is worse...

...The Nazi prison camps were filled with hundreds of thousands of Germans of whom large numbers died because they would not yield to Hitler's foul theories and bloody methods...

...It is unparalleled in history...

...22, 1917, when he appealed for a "peace without victory...

...We have by the Pact of Potsdam underwritten the Russian rape of Poland under the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, and sought to compensate Poland by handing over huge areas of Germany to the Polish...

...What faith can the world have in the few high-sounding promises of this secret conference, when the 3 participants tore to shreds their solemn promises under the Atlantic Charter to permit no territorial aggrandizement and to make no territorial changes which do not conform with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned...

...Why, its folly, its impossibility, its shamelessness, and above all its threat to all of Europe stands out so vividly in all its nakedness that one reading more than suffices...

...FINALLY, let me go back to the past once more...

...How incredibly trustful some people are...

...Force may accomplish a good many things, but the day has not yet come when it can dominate the minds of human beings...

...Well, I will venture the prophecy that it will never be carried out and cannot be as it is contrary to common sense, the psychology of peoples, and human nature, that reformation can never be imposed upon a people from the outside...

...What reason is there to think that German manhood will calmly lie down and accept from foreign conquerors the ideas and the teachings we say they should adopt and believe in...

...Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished...

...Stalin has had his way almost completely...

...Will there not be every temptation to the Russians to communize their part of Germany, to install their methods of government, even though there is to be a joint control of the conquered territories...

...But if they did, would this make for the advancement of Europe as a whole...

...If so, then there are many ethical and Christian teachings that ought to be abandoned once and for all...

...She need not be so sure...

...As for the Times, it is so staggered as to say of the plan that "it must prove itself in practice...

...But that does not mean economic peace, nor even rational economic development in Europe...

...A second reading of the pact necessary...

...He continued thus: "I am seeking only to face realities and to face them without soft concealment...

...Only a peace the principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit...

...They were bent not only on crushing Napoleon, but on putting an end to the ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity which threatened to do away with all the monarchies of Europe...

...CLEARLY, this is not the road to peace or good-will but to hate, unending bitterness and more war...

...Let me recall what Gen...

...Stalin's successor is willing to withdraw his troops and turn what is left of the Russian part of Germany back to the Germans...

...For the pact takes from them great stretches of their country, sanctions the expulsion of millions of Germans from historic German lands, and forces them into the remaining territory which is to be deprived of its supporting industries and turned back to farming...

...Not in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, but in spirit and in truth,' as the Great Master said, must the foundation of the new order be laid...

...And then there is the immortal speech of Woodrow Wilson on Jan...

...We may think that this serves the Germans right and is no concern of ours...

...By this single stroke we have created two perilous areas of discord and bitterness and scheming and plotting which can only explode in bloodshed again...

...History has justified him completely once...

...Wilson and by his fellow-members of the Wilson Cabinet...

...And the Allies, who boast of their devotion to the Four Freedoms, are to regulate not only the economic life of the Germans and to limit their sustenance to the lowest standard in Europe, but are to control their spiritual life, their intellectual processes, their education, their amusements, their press, their news, their politics, and their meetings until such time as they have become sufficiently docile and subservient to their conquerors...

...Anglo-American acceptance of Stalin's settlement for Central Europe is bound to plague us—and the next generation even more so...

...Correctly it says: "Nothing of the kind has ever been attempted in modern times...

...DEAN finally points out that the aim in Europe must be "to alleviate the political, economic, and social conflicts and frictions that lead to war...

...It proposes to rob the Germans of their industries, to strip them of their manufacturing to the extent that the Allies may dictate in their own interest and to compel them to rely upon agriculture for their maintenance, although their territory is to be greatly reduced...

...Vera Micheles Dean, the director of the conservative Foreign Policy Association, in protesting months ago against the threat to deindustrialize Germany, calling it "a defeatist policy," wrote that "instead of destroying German industry, should we not ask ourselves whether it can be used constructively if it is controlled by democratic committees of managers, technicians, and workers, as proposed for France...

...It is a pact of vengeance to be imposed upon over 70,000,000 people, upon innocent and guilty alike...

...This war has now been lost just as World War I was lost at Versailles...

...They are not even mentioned by the Big 3. No provisions were made for the withdrawal of Red troops from Stalin's puppet states, or for any inter-Allied supervision of the promised election in Poland...

...To make a clean sweep of all German industry would be to deprive millions of Germans of the opportunity to make a livelihood...

...Only a peace between equals can last...

...Even in the territory occupied by ourselves and England and France machinery is to be taken out and shipped to Russia...

...This is precisely what the Pact of Potsdam will not do...

...The German menace in 1939 was not in the factories of Germany, but in the minds of Germans who saw profit and prestige in militarism and expansion, and in the indifference of the Western Powers to the political implications of Nazism...

...is put into bankruptcy, and the new Germany which is expected ultimately to emerge will scarcely be a nation-state at all...

...Undoubtedly the conquerors see in this the opportunity to secure for themselves the international trade of the conquered—London has already gleefully announced (on July 24) that all the "industrial developments, inventions and trade secrets held by the Germans . . . are being made available to both the United States and British Governments and at some later date will be released to all industries of the 2 nations...

...The rulers of Europe in 1816 thought that they could do it when they had defeated Napoleon and made their treaty of peace...

...THAT the whole pact is a triumph for Soviet Russia our press freely admits...

...He gets a majority of the reparations that are to be squeezed out of the Germans...

...carry out the ueformation prepared for the German people...

...MRS...

...It thinks the plan "specific" and "carefully worked out," but adds that "it will take a long, long time to An extended presentation of the specific terms of the Pact of Potsdam appears in the War in Review on Page 2 of this issue...

...Smuts wrote after he signed, under protest, the Treaty of Versailles: "This treaty is simply the liquidation of the war situation in the world...

...Always in the past, it admits, wars have ended with the continuance "of the defeated nation's state organism...