D. Thompson: Consequences of the Potsdam plan (1945)

[NormanStewart]

The Evening Star (September 3, 1945)

ON THE RECORD –
Consequences of the Potsdam plan

By Dorothy Thompson

Many things – the most important – are left open in the Potsdam communique, such as the German-Polish frontiers, and the manner of exchanging populations. In fact, the Polish “provisional government” and the Red armies are taking over the area east of the Oder and Neisse, and getting rid of the German population. Mr. Truman spoke of “being informed” that there were “still” some million and a half Germans in this area. Mr. Churchill expressed concern about the others.

The German population of these territories was, in 1925, around 12,000,000; the highest Allied estimate of the numbers who have fled into the British and American zones is 4,000,000. This is probably exaggerated. But even this leaves perhaps 6,500,000 unaccounted for. If this area is depopulated and resettled before the peace conference, how will the conference be able to change matters?

If one is critical of such things, it is attributed to German sympathies. I have never seen a German state I admired, and I advocated immediately after the last war the dissolution of the Reich in a European confederation on the Swiss model.

But the issue is whether wholesale deportations of men, women and children to unknown destinations is or is not “extermination” and “slavery,” in which we have given our word of honor not to engage. The questions are whether we want to concur in the principle that helpless peoples should be without any protections imposed by the moral inhibitions of their conquerors; what the eventual effect of such inhuman policies will have on our own minds and on the prestige of democracy anywhere on earth; whether two wrongs make a right, or whether only might makes right.

It was opposition to the latter concept which furnished the moral support for our war, and I do not see how the Allies can re-educate Germans against what they practice themselves.

The manner of collecting reparations in kind also demands consideration both of its justice and its results. The Soviets may take from Germany any machinery in their zone which they adjudge unnecessary for peacetime production. In addition, the Western Allies have agreed to exchange from their zones 15 percent of existing machinery against deliveries of food, etc., from the Russian zone, and deliver 10 percent outright, subject only to judgment of what is necessary to maintain a subsistence living standard.

This will inevitably mean the accelerated disintegration of the entire European economy with serious repercussions upon our own. It also will have radical social results.

Payments in kind were successfully collected from the defeated nations after the last war. But they were assessed against the enemy states, which devised their own means of compensating for and delivering them.

Stripping German industries by the present method does not collect reparations from the German state or people. It amounts to the forcible expropriation of a certain class.

I cannot understand the mentality of the Churchill or Attlee governments, or our own, in agreeing to what is, actually, a form or degree of bolshevization by the military. Mr. Attlee’s Britain favors the socialization of British basic industries, with compensation to the owners in due process of law. I would not attack such a development in Germany were the impetus to come from the German people. But we are establishing the principle that a victor has the right of expropriation of private enterprises and property without adjustment, and this principle is not halting in application with German frontiers.

Though Austria has been promised “freedom and independence,” in the Russian zone she is being systematically looted of everything – machines, cattle, jewelry and household furniture – and again it is not the Austrian state which is paying reparations within a taxation scheme, but individuals, arbitrarily selected for expropriation.

The same is happening everywhere east of the Oder, and suddenly the victors are embarrassed when it is applied to the properties of their own nationals – General Motors, Ford, IT&T, or, in Yugoslavia, the copper mines of Bor, formerly owned by French stockholders. But what principle is operating that would not apply to all industries that contributed to the Axis war effort?

All in a different way, it is not only happening east of the Oder. The Western Allies do not want old machinery, but they are on a successful treasure hunt for private properties much more valuable: scientific formulae.

All this can only mean violent disintegration; the extinction of legal property rights, added to the elimination of human rights – i.e., lawlessness. It will inevitably create the social, economic and spiritual chaos favorable to seizure of power by the most ruthless individuals and parties, the moment the Allies withdraw their troops. Why, then, do we support it? Frankly, I do not know.

[NormanStewart]

Youngstown Vindicator (September 5, 1945)

ON THE RECORD –
Consequences of the Potsdam Plan (II)

By Dorothy Thompson

An argument advanced for expropriating private industrial property in Germany, by the manner of collecting reparations agreed to in Potsdam, is that the “industrialists” were Hitler’s chief support, and therefore deindustrialization by expropriation is de-Nazification.

There has been a buildup in all Allied countries of the theory that Nazism won its sole support from conservatives, and that the only opposition was from the extreme left.

This is largely propaganda. Nazism was a mass movement. Only a limited number of industrialists helped Hitler in any way to come to power. His mass strength came from the lower middle classes proletarianized by inflation and depression, and from unemployed youth. Nazism appealed to the radical dissatisfactions of the masses and to nationalism. Industrialists who supported it originally did so because they stupidly thought they could control and modify it.

The active resistance to Naziism inside Germany, which culminated in a direct attempt to overturn the regime in July 1944 comprised persons from conservative ranks through ail shades of democratic German opinion.

Conservatives opposition

Himmler hanged hundreds of active conspirators between January and October 1944. With few exceptions they were not left-wing radicals but civilized persons interested in the restoration of order and law, some of them aristocrats with names as old as German history, and all of them with a deep moral or religious sense of personal responsibility.

The liaison man of the movement on whose head Himmler placed a reward of 1,000,000 marks, Karl Goerdeler, was a vehement anti-Nazi from before the Hitler revolution until the moment when he swung from the gallows. He wrote his political views in a statement deposited abroad, and Wendell Willkie (but not the Daily Worker) would have approved it.

In Great Britain, serious work has been done among German prisoners of war, sorting them into “Nazi,” “Anti-Nazi” and “Reformable.” This has not entailed superficial questionnaires, but probings covering months of work with individuals and small groups.

What Britain learned

The researches revealed interesting things. Most of the prisoners in the earlier days of the war were Nazi. These, however, had to be classified into two groups: The unthinking, who merely parroted the slogans, and the philosophically convinced. The arguments of the latter followed a line which has had support in German mentality since Nietzsche, and was thoroughly explored and expressed in Spengler. This attitude could be summarized as follows:

Western so-called “Christian” democratic civilization is moribund. It is technologically advanced but spiritually decadent, having lost the primitive will to live of the barbaric but strong and young peoples. Whatever happens, the western democracies will not be victors. If Germany loses, only Russia will win. We and Russia, though bitter enemies, represent the only movements and states which have survival value. Europe must be unified and can only be unified by force; terror is the weapon of all revolutions and we are making the European revolution. But if we fail, Europe will nevertheless be unified by force. Our mission will descend on the Russians.

These Nazis when asked in which direction they would orient themselves, in case of defeat, answered almost without exception: To the Russians.

The anti-Nazi view

The minority of clearly conscious anti-Nazis, almost without exception, said, ‘‘We hate Nazism because it is a reign of terror destroying the roots of German and European civilization. We want the restoration of justice and law, the end of persecutions, and the revival of civilization in a free United States of Europe.”

In Italy, the radical Communists in the revolutionary underground movement, led by Ruggiero Grieco – as contrasted with the open politicals, and exponents of the Popular Front, led by Togliatti; both wings of the same party – are recruiting former Fascists to their ranks. All they must do is repent, be converted, and prepare to become instruments for the leftist revolution. The alternative is to be “liquidated.” The radical Fascists, like the radical Communists, have had training in the “technique of the coup d’etat,” and the organization of terror; they are far more mentally conditioned for a switch to some leftist revolutionism than to democracy.

Potsdam effect

Thus, if we take into consideration the attitude expressed by Nazi prisoners of war. the composition of the internal German anti-Nazi movement, and the facts in Italy, there is reason for believing that it will be Nazis who will disappear into Communist ranks to become servants of the next – and this time they think successful – European revolution.

Everything Potsdam announced for defeated Germany will contribute to this development. The national sentiment, inflamed by cutting away from the Reich a quarter of the arable land in eastern territories, German for centuries, will see hope for reunion only in a Sovietized Reich.

Deindustrialization will give the coup de grace to what is left of the middle classes. Economic chaos and misery will inflame the working masses. And the German Nazis, after a few trips to Canossa, will probably recognize that they have an occupational interest in the next revolution. After all, conspiracy has been their job!