by Savitri Devi
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But the two forms of robbery that have surely been the most bitterly resented by the Germans ever since the beginning of the Occupation and that, to this day, every German cannot but take as open acts of hostility, are the dismantling of the factories and the large-scale deforestation of the country.
One must know something of the German labourer’s high standard of technical education and of his genuine interest and pride in his daily work, to realise what an amount of bitterness the Allies are storing against themselves in the hearts of millions of Germans, through that mean policy of thieves which they have pursued since 1945, and are still pursuing, in all the Zones. Even if their orders to remove piece by piece, or to destroy, thousands and thousands of valuable machines, were actuated by the sole desire for “security,” i.e., by the sole fear of seeing a powerful, warrior-like Germany rise again in amazingly short a time out of the utter ruin of today, still I would characterise their policy as criminal. For what right have they, anyhow, to try to keep down a great nation forever, just because it has more potentialities for military efficiency than they? Who are they, that they alone in the world should be armed and ready for war, and others, by no means their inferiors, should yield to them? But that is not even the case. The attitude of the victors, in this matter of plunder, as in the others, is inspired by “a policy of economic competition,”120 to quote the words of another German paper, written precisely in connection with the dismantling of a factory. This is so true that not merely armament factories, but many others, of which the production is entirely affected to peaceful aims—such as the firm Hellige, Morat, and Company of Freiburg, specializing in manufacturing medical and physiological instruments—were also dismantled.
On the other hand, the German people—now powerless to act, but not powerless to think and feel—and especially the workmen attached to the factories that are to be dismantled, witness the proceedings with healthy, concentrated bitterness. Over and over again, cases have occurred in which the workmen appointed to take part in the dismantling categorically refused to pull down, piece by piece, the machines that had been in their hands, for so long, instruments of prosperity. Recently—in January, 1949—the 11,000 workmen of the Bochumer Verein factory (which the British insisted on dismantling) sent a telegram to the President of the USA, Mr. Truman, stating that “they would not take part in the destruction of their instruments of labour, even under military pressure.” The further wording of the telegram is full of significance: “One cannot ask us to demolish our own house, and to give bricks and old iron to feed our increasing population. No true German will dirty his fingers by contributing to the destruction of our factory.”121
Proud and sensible words, that were not “nothing but words”; for, a week or so later, began before the British Military tribunal of Bochum, the trial of several workmen of the Sulzbach concern, from Essen, who had refused to take part in the dismantling of the Bochumer Verein factory.122
One can imagine the feelings of these men, tried for not agreeing to lend a hand to the systematic ruin of their country’s economy imposed, under threat of arms, by rapacious foreign capitalists. As millions of workmen all over Germany, they must have looked back, within their hearts, to those glorious days in which they acclaimed the Führer—the maker of Germany’s prosperity—and in which the Führer held out his hand to them, individually, and to their happy children. And if, among them, several had not, in those days, wholeheartedly supported the National Socialist New Order; if, during the war, some had allowed themselves to be deceived by anti-Nazi propaganda, and had expected out of Democracy some greater good than that which our loving Hitler could give them, how they must have regretted their folly!
The destruction of Germany’s splendid forests is something even more tragic than the dismantling of her factories. However precious might be highly perfected machines, living trees are still more so. And they—the outcome of Nature’s patient fecundity, not of man’s skill—cannot be replaced in a couple of years even with the help of any amount of money. I have, years ago, expressed in another book what I think of deforestation in itself, apart from any utilitarian consideration from man’s point of view.123 To the extent one does not resort to it extremely cautiously and sparingly (replacing every tree one fells) and then too, only when one is absolutely compelled to, by some vital necessity, to that extent, I say, I look upon it—whenever and wherever it be—as a crime against the divine beauty and majesty of Nature. Here, in Germany, now, it takes on a still more sinister character. It is not merely the repetition of the stupid sacrilege which countless generations of men have committed every time they have cut down trees for some petty human purpose “not worth it”; for some temporary convenience or satisfaction, without realising what they were doing. It is a deliberate sacrilege, coupled with inexcusable robbery, on a scale that one has seldom seen; a double insult to Nature Herself and to the German people who, in the West at least—and more so after that admirable National Socialist education which the younger ones have received—are perhaps the nation that understands and loves Nature the best; the nation among which the old Aryan cult of the Tree has left the strongest roots.
One needs no tedious statistics to become convinced of the enormity of the disaster. One only has to take a trip through the Black Forest—to travel, for instance, from Baden-Baden down to Titisee—and to use one’s own eyes. In a number of places, along the main road, one beholds, right and left, for miles and miles, nothing but empty expanses in which appear stumps of felled trees—thousands of them. That is what the French call “des coupes à blanc”124—cutting down of a portion of forest until there is not one tree left; until the once thick, living patch of vegetation is reduced to a blank. In any of those “coupes à blanc” one can walk for hours without seeing a standing tree. And it is not true that such devastation can only be found on the border of the main road going south. There are also plenty of “blanks” in the interior of the Black Forest. The contrast with the luxuriant green portions that have not yet been touched, makes the sight of the cut down areas even more heartrending.
One recalls the first verse of a fairly well-known French poem: “Les Turcs ont passe la; tout est ruine et deuil.”125 But no; here it is not the Turks; it is only the French themselves—and the British in the British Zone, where the great sacred forest, the Hartz, has suffered no less than the Black Forest in Southwest Germany; and the Americans, and the Russians, who have wrought equal devastation all over the country, from East Prussia, now a desert, down to the ruined cities of central Germany and of the Danubian region. The Turks would not have done the job so thoroughly.
And it is not only the Black Forest and the Hartz, and the forests of North Germany. Wherever one goes, one is bound to see hilltops on which nothing is left of the once glorious green mantle of living woods. The extensive patches of forest that can still be seen, and that one imagines prolonged over the horrid “blanks,” help one to realise (if one has not actually seen it) how beautiful Germany was before the disaster of 1945. The Allies are simply disfiguring the land for the sake of their petty profits; perhaps also for the pleasure of disfiguring it—they are mean enough for that.
Wherever one goes, one is bound to see, also, travelling along the railway lines, or waiting in the stations to move on behind another engine, wagons and wagons of wood; whole tree-trunks, heaped upon one another horizontally, or relatively small pieces of wood placed vertically one by the side of the other. And it is not once, it is not twice, it is not “often”; it is every day, and at every time of the day or night. It looks as though the trees of Germany—those trees that the German people love so much and of which they were so proud—are all being deliberately cut down and carried away.
The German people can say nothing and can do nothing about it, as much as the daily sight of that systematic plunder and ruin of their country fills them with legitimate indignation. They only know that they have lost the war, and are now disarmed, and cannot rearm
themselves as long as the Occupying Powers hold the land. They have lost the war, not through their own fault—most of them have been loyal and enduring, and have done their duty well—but through the fault of the anti-Nazi traitors who helped the coalesced forces of East and West to crush the National Socialist State. And because they are vanquished they must suffer, they, and the very land itself. Vae victis!126
And yet . . . as one walks about in those devastated, those massacred forest areas—those “blanks” where not a tree is left standing—one sees that there are already green leaves appearing on the sides of many of the stumps; new, tender shoots, springing up from between the roots; new trees growing between the old ones in the bright sunshine, from nowhere—from the bosom of the invincible earth.
One remembers the fresh green grass, or the creepers with pink and white flowers that one sees so often in the cracks of burnt and blasted walls, in the ruins of all the German towns. Here, as there, life continues. No Occupying Power can kill it. Here, as there, patient Nature reasserts herself, after the work of death wrought by the little men, agents of the death forces. And in the German people themselves, too, the will to live—which is the beginning of life—and the will to conquer—which is the beginning of victory—bursts forth already, in the midst of the bitterness of defeat.
Under a show of resignation; under apparent adhesion to the professed principles of the victors; under de-Nazification reluctantly and only outwardly accepted for practical purposes, the soul of Hitler’s people watches and waits!
“We are waiting for the spark,” said to me, in October 1948, one of the sincerest National Socialists I know in Saarland.
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That readiness, that expectation, that impatience under the yoke, was manifested recently in the unanimous reaction of the Germans against the Ruhr Statute—the latest device to secure for the Occupying Powers the maximum opportunity of permanent plunder, and to keep Germany down forever.
What does the Ruhr Statute amount to? All Germans know, only too well. Yet, it is perhaps worthwhile repeating it here, for those readers of the far-flung English-speaking world, if any, who might have forgotten it by the time this book sees the light—if ever it does. It was decided by the Western Allies, in December 1948, in London, that
an international body in which the Germans, when they once more have a Government, will be represented by three delegates, as also France, the USA, Great Britain, and the Benelux, will supervise the distribution of coal, coke, and steel, of which a part will be used for home consumption while the rest will be exported. That body . . . will have, in addition, the right to examine the commercial utilisation of these products. And when the Occupation ends, it will possibly take over the power lying at present with the military governors, in connection with the eviction of former Nazis, the interdiction to reconstitute cartels, and the management of the industries.127
Side by side with the international authority, of which the function is essentially economic, will be set up an Allied body of “military security,” “which will see to it that the disarmament and demilitarisation (of Germany) are maintained. It will be the duty of that body to enforce the interdictions and limitations that are to be imposed upon German industry.”128 The Office of Military Security is to be constituted in a near future, probably at Koblenz or at Bad Ems. The International Committee for the Ruhr will only really come into function after the end of the Military Occupation.
One has no need to be a politician to see at once that this new dictate is anything but “a solution that allows the reconstruction of Germany while giving legitimate guarantees to her neighbours.”129 One has even no need to be more than moderately intelligent to see that it is no step towards a “peaceful and friendly” collaboration between the countries of Western Europe. It is an outrageous document, sealing (in the minds of the Allies, forever) the relegation of Germany not merely to the rank of a third-rate power, but to that of an actual colony of the Western Democracies; to that of a State in which the very standard of life of the people would no longer depend upon their own efficiency or their own social laws, but rather “upon the vote of the competitors of the German economy.”130
Three main features of the Ruhr Statute cannot but strike one’s attention: first, it limits the production of coal and steel in the main German industrial area and controls the use to which these goods are to be put at home and abroad; second, through the Office of Military Security, it aims at suppressing every possibility of a new rise of the National Socialist spirit, i.e., at keeping Germany, politically also, under control; and third, both these outrages to the German nation are to be made permanent. (At least that is what the Allies want.) To us, the first feature constitutes no less than the official sanction of organised plunder on behalf of the Western victors of 1945; the second and the third are attempts to avoid the possibility of the plunder being one day put to an end.
Not only is the production of steel in the Ruhr never to exceed 10.7 million tons a year, but, in addition to that, according to article 14 of the Ruhr Statute (to take only one instance), the new international authority is to distribute among the different purchasing countries the output of about 7,000 German enterprises.
The Ruhr furnishes the raw material for 80 percent of German exports. The new international authority is given the power not merely to fix the minimum quantities of coal, coke, and steel to be absorbed by German industry, but also to determine the nature of Germany’s exports, which allows it, for example, as regards steel, to eliminate at one stroke all German exportation of dentistry appliances, a rich line that would bring in currency. Provided they agree, the representatives of the Western powers are therefore practically in a position to strangle any line of German exports that would risk becoming a danger to their own economy. Along with this power of control over the German exports, the international authority can also stop arbitrarily all commercial transactions between Germany and the Scandinavian countries, Spain, Italy, and the Southeast of Europe. The Western Allies can therefore also use the Ruhr exports as a means of very effective pressure in matters of foreign politics.131
And, in order to make that total and permanent dependence still more secure, the German concerns would have to send periodical accounts of their activity to the international authority, while the representatives of the latter would have free access to all the factories!
If that is not carefully planned plunder, then I ask: What is?
Of course—as always, with Western Democrats—it is plunder under the cover of some excuse. (They have not even the guts to be thieves frankly and boldly). The excuse is the same old one—that wearisome, sickening one that has saturated Allied speeches, Allied discussions, and the European press, ever since the end of the First World War: France’s security. Strangle, shackle, weaken, keep down the naturally strong—the healthy, the pure-blooded, the martial, the fit to live and fit to rule—so that those born tired might at last feel “secure”; stifle the representatives of a more virile humanity, so that a few quaint flowers of decadence might bloom at ease, amidst the many weeds of mediocrity, in the thick and soft manure of undisturbed corruption! That is the whole spirit, the whole justification of Democracy, and the secret of its appeal both to the degenerate Aryans of the West and to so many “intellectuals” of the inferior races who, all over the world, re-chew and re-swallow with delight, like docile camels, their equalitarian teachings and their anti-Nazi slogans! That is also the real meaning of French security in this connection; that and nothing else.132
But security is only an excuse. The true motive behind the Ruhr Statute in 1949, is the self-same one which lay behind the Occupation of the Ruhr by the French in 1923—plunder; in Democratic language, “business.” The Democrats say so themselves, when they leave off talking propaganda. The Parisian bulletin on economic affairs, L’Echo de la Finance, puts it indeed very nicely: “It is especially our former enemies’ industrial possibilities that make us feel uneasy. If tomorrow the German steel indus
try were to oust us from the European market, it would no longer be possible for us to secure for ourselves the currency which, however, we absolutely need. It is not in the military field but in the field of economy that we shall have, henceforth, to measure our strength with our enemies of yesterday.”133 This is spoken clearly enough. It is addressed to businessmen, not to sentimental fools.
Is it any wonder if a German paper calls the Ruhr Statute, “a realisation of the Monnet plan which provides for a transplantation of the steel production from the Ruhr into Lorraine,”134 and, if even a Social-Democratic paper such as the Telegraf, from Berlin, writes that “the control foreseen for the Ruhr will discourage and discredit the Democratic forces of Germany, and will again render ‘radical’ the broad layers of the German people”?135 Is it any wonder that the nefarious plot was denounced officially by the directing Committee of the Social-Democratic Party itself as a “temporary solution for the abolition of which” that party will “fight with all its strength”?
