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Already Hitler has reincorporated many pieces of the Holy Roman Empire into his Greater Germany. Last week he officially annexed Eupen and Malmédy from Belgium. Other pieces still remain really or nominally outside: The Netherlands (including Belgium), Switzerland, Metz, Toul, Verdun and lower Alsace in France, northern Italy. What plan Hitler has for these territories is not yet clear, but two of his plans are clear: 1) Britain is to be eliminated as a continental power; 2) France is to be reduced to a second-or third-rate power, existing by the grace of the Reich. What may await France and Britain at Munster, if they lose, was forecast by the Deutsche Wehr: "Total victory entails the total destruction of the defeated state, its complete and final blotting out from the pages of history."
Separate Peace? The German people's irreconcilable mortal enemy is and remains France. It does not matter who ruled or will rule in France. . . . The final goal of her foreign-policy activity would always be an effort to hold the Rhine frontier and to guarantee this stream by means of a disintegrated and dismembered Germany.—Mein Kampf.
Remembering that a dismembered Germany has been France's No. 1 war aim, Frenchmen last week smiled wryly as a barrage of radiorations began arriving from Germany, all hinting at offers of a separate peace. French morale was still good. Nonetheless, there were indications that France might already have been offered peace terms. Low-flying planes dropped leaflets on Paris assuring Parisians they need not be afraid, that "Paris will be spared for the glory of Adolf Hitler."
And there were elements in France that might work for a separate peace. Last week François Charles-Roux, French Ambassador to the Vatican and an intimate of the Pope, replaced anti-German, collective-securitist Alexis Léger as Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There is in France a school of political thought, led by Pierre Etienne Flandin, which argues that with its stagnant population France had better submit to German hegemony, abandon its overseas empire, become self-contained, be let alone.
This week when the Belgian Army laid down its arms, not the least reason for their doing so was the fact that two million civilians trapped in Flanders were nearly all Belgians. Although Premier Reynaud told his countrymen that France would fight on, what if two million French civilians should become similarly endangered?
But few realists believed that even a magnanimous peace would be more than a Munich for France. In Hitler's Europe a mighty Germany must be surrounded by satellites. Said Adolf Hitler to Hermann Rauschning in 1934:
"In addition to the Greater Germany resting on Austria, Czecho-Slovakia and western Poland, there "will be an alliance of . . . vassal States with no Army, no separate policy, no separate economy. . . . I shall have a western union of Holland, Flanders and northern France and a northern union of Denmark, Sweden and Norway."