André Chéradame is a stubby, sturdy Norman scholar, now going on 70, who for half a century has been absorbed by the subject of Pan-Germanism. Since 1901, in books, pamphlets, articles and speeches, he has preached variations of his single sermon to a world that was usually bored. The sermon: In 1895 Germany set out to conquer Europe, and then the world, in a campaign which was to be completed in 1950.
Last week André Chéradame was in the U.S. to seek results from his latest book, Defense of the Americas.* The book was news, not so much for the ingenious plan of defense which Author Chéradame offered to the Americas, but for the sense it made of the political plays of Europe from 1895 to this week's invasion of Russia.
The Pan-German Plan, says Author Chéradame, is contained in a brochure, Greater Germany and Central Europe in 1950, published with the backing of the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League) in 1895. It conceived of the conquest of Europe and its exploitation by Germany. Remarkably foresighted chiefly because he took the Germans' plans seriously, André Chéradame wrote after reading this brochure, in 1901: "The inevitable war between Germany and Russia will finish this undertaking. If it is successful, Germany will annex the Baltic provinces, Esthonia, Livonia and Courland. She will set up a Polish state and a Ruthenian kingdom to which will be sent the Jews and the Slavs who will emigrate from the Greater German Empire. . . . Pan-Germany will have 86,000,000 people, and the territory subjected to its direct and exclusive commercial control will contain 131,000,000 consumers." Germany came close to ruling "from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf" in the last war, was close enough to that goal again last week once more to run afoul of Russia.
Says perspicacious Author Chéradame:
"The weak attitude of the Great Powers from 1895 on, and their failure to understand the true German designs, convinced the Berlin leaders that in the near future they could satisfy their wildest ambitions. Consequently the Pan-German scheme was extended to cover the whole world." He quotes Pan-Germanist Otto Richard Tannenberg (Greater Germany, the Work of the Twentieth Century) to prove that as early as 1911 Germany planned by 1950 to expand out of Europe and control the strategic points of the world, on land and sea, in Africa, Asia and the Americas, including all of South America south of the Tropic of Capricorn. The steps:
> "Austria-Germany begets Mitteleuropa.
> "Mitteleuropa begets Central Pan-Germany.
> "Central Pan-Germany begets European-Asiatic Pan-Germany.
> "European-Asiatic Pan-Germany begets Tri-Continental Pan-Germany.
> "Tri-Continental Pan-Germany begets world-wide German domination."