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The Villain of latter-day Pan-Germanism is not Hitler, says Author Chéradame, but the German General Staff. When the General Staff saw that it must lose World War I it utilized the fear of Bolshevism to win an armistice. (Last week the Germans were once more "saving Europe" from Bolshevism.) But the General Staff never considered the Armistice anything more than an armistice. Kept intact through the Reichswehr, the General Staff planned to continue the war as soon as possible, first by what André Chéradame calls scientific warfare (propaganda, the war of nerves, etc.), later by armed conflict. Hitler, when he came to power, found a plan already made for him. "He is only carrying out the Pan-German idea with its logical developments."
The Dupes. "The Germans," says André Chéradame, "appear to have conquered Europe; in reality it was handed over to them. . . . Everything that has happened since has only been the result of the surrender of Czechoslovakia, an error without precedent in history on the part of the British leaders and a masterpiece of treason on the part of the French." For the surrender of the Bohemian bastion handed Mitteleuropa to Germany.
Author Chéradame specializes in political rather than social atmospheres, takes less note of the ethical void which made possible so much 20th Century diplomacy. On the social sickness of his countrymen, and its results, however, he has some unhappy things to say. Ever since World War I ended Germany has systematically plotted France's downfall, through treason in high places, through the venality of the Paris press, through espionage facilitated by France's leaders. M. Chéradame says the French leaders would not listen to him when he urged a knockout blow at Italy when World War II began. With Italy out, he thinks, the Allies could have established a Balkan front and kept Germany fighting on two fronts. Instead Weygand's Army sat in Syria, threatening not Germany but Russia. Thus the Fifth Column destroyed France and the Franco-British Alliance, lost the Balkans to Germany, which thereby extended its pincers around Russia for the next move.
To America André Chéradame says: the size of the Americas favors invasion. With Fifth Column help Germany could land an air force in the Americas and establish a base from which she could be dislodged only by a superior air force. "In order to see things as they are," says he, "Americans need a disintoxication treatment. In order to act with decisive energy, Americans must realize that they have been just as methodically deceived as were the French and English." They must get rid of pacifism, defeatism, treason, isolationism, confusion, the delusion that the end of Hitler would bring real peace.
"The only method of achieving true peace is permanently to take away from the Germans the possibility of applying their intolerable plan of enslavement." First steps: build a "huge fleet" of bombers, train a guerrilla army like Britain's Home Guard (which André Chéradame credits with saving Britain from invasion); jail all Fifth Columnists now.
* "Doubleday, $3.00