The Continuation Of War By Other Means

 

General Otto von Stuelpnagel who ruled France for Hitler from 1940 to 1944:

"What does a provisional defeat matter to us if because of the destruction of manpower and material which we will have been able to inflict on our enemies and neighbouring territories, we have obtained a margin of economic and demographic superiority greater than before 1939? The conquest of the world will require numerous stages, but the essential is that the end of each stage brings us an economic and industrial essential greater than that of our enemies."

"With the war booty which we have accumulated, the enfeebling of two generations of the manpower, the destruction of the industries of our neighbours and that which we can save of our own, we shall be better placed to conquer in twenty-five or even fifty years than we were in 1939. The interval of twenty-five years is a limited interval, for that is the time which will be required for Russia to repair the destruction we have visited on her."

The memorandum mentioned some of the elaborate devices by which the rulers of Germany would seek to evade a Just peace;

 “We do not have to fear peace conditions analogous to those which we would have imposed because our adversaries will always be divided and disunited. Our enemies recognize already that the 1919 formula, 'Germany will pay,' lacked sense and worth. We will furnish them some brigades of workers, we will restore some art objects or out-of-date machines, and we can always say that those which we do not restore were destroyed by enemy bombardments.

We should immediately prepare as camouflage a list of such objects destroyed by Anglo-American bombs."

The basic aim of the German plan, in 1945 as in 1918, was to secure a final peace settlement, no matter how severe it may appear on the surface, or how hard on the German people, which would leave German economic power intact.  (more...)

The Continuation Of War By Other Means