I spoke with all the emphasis I could muster and placing my fist on the table to help express my sincerity talked directly to him: “Mr. President, I think that if you give up, if you surrender, it will mean the end of France as a nation, the end of France forever unless another, outside power comes to your rescue. But Mr. President, if you go on fighting, if you refuse to surrender, even if you have to go to North Africa and base your government on Morocco, then France will live because she and her friends will win this war, however long it may take. But please believe me, Mr. President, when I say I know what the Nazis mean to do to France, and I know because I have lived for nine years in Germany as a professional observer and I know Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis, and the German people better than I know any politician, or political party, or people in the world, and I know they mean the utter destruction of France.” There was dead silence, and to my gratification everybody at the table, all of Laval’s friends, nodded in agreement with me, but M. Laval himself, grave as a judge, leaned back and with that inscrutable Moorish air of his said, “No, M. Knickerbocker, you do not understand. Hitler does not want to destroy France; Hitler only wants to destroy the Soviet Union.” That was Laval’s belief, and because this belief was shared by so many other Frenchmen, it became one of the principal reasons for the fall of France. Whatever else one may think of him, Laval has guts and is no hypocrite. He hates democracy and says so. He is out to promote the fortunes of M. Laval and admits it. He calls himself a realist; and realistically he long ago estimated the strength of France as inadequate to stand up against Germany. He learned to hate Britain during those long years when every French move to bolster their position against the doubly powerful Reich was checked by an imbecile British Foreign Office which continued to think that the balance of power required a stronger Germany and a weaker France. So Laval’s belief in the desirability of a Franco-German “understanding” was not born of defeat alone.