The PanGerman Plot Unmasked: Berlin's formidable peace-trap of "the drawn war"Chéradame, André
History
The PanGerman Plot Unmasked: Berlin's formidable peace-trap of "the drawn war"
Chéradame, André
Europe -- Politics and government -- 1871-1918; Pangermanism; World War, 1914-1918
These various declarations, made on high authority enable us to affirm,
that on the whole the annexations which the Pangermans intended to make
in the West would have extended in France more or less to a line drawn
from the South of Belfort to the mouth of the Somme, that is, so far
as concerns France, they would comprise a total area of 50,271 square
kilometres, which, before the war, held 5,768,000 inhabitants.
Further, as regards France, the intended annexations were, according to
Pangerman conceptions, to have had a double effect.
1º. By taking over the richest industrial and mining French regions,
Germany would secure an enormous booty.
2º. Deprived of her most productive departments, which bear the main
burden of taxes, and which hold mining elements indispensable to economic
life, France would have been maimed and reduced to a state from which it
would have been a sheer impossibility for her to recover or ever again to
become a power capable of thwarting in any shape whatsoever the future
determinations of Germany.
A few figures will enable us to verify this forecast. At the beginning
of 1916 the Germans were holding 138,000 hectares of the coal basin of
the department of the _Nord_, being 41% of the total superficies worked
in France (337,000 hectares), or about three-fourths of the total French
production. The Germans also occupied 63,000 hectares of the iron-ore
basin of Lorraine which represents 75% of the superficies of all the iron
beds worked in France (83,000 hectares), and nine-tenths of the total
production. It is clear, that were such a state of things to continue,
economic and therefore national life would be made radically impossible
in France, shorn of her vital organs. In reality France would be in a
position of entire dependence on Germany in accordance with the Pangerman
schemes for the future.
It is still necessary to mention that in the territories occupied by
Germany in the West, as well as everywhere else, the measures already
taken by the Germans in 1916 were not merely measures of military
defence, but measures for the organization and permanent possession of
the said territories. These measures to ensure permanent possession may
be classed in the following categories:
_Measures of terrorism_ applied in Prussian fashion so as to bring into
subjection all refractory elements.
_Measures of division_, such as in Belgium, the Germans take in order
to rouse, by all possible means, opposition between the Flemish and the
Walloons for the purpose of neutralizing the one by the other.
_Measures of strict and regular administration_ in order, by the bait
of some external or economic advantages, to accustom to the German yoke
those elements of the population whose moral resistance, in the opinion
of Berlin, can be most easily broken.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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