55-Year War

Andre Cheradame 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 Andre Cheradame 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 Cheradame 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 Cheradame, 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, Andre Cheradame 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 Cheradame:

"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."

The Villain of latter-day Pan-Germanism is not Hitler, says Author Cheradame, 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 Andre Cheradame 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 Andre Cheradame, "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 Cheradame 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. Cheradame 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 Andre Cheradame 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 Andre Cheradame credits with saving Britain from invasion); jail all Fifth Columnists now.

* "Doubleday, $3.00

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