Hitler must be getting a lot of quiet amusement out of the declarations of men like M. Paul Baudoin, the Vichy Foreign Minister, about the regeneration of France; for that is the last thing he will permit. At the moment he seems io be waiting and watching, as a cat watches a bird it has crippled and which it knows cannot get away. So long as M. Laval and M. Baudoin play straight into his hands, he need not worry. And that is what they are doing, just as if they imagined: that Hitler would help them in putting the stunned and betrayed French people onto their feet again. What Hitler's policy is to those who surrender has been clearly explained by himself in "Mein Kampf." There he wrote A clever conqueror will always, if possible, impose his demands on the conquered by instalments. For people that makes a voluntary surrender saps its own character; and with such a people you can calculate that none of these oppressions in detail will supply quite enough reason for it to resort once more to arms. The more such extortions are suffered without resistance, the more unjustifiable it comes to seem to people to make any ultimate stand against pressures which appear each to be new and isolated, though in fact there is perpetual recurrence of them.
There can be no doubt that Hitler is carrying out just this policy in France. At first it was an "honourable" armistice. With the French once disarmed, he began to put the screw on. Foodstuffs were requisitioned. Cattle rounded up and driven off to Germany. France was told to become an agricultural nation and to leave industry to Germany. An enormous sum was levied for the maintenance of the army of occupation, which was not an army of occupation at all but a German army engaged in war against Britain. Then followed widespread penetration into the French Empire, as witness the German and Italian influence in Dakar, and the latest Italian demands to the French in Syria, These include the use of Tripoli as a naval base and the removal of all rench planes to the Dodecanese "for lutation:" France is to be allowed to cep sufficient armed forces in Syria to police the country—no more. Surely these are "pressures which appear each to be new and isolated. though in fact there is perpetual recurrence of them." One of the most vile of all the "pressures" is to be be seen in Indo-China, where Hitler virtually traded a French colony to Japan in return for Japan's signature of the three-Power military alliance, just as he traded half Poland to Soviet Russia in return for Russian neutrality.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.