Pierre Van Paassen - Quotations From Van Paassen's Works

Quotations From Van Paassen's Works

In 1938, before the Munich Accord, Van Paassen wrote of the Western European powers' strategic assessments of Germany's likely drive for expansion in Eastern Europe and Russia, and the potential shock to the European economy if the West were to make war and destroy Germany.

"On the other hand, against the evil of Germany's collapse stood the alternative of giving Adolf Hitler, under a Four-Power accord, carte blanche to break out of his dangerous isolation by clearing himself a road through Czechoslovakia to the oil and wheat fields of Rumania, thus putting him in possession of the wherewithal to risk a war of long duration with the Soviet Union. For it is Russia, which Herr Hitler, by a stroke of the pen, has relegated to Asia, that is to provide Germany with the markets and colonies she lacks at present. In this way Germany's pressure on the Western imperialisms will be lessened, and at the same time the intolerable burden of carrying the Reich's colossal war machine will be shifted, at least partially, from the shoulders of the German people to those of the prospective colonial tribes in the Muscovite plan.

"To prevent an interimperialist European war by coming to an understanding with Nazi ambition for expansion in Eastern Europe has been the fundamental directive of England's foreign policy under Baldwin and Chamberlain. Having her eyes on the Far East, where Japan has arisen as the next historical challenger of British naval and colonial power, Britain desires above all else to have her hands free for the struggle she must wage in the Pacific. For, as England in the past has successively destroyed the naval power of Spain, Holland, Louis XIV, Napoleonic France and Imperial Germany, she must sooner or later envisage checking Japan before her spheres of influence in China and her Indian, Malay, and Australian possessions are threatened by that new and determined rival.

"England will fight, therefore, not for democracy and not in Europe if she can at all prevent it, but to safeguard her imperial interests where they are at stake... in the East.

"...It could therefore be predicted with reasonable certainty after the smoothly effected annexation of Austria that Czechoslovakia would be the next link in the chain encircling Germany to be sacrificed, and, thereafter, that Poland, Hungary, Rumania and Yugoslavia are to be similarly abandoned when Hitler judges the time opportune to take another step in easterly direction."

Earlier, Germany's January 1936 commercial contracts for the output of the Spanish and Spanish Moroccan mines had gone awry with the opposition of a newly elected government in Madrid. "Even so, the need for raw materials was pressing. Germany's war stocks were of the scantiest. Rather than forgo the unlimited supply that the mines of Iberia and the Riff offered, Hitler summoned General Sanjurjo from Lisbon (where he was living in banishment) to Berlin in March 1936, and the plot for a military insurrection against the Republic with the aid of the Fuehrer and Signor Mussolini was hatched." After Sanjurjo's death his lieutenant, General Franco, duly launched the planned war from Morocco.

But the Prime Minister of France, Léon Blum, said that "...every time we make a move to help the Spanish Republic, we are warned by Downing Street that if we become involved in war with Italy and Germany over Spain, France cannot count on British support."

Van Paassen was convinced that the British Empire's farsighted military planners and political leaders were not entirely displeased to see France's position weakened by Germany at that time, as it improved Britain's relative dominance over its ancient rival, France, in Britain's drive for worldwide hegemony. "By his intervention in Spain, Herr Hitler, moreover, rendered Britain the immense service of laying an ax to the French military hegemony in Europe (which had been a thorn in Britain's side ever since Versailles). By the creation of a third hostile frontier, he made the Quai d'Orsay so absolutely dependent on England that France lost her freedom of action entirely and was reduced to the status of a second-rate power..."

"In December 1936, Germany had the satisfaction of receiving the first shipments of iron ore from Spanish Morocco and a year later had not only the mines of the Asturias under her control, but had ordered Franco, in exchange for artillery tanks, Junker planes and ammunition, to have one million tons of ore, antimony, tin, copper and lignite in German ports by the end of 1939."

"In reality, the civil war in Spain strengthened Hitler so enormously that in the perspective of history that dolorous episode may well come to be known as the starting point of the Nazi mastery of Europe."

In 1941, Van Paassen wrote, "To many observers, amongst them a number of statesmen, the civil war in Spain at one time appeared to be nothing more significant than a bloody dispute between adherents of two equally obnoxious ideologies, Fascism and Communism. Whichever of the two contending parties came out victorious seemed, therefore, a matter of supreme indifference. Only in 1941 did it become clear that Franco's early victories in 1937 had laid the ground for Hitler's final blow to Great Britain's Mediterranean position in 1941."

At the same time he wrote, "The assumption that the Battle of the Atlantic is the pivot upon which world history turns is false. Britain as an empire stands or falls with the control of the Near East." In "To Number Our Days" published in 1964, after viewing the plight of Blacks in Atlanta and after discussing President Franklin Roosevelt sympathetically as introducing "creeping socialism" (in the context as that term was understood in 1964), he notes that he made a prediction sealed in a vault at Oglethorpe University in 1942: "My prediction ran this way:...In AD 2042 when Oglethorpe's vault is opened, there will be a socialist president in Washington. He will be a Negro!" (p. 248).