THE DOUBLE
CRISIS
takes the view that the United States should give up France as use–
less, or hopeless, and should adopt the policy of rebuilding Germany,
and winning the German people as allies for the war that may come,
or has perhaps already started. For them the Morgenthau Plan has
been turned upside down.
I am inclined to believe that this point of view will win out in
the United States-unless western Europe begins quickly, and in
action, the process of federation. Europe cannot recover, cannot be
strong, without the Germans and their work and their economy.
That is why the Morgenthau Plan had to be abandoned: turning
Germany into an industrial desert would have meant the slow death
of ten or twenty million Germans, which was perhaps acceptable to
the advocates of the Plan; but it would have meant also permanent
misery for the rest of Europe. There remain then only two alterna–
tives: to rebuild Germany as a national economic (and hence eventu-
ly political) unit, or to integrate the reconstruction of Germany's
economy into the revival of European economy as a whole, along
the perspective of European federation. Vengeance is not the most
reliable of political guides. The serious problem is not to punish Ger–
mans, but to put them to work for the benefit of Europe.
Malraux:
It
is always hard for a Frenchman to think of the
Geiman problem abstractly. The hatred of Germany which exists in
France is not due to the military aspect of the war. This war was
not the first with Germany, and the alternation of victory and defeat
is an old story. But don't forget that the concentration camps or,
more accurately, the extermination camps with all that they imply
in mechanized torture were not a form of warfare. More American
soldiers than French died under the fire of the German panzers, but
many less American civilians died in gas chambers. Let us also re–
member that even
if
the losses of France in the First World War
were much more numerous, the dead of the Resistance were all vol–
unteers. This time, death struck fewer, but it chose its victims.
If
we
therefore take this problem emotionally, it is perhaps not without
reason. But if my emotion requires you to look into my reasoning
with particular care, it still does not prove me wrong.
The position of the Gaullists on the German question is summed
up in a phrase: "No Fourth Reich." Why must defense against Stalin
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