LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DEPOPULATING FRANCE
SiR,—Mr. David Thomson, in his impressive article, " The Eight Frances," which appeared in last week's Spectator, casually refers to Hitler's intention in detaining r,800,000 French soldiers—" the flower of France's manhood "—as prisoners of war in Germany. Hitler, Mr. Thomson says, is not " in the slightest hurry to return the prisoners—except small batches of middle-aged men—for this forced segregation lowers France's birth-rate for a generation to come." I wish that Mr. Thomson had made more of this point, for it is a most important part of Hitler's policy. Hermann Rauschning, in Hitler Speaks (page 140) reports a conversation he had with the Fiihrer which makes the fact perfectly plain. Here is what Hitler said : " We are obliged to depopulate as part of our mission of pre- serving the German population. We shall have to develop a technique of depopulation. If you ask me what I mean by depopulation, I mean the removal of entire racial units. And that is what I intend to carry out—that, roughly, is my task.
• Nature is cruel, therefore we, too, must be cruel. If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity for the spilling of precious German blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin! And by ' remove ' I don't neces- sarily mean destroy ; I shall simply take systematic measures to damn their natural fertility. For example, I shall keep their men and women separated for years. Do you remember the falling birth-rate of the world-war? Why should we not do quite consciously and through a number of years what was at that time merely the inevitable consequence of the long war? There are many ways, systematic and comparatively painless, or at any rate bloodless, of causing undesirable races to die out."
Such was Hitler's intention, as announced to, and reported by, Herr Rauschning. If it is said that we have only Herr Rauschning's word for it that these were Hitler's words, we can reply that they are substantially in agreement with what appears in Mein Karnpf, where the Fiihrer not only maintains that Germany's safety tran- scends all other considerations, but makes plain his belief that the French are an " inferior " race. His policy of extermination in Poland supports the statement made by Rauschning. There he pro- poses to create an " inferior " race by the simple policy of killing educated men and enslaving the rest. Having destroyed the intelli- gence of Poland, he can then say to the rest of the world, " Is this illiterate population fit to be entrusted with its own government?" Marshal Petain, that pitiful numskull, whose career demonstrates once again that the conceit of a very stupid man is more dangerous to his neighbours than the conceit of a clever man wailed to heaven when he surrendered his country to the Boche, that one cause of French defeat was " too few babies." If he had confined the causes to the single and insurmountable trouble, the incompetence of the French generals, he would hat been asserting a simple fact. How these men ever came to be credited with skill in arms is a thing that no one now can understand. But even if France's defeat were in part due to " too few babies," how, one may well wonder, does Marshal Petain, himself a childless man, imagine that her plight is to be improved when 1,800,000 of her soldiers, " the flower of France's manhood," are held in durance, deliberately separated from their countrymen? Perhaps Hitler hopes that the French women will be fertilised by Germans, though his queer ideas on racial purity may cause him uneasiness on that subject. Whether that be so or not, the plain and irrefutable fact remains that he is de- liberately reducing the French population, and that this reduction is being accomplished by the aid of the Vichy Government and that
Hun, Admiral Darlan.—Yours faithfully, Sr. JOHN ERVINE. Honey Ditches, Seaton, Devon.
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