During the war, the Nazis stole a fabulous number of freight cars from Western Europe. Those nations asked us to replace some 90,000 of them, urgently needed to keep the lifeblood moving through those ravaged areas. Meanwhile, by way of helping themselves according to our advice, they took it upon themselves to take over some German cars as partial restitution. Our State Department acted quickly and characteristically. It ordered the non-German countries of Europe to return all seized freight cars to Germany and promised the delivery of 26,000 new freight cars under the plan—all of them to Western Germany.
That, then, is the strange picture. The Ruhr is to be rebuilt at the expense of the industrial development of our allies. For they will be forced, under the plan, to trade with the Ruhr industries; they will be forced again into economic subjection to the Ruhr.
And who will run the Ruhr? American money will pay the way, of course, but many of the familiar faces will be behind their old desks. For many of the Nazi industrialists and bankers have been asked to take over their old jobs for the State Department. The Herter Committee, which studied the plan for Congress, formally pleaded for a still greater "softening" of denazification procedures so as to give us the experienced personnel. Experienced in what? Experienced in making money? Yes. Experienced in making guns? Yes. Experienced in subduing a continent? Yes, indeed. And for all these things, these are perhaps our men. For not only do our monopolists see the Ruhr as the key to economic domination, but it is also a convenient arsenal for our bases, which even now surround the Soviet Union.
The nations of Western Europe are grimly aware of all these implications. But even the nations of Western Europe, the nations of the plan, are aware and resentful of the economic program implied by American policy in the Ruhr. These nations, meeting in London, have unanimously protested America's rebuilding of their ancient master, the master they thought they had overthrown. But the U.S., since it holds the purse strings, calls the turn, and no one doubts that present American plans will go through over the pleas of France, England, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
The State Department insists on building up a strongly industrialized Ruhr and refuses to internationalize that powerhouse. As on all other counts, the opinions, estimates, and proposals of the allegedly cooperating nations of the plan will be filed in the waste baskets of our State Department.
It is hard to imagine the extraordinary capacity for self-deception required to believe that this plan for a new Reich to dominate Europe is really a formula to bolster peace and democracy in the world. Those who fool themselves so far may find it easy to swallow the $250,000,000 we plan to give the bloody dictatorship of Salazar in Portugal, which kept profitably neutral throughout the war. They may then go on to accept the inevitability of our including Franco's Spain as still another...
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