Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

162 DER FUEHRERarmed nation. Germany waged war by falling down and passivelysubmitting to the enemy's blows. Wherever French soldiers appeared,the trains stopped running, machines gathered rust and dust in emptyfactories, the coal mines were abandoned. Throughout the west ofGermany, occupied by the French, life was at a standstill, excepting inthe Cologne region, where the occupation was English; from near-byKoblenz, the Americans had previously departed, regretted by thepopulation. Among the foreign conquerors they alone had given theGerman population the feeling that understanding was still possiblebetween victor and vanquished, a return to peace without bitterness andvengeance.Poincare's France did not believe in such an understanding. Poincarefelt that Germany had not been sufficiently broken by the defeat of 1918and wanted to break her for good. Actually Germany did have a certainpower. The passive resistance to which the Cuno governmentsummoned the Ruhr and the Rhineland was an expression of power, thestandstill in western Germany was — at least in the beginning — a greatpolitical achievement. The unions gave the strike order, and everyonestruck, the industrialists included. Let the conqueror find himself with aworthless country, a dead victim. The French military authorities chasedthousands of inhabitants into the unoccupied territory. For Hitler it waspainful and humiliating that the 'great man in the South' should alsoparticipate in the pillage, sending a company of Italian engineers afterthe French troops into the Ruhr; for Italy could not live without theGerman coal from the Ruhr. England, by contrast, was not in the leastenthusiastic over the French seizure of German coal; for France hadalways bought a large part of the coal for her industry from England,and the English mines could not live without their French purchasers.Besides, England could not approve the establishment of French rulenear the mouth of the Rhine, hard by that triangle of coasts, rivermouths, seaports leading into the heart of Europe, through which onehundred and twelve years earlier Napoleon had drawn a military lineextending from Cape Finisterre in Spain to Hamburg, menacing theBritish Isles — no, it was a cardinal principle of British policy that thiscoast must never belong to a single power. English banks sup-