JACQUES PAUWELS—Ever since the epoch of the French Revolution, the noble (and conservative) elite had never dissimulated its antipathy towards the idea of liberty and progress for the benefit of the masses. The haute bourgeoisie was liberal by conviction and therefore partial to the concepts of liberty and progress, in theory for everybody, but in reality for itself; it detested the idea of democracy, which it perceived not as an ideal but a nightmare, the rule by the stupid and cruel “masses.”
-
-
JACQUES PAUWELS—A war against the Soviet Union was wanted by the industrialists, bankers, large landowners and other members of Germany’s upper class, the “elite” of the land. That was one of the reasons, and arguably the paramount reason, why they had enabled the coming to power of Hitler, a politician of whom it was widely known that he considered the destruction of the Soviet Union as the great task entrusted to him by providence. Hitler’s so-called “seizure of power”(Machtergreifung) was in reality a “transfer of power,” and this transfer was orchestrated, logically enough, by those who, behind the democratic façade of Weimer Germany, ensconced in the army, judiciary, state bureaucracy, diplomacy, and so forth, wielded power, namely the upper-class.
-
JACQUES PAUWELS—In Strasbourg, the local bourgeoisie, overwhelmingly German-speaking, as well as the local social-democratic leaders, were horrified and decided that they preferred to be “French rather than red.” They appealed to the French army to “rush to Strasbourg as soon as possible” in order to put and end to “red rule” in the city. French troops entered Strasbourg a few days earlier than planned, namely on November 22, overthrew the soviet and cancelled all the democratic measures it had fathered.
-
JACQUES PAUWELS—The political motivation for Dieppe would explain why the lambs that were led to the slaughter were not American or British, but Canadian. Indeed, the Canadians constituted the perfect cannon fodder for this enterprise, because their political and military leaders did not belong to the exclusive club of the British-American top command who planned the operation, and who would obviously have been reluctant to sacrifice their own men. Our hypothesis likewise explains why the British were also involved, but in much smaller numbers, and why the Americans sent only a token force.
-
JACQUES PAUWELS—The Great War of 1914-1918 had ended with a clear and unequivocal armistice, namely in the form of an unconditional German surrender. The capitulation was signed in the headquarters of Marshal Foch in the village of Rethondes, near Compiègne, on November 11 shortly after 5 a.m., and the guns fell silent on that same morning at 11. The Second World War, on the other hand, was to grind to a halt, in Europe at least, amidst intrigue and confusion, so that even today there are many misconceptions regarding the time and place of the German capitulation. The Second World War was to end in the European theatre not with one, but with an entire string of German capitulations, with a veritable orgy of surrenders, and even after the signings it sometimes took quite some time before the hostilities were terminated.
