The War of the Reces

Henri Berenger, author of the following article, was for some time French Ambassador to the United States, having been appointed to that post on December 8, 1925. He has represented his country in many lands, and has often been a delegate to the League of Nations. Since January, 1912, he has been a member of the French Senate, representing the island of Guadeloupe.

Well-known as an author Mr. Berenger received the title of Laureate of the French Academy in 1894 and 1915. He is an officer of the Legion of Honor, and serves on a number of Senatorial commissions. He is at the present time president of the Senatorial Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Senator, ambassador, author, M. Berenger is considered one of the major French statesmen of today.

III

SOME time ago, when I was in Geneva, I had a long conversation with Dr. Goebbels, high priest of Hitlerite thought, in which I tried to find out what was going on.

And I asked Dr. Goebbels; “What is the whole problem? Why are these savageries committed, and why is a section of the German nation segregated. Why the segregation that you have given to Hitlerite Germany itself? I cannot see why you as a statesman should do such things.”

“There are two questions here: there is the question of proportion and there is the question of blood,” Dr. Goebbels answered. “As for proportion: there was in Berlin and most other large German cities a Jewish proportion of from forty to fifty per cent, in the liberal professions. Now, in the whole country there are 62,000,000 Germans and only 600,000 Jews. Thus, one per cent, of the population occupied fifty per cent, of the professions. This situation could not last.”

“But, tell me, have you applied the same system to the Swabians, the Saxons, the Bavarians, the Wurtemburgers, the Prussians, the East Prussians?” I asked him. “Do you class them, not according to their talent or their personality, but according to the proportion of population, and do you believe that, in the so-called liberal professions, there must also be a percentage according to origin? Have you done that for the Swabians? And for your own stock–I don’t know from what part of Germany you come–has that been done?”

Dr. Goebbels looked at me for a moment and replied, “But, Mr. Ambassador, that is not the same thing. The Swabians, the Wurtemburgers, the Bavarians, are all Aryans, while the Jews are not Aryans.”

“Ah, but I should like you to tell me who are the Aryans. Just what is an Aryan? This question is of interest to me, because I studied ethnography in my youth, and I would like very much to know the exact definition of the word.”

“Mr. Ambassador,” said Dr. Goebbels, “I can tell you who are non-Aryans. The Jews are non-Aryans.”

QUESTION OF BLOOD

The customary diplomatic courtesy made it difficult for me to keep up this conversation. I found myself face to face with an obvious obstinacy, the same obstinacy that dominates the whole policy of Germany and of the national socialist party.

“You understand, there is also the question of blood,” Dr. Goebbels told me. “An Aryan has entirely different blood from a Jew, and the moment you have Aryan grandfathers and grandmothers on both sides, you are an Aryan. But if your father and grandfather was a Jew, you are no longer Aryan.”

We had returned to the blood question and it is necessary for us to discuss it here.

From whence had the Germans taken this conception of “Aryanism?” It had been unknown to the French. We did not grow up, whoever we are, Catholics, Protestants, Free-thinkers, Jews, with this fixed idea that there is one elected race called “Aryan” and that all the other races are secondary and contemptible. How could such a theory have been born, and grown up, and become are obsession, a dominating factor in the German nation? That is the most important question in modern Europe.

They tell us that they took the idea from a French diplomat and philosopher, a sociologist named Arthur de Gobineau.

Count Arthur de Gobineau, around the middle of the last century, was in fact a secretary of embassy who later became minister toward the end of his career, and who retired after having achieved that distinction. He was a valuable man who had served his country well. That was his profession. But his hobby, his real love, was ethnography.

He devoted long years, long evenings, whole nights, to the writing of two thick 500-page volumes which he called the “Essay on the Inequality of Races.”

“GOBINISM” GERMAN RELIGION

The Germans snatched up these two volumes. I had read them myself in my youth, but I was not particularly impressed. When I was told that they were the religion of the national socialists. I read them once more, and I discovered the reason why the Germans transformed “Gobinism” into a real religion.

Gobineau wanted to prove that there are races. That fact is self-evident. But, he continued, these races are unequal and, in this inequality, the white race reigns supreme above all the others; and, in this very white race, a single offshoot, coming from India thousands of years ago, became in the north, “Aryan” branch, which predominated. And these are the masters of the world, these are the men who must one day establish hegemony and order in the universe. That is, I believe, without deformation, the theory of Count Gobineau.

The Germans seized upon it. They said, it is demonstrated by a Frenchman that the Germans constitute the superior race, the chosen people, and that the Germans must extend their domination over all other races and must bring forward the reign of the superman.

Yes. A little of Gobineau’s science can make the gullible German believe that. But a great deal of Gobineau’s science could make them believe the exact opposite, for, if they wish to read his book thoroughly, they will find, in chapter four of book five, on page 387 of the second volume, in a style which I dare not translate for you but which I prefer to condense, the theory that the Germans of today are not the real Germans who once occupied Germany. The ancient Germans were driven out during the Middle Ages by the invading Huns, Teutons, Celts and Wends, and these four victorious tribes drove the Germans from Germany, pushing them northward. Thus, it is in Scandinavia that, according to Gobineau, one can find the real “Aryans,” and he calls the modern Germans hybrid foreigners.

Besides, he was always nice to the Jews. His was a confused mind. He went frequently from one extreme to another. In certain parts of his book he speaks of the eastern Jews and describes them as a mixed race with Negro blood in their veins; they are not a superior race, he says. But, on other pages, speaking of the Semites, from which stock the Jews come, Gobineau demonstrates that the most “Aryan” blood that exists today, or at the moment he wrote, ran in Semitic veins, because they lived in the central part of Asia.

These are the ideas that the Germans have snatched up, distorting them as they alone know how to do.

I tried to find something explaining the theory of blood purity, since the Hitlerite laws specify, in each of their articles, that it is because one is “non-Aryan” that one must be persecuted and even excluded from the community. I tried to discover it somewhere in one of Hitler’s books, somewhere in Mein Kampf. Hitler, as a great Jews and the Jewish press, conceived a demagogic hatred for the Jews. He became anti-Semitic as a consequence of this dislike. But this is not an explanation of “Aryan” blood. In other words, I found none there.

Thus, Hitlerism, if it is really sincere, is built upon the most negative and uncertain of ethnographic hypotheses.