Westbrook Pegler
North Adams Transcript/December 13, 1944
New York. Let us try to recall the conduct of the French Communists in the hour of their own country’s disaster and up to the German attack on Russia. Thus reminded we should be better able to judge the clamor in favor of the Communists who have risen in the guise of patriots in France, Belgium, Italy and Greece.
I insist again that we can never trust the Communists and that we must distrust all politicians and propagandists who knowingly associate with them, whether in government or in popular movements, including the union movement and the Political Action committee of the CIO.
“Berlin Diary,” by William Shirer, an American newspaper and radio reporter, was a best seller of 1941. He came home after the blitz fiercely hating the Nazis and has now returned to Europe to write a newspaper feature called “The Propaganda Front” in which he serves as a propagandist, himself. Nowadays his detestation seems to run against Fascism only but he may just regard Fascism, or Hitlerism, as the more immediate menace and may be dealing, according to his lights, with first things first.
On Aug. 23, 1939, Shirer wrote in his diary that there was great excitement over the Russo-German agreement.
“It’s a virtual alliance, and Stalin, the supposed arch-enemy of Nazism and aggression, invites Germany to go in and clean up Poland,” he noted. “That Stalin should play such crude power politics and also play into the hands of the Nazis overwhelms the rest of us. Stalin’s step should kill world Communism. Will a French Communist who has been taught for six years to hate Nazism above all else swallow Moscow’s embracing of Hitler?”
He erred in his guess that Stalin’s action would kill world Communism but so did others.
On June 27, 1940, after France had collapsed, Shirer wrote “it seems fairly clear to me that France did not fight. The fields of France are undisturbed. The French blew up many bridges but they also Ieft many strategic ones standing. More than one French soldier I talked to thought it was downright treachery. And,” he continues, “from German and French sources, alike, I hear many stories of how the Communists had received orders from their party not to fight.”
On Aug. 5, 1940, while American Communists were committing industrial sabotage here and collaborating with Hitler because Hitler and Stalin were partners, Shirer wrote further: “A photograph in one of the papers shows French miners unloading coal at a pit. Watching over them is a helmeted German soldier with a bayonet.
“Their Moscow-dominated Communist party and their unions told them not to work when France was free. Now they must work under German bayonets.”
Rene de Chambrun Is a young French lawyer. He enjoys American citizenship because of some relationship to Lafayette. He is the son-in-law of Pierre Laval and a nephew of Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth. He is well acquainted with Franklin D. Roosevelt with whom he conferred several after France fell. De Chambrun is, or was, a rather overbearing French cub politician but, when his country went to war, he went too as a company officer. He served in the Maginot line during the phoney war and was detached for liaison work with the little British expeditionary force shortly before the blitz.
Unlike the Communists of France, de Chambrun fought his best while they were refusing either to fight or to work. In 1940, after France collapsed, de Chambrun made several clipper trips to the United States trying to promote help for his country. He also wrote a little book called “I Saw France Fall.”
I have met de Chatnbrun several times and, after the fall, heard him plead the case of France. Throughout a long talk one afternoon he revealed only hatred for the Nazis and largely blamed the Communists and the Popular Front for the disaster.
In “I Saw France Fall,” Rene recalls that when the Nazis were preaching the nobility of work and building their Siegfried line, “our soldiers might have been asked to work relentlessly night and day building huge anti-tank ditches between the North sea and Swltzerland. But it seemed that the political leaders, in war as in peace, did not mold and inspired public opinion. Hard work was not popular and they wanted votes.”
De Chambrun recalls another time in 1937 when, during the reign of the Popular Front, Maurice Thorez, the French Communist leader, with 73 seats in the Chamber, demanded an hour recess before he would cast his votes on a certain question.
Obtaining this delay, he recalls, Thorez went to the phone and called Moscow to get authority from Stalin to support the government.
Sumner Welles, the former undersecretary of state in our country, wrote recently: “The strength of the Communist party in France is unquestionably very great. In the case of the recent demand that the Communist leader, Maurice Thorez, who deserted during the war, be amnestied and permitted to return to France from Moscow, General de Gaulle has been obliged to give in.”
This traitor then returned to France and recently held a big Communist rally in Paris at which he was greeted by an American soldier from the Bronx, in uniform. Moscow had shielded this traitor for five years.
We have many such traitors here who also have received, as it were, political amnesty from the Roosevelt government. They have great power to cripple war industries, tie up our shipping, and isolate our armies in Europe in the event that the European Communists should decide to take over the continent and the United States should refuse to submit.
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