2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 195Emanuel Moresco, a former the vice-president of the Council of the
Netherlands Indies and the chair of one. of the Paris conference’s round
table meetings on the colonial question, later observed that it was some-
what curious that, contrary to the expectations, a ‘National-Socialist race
doctrine, with its implications for the treatment of coloured peoples’
was not raised at the peaceful change conference in Paris given that at
the conference much time was expended on arguing why German colo-
nial demands should be resisted.^378 Certainly, the implications of this
doctrine in regard to the colonial question had already been much
addressed and in very explicit terms in various other forums. For exam-
ple, Randolph Churchill, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph published on
January 23, 1937, stated that ‘to abandon these helpless natives to the
crude racial hatreds of men like General Goering and Dr. Goebbels with-
out their express desire would be an act of betrayal and infamy unparal-
leled in British history since the Rohilla war.’^379 In the previous month,
a letter to the Times had advised that it was ‘no good pretending that
the abominable cruelty with which Jews and Socialists have been treated
in Germany’ had not ‘damaged incalculably’ the German ‘claim to bear
rule over backward peoples.’^380 General Ritter von Epp, a former officer
in the colonial army and the former head of National Socialist Party’s
Colonial Bureau in Munich who became the chief of the successor
organisation to the Colonial League following its dissolution in January
1936, in effect acknowledged the truth of this point. He declared that
the National Socialist’s racial doctrine would not be a cause of danger
to those peoples over which Germany would exercise sovereignty should
Germany’s colonies be returned to it.^381 Epp stated the following:
(^378) Emanuel Moresco, ‘Claims to Colonies, Markets and Raw Materials,’ New
Commonwealth Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1936): 318–29, 326–28. Moresco suggested that a dis-
cussion of National Socialist Racial doctrine ‘may possibly lead to an international exchange
of views on the racial policy practised in different African mandated territories’ (ibid.). See
also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 126.
(^379) Letter to the editor, Daily Telegraph, January 23, 1937, quoted in Wood, Peaceful
Change and the Colonial Problem, 89.
(^380) Edwyn Bevan, letter to the editor, Times, December 28, 1936. See also Wood,
Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 89–90n.
(^381) Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 33.