Henry Morgenthau

This article deals with the politician Henry Morgenthau, for his father Henry Morgenthau senior, diplomat and entrepreneur, see Henry Morgenthau senior .

Henry Morgenthau (1947)

Henry Morgenthau junior [ ˈmɔːrgənθɔː ] (born May 11, 1891 in New York City , † February 6, 1967 in Poughkeepsie , New York ) was an American politician . From 1934 to 1945 he held the office of US Treasury Secretary .

Family, studies and professional career

Morgenthau was the son of Henry Morgenthau senior. and his wife Josephine (née Sykes). His father was the American ambassador to Constantinople (now Istanbul ) from 1913 to 1916 . He witnessed the Armenian genocide in Turkey and wrote a report that was published in the United States in 1918.

For the United States Food Administration , Morgenthau worked with the French Minister of Agriculture and brought tractors into use.

His grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Mannheim . After attending school, Henry Morgenthau jun. Architecture and Agronomy at Cornell University , but did not graduate. Instead, he devoted himself to agriculture.

On April 17, 1916 he married Elinor Joan Fatman (1892–1949), with whom he had three children. After her death, he married Marcelle Puthan Hirsch (1902–1972) on November 21, 1951, who, like him, was widowed. In the 1920s, Morgenthau took over American Agriculturist magazine and served as chairman of the New York State Agricultural Advisory Committee.

Another well-known figure in the family is Morgenthau's niece, the self-taught historian Barbara Tuchman . His son Robert M. Morgenthau was a respected attorney in Manhattan until he was 90 .

Secretary of the Treasury under Roosevelt

Morgenthau's signature on US $ banknotes

Morgenthau jun. was a close confidante and friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt . For Roosevelt, he served as a campaign advisor in 1932. In 1933 he became Secretary of State in the US Treasury Department . Like Roosevelt, Morgenthau was financially conservative; he supported Roosevelt's policies of the New Deal with conviction . The goals of his financial policy were, among other things, a balanced state budget and a deflationist policy, especially during the recession of 1937/1938. He gave up this attitude in the second quarter of 1938, when there was still no improvement in sight.

Even before the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Morgenthau tried to block German foreign balances so that they could not be used by the German war economy. From 1942 Morgenthau was able to confiscate the German assets in the USA and place German subsidiaries such as IG-Farben -Werke under American management. He also tried this in neutral countries and in South America, where Brazil and Argentina in particular were under German influence.

In January 1944, Morgenthau proposed the establishment of an office for war refugees, which should enable around 200,000 Hungarians and Romanians of the Jewish faith to be saved from murder by the National Socialists. In the same year, in his role as head of the American delegation, he opened the Bretton Woods Conference , which agreed on fixed exchange rates between currencies, a fixed gold purchase guarantee from the American central bank and the establishment of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to implement the agreement .

Morgenthau became known in Europe through the Morgenthau Plan named after him , which is based on a memorandum that became known through indiscretion in September 1944. The aim of the Morgenthau Plan was primarily to divide the former German Reich into several states after the end of the war, each of which was to be demilitarized and converted into agrarian states . US President Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected the draft after a few weeks; it never reached a concrete planning stage and was never intended for political implementation.

The Nazi propaganda used it for their perseverance slogans. In October 1945 Morgenthau published a book entitled Germany is our problem . In it he explained his plan.

Morgenthau resigned when Harry S. Truman became US President after Roosevelt's death in April 1945 . In 1945 he received the Medal for Merit , at that time the highest civilian award in the USA.

After his resignation, Morgenthau remained an active member of a group for several years that campaigned (together with other celebrities such as Eleanor Roosevelt , the former First Lady ) for a "harsh peace" with Germany.

Web links

Commons : Henry Morgenthau  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

• Literature by and about Henry Morgenthau in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Henry Morgenthau in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Henry Morgenthau in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)
• Kathrin Weber: Short biography of Henry Morgenthau . ( Memento from April 16, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) ard.de; Retrieved September 7, 2014

• Michael Marek: September 2, 1944: Morgenthau plan . Deutsche Welle calendar sheet ; Retrieved September 7, 2014
• Morgenthau Plan - Text (English)
• Wolfgang Benz: Morgenthau Plan From: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Legends - Lies - Prejudices ; Retrieved September 7, 2014

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Henry Morgenthau Sr. : Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (English) in Project Gutenberg ( currently not usually available for users from Germany )
2. ↑ Bert-Oliver Manig: 50 Years Ago: Death of the former US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. , article from February 6, 2017 in the series calendar sheet of Deutschlandfunk
3. ↑ Steven Casey: The campaign to sell a harsh peace for Germany to the American public, 1944-1948. In: History. Vol. 90, No. 297, 2005, ISSN  1468-229X , pp. 62-92.