Morgenthau plan

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The Morgenthau Plan of August 1944 was a draft initiated by the then US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to convert Germany into an agricultural state after the foreseeable victory of the Allies in World War II . In the long term, this should prevent Germany from waging another war of aggression .

Proposed program of the plan (left) and the later book Morgenthaus Germany is our problem

The memorandum was drawn up in the US Treasury Department in August 1944 and published in the US by indiscretion on September 21, 1944. 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 National Socialist propaganda promptly picked up on the publication, presented the Morgenthaus plan as one of so-called World Jewry for the “ enslavement ” of the Germans and thus emphasized their slogans for perseverance. In right-wing extremist historical revisionism , the draft, meaningless for the later occupation policy of the Allies, continues to be used for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories because of the initiator's Jewish origin and government affiliation, analogous to National Socialist propaganda (" Morgenthau legend ").

Morgenthau resigned from office in April 1945 due to political differences with the new President Harry S. Truman , but remained active as a member of a group which, together with other celebrities such as Eleanor Roosevelt , the former First Lady , for a "harsh peace" started with Germany. In October 1945 he published a book entitled Germany Is Our Problem ("Germany is our problem", published by Harper and Brothers), in which he explained his plan.

content

The draft contained the following fourteen points:

Planned new German borders according to the Morgenthau Plan
  1. Demilitarization of Germany
  2. Territorial reorganization: division of East Prussia between the Soviet Union and Poland , handover of southern Silesia to Poland, handover of the Saarland and some areas on the left bank of the Rhine between the Rhine and Moselle to France , division of Germany into two independent states in the north and south, customs union between the southern state and Austria
  3. Complete dismantling of industry in the Ruhr area , in the Rhineland and in adjacent industrial areas as well as in the area around the Kiel Canal , administration of the de - industrialized area as an international zone by the United Nations , ban on re-industrialization for the foreseeable future.
  4. Compensation and reparations from current possessions, but not future payments or leases
  5. Denazification of schools, universities, newspapers, radio and subsequent closure and rebuilding under the direction of an allied education commission
  6. Political decentralization through federalization
  7. Control of the economy by Germans without overriding responsibility for the military authorities
  8. Control of the German economy by the United Nations for the next twenty years to prevent the development of a military industry
  9. Punishment of war criminals
  10. Destruction of large estates , distribution to the peasants and change in inheritance law
  11. Ban on uniforms and military parades
  12. Prohibition for Germans to drive aircraft
  13. Withdrawal of US troops, transfer of occupation tasks to Germany's neighboring countries, while the decisive powers remain with the USA
  14. Appointment of a US high commissioner as the main political control body

Emergence

Coordination of the Allies' German policy after the Tehran Conference

At the Tehran Conference in 1943, the allied states USA , Great Britain and the Soviet Union reached a basic consensus on the division of Germany, the separation of East German territories and the disempowerment of Prussia, but they did not agree on specific details. Negotiations were also held about the dismantling, demilitarization and punishment of National Socialist perpetrators. Subsequently, various British and US American ministries each developed their own plans for the Allied policy on Germany after the war. Thereby, milder concepts competed with stricter concepts both within and between the ministries involved. The US State Department under Cordell Hull had spoken out against the forced division of Germany several times since 1942. The US War Department under Henry L. Stimson advocated a relatively short period of occupation and withdrawal after war criminals had been punished; his Civil Affairs Division wanted to leave all political decisions on the treatment of the Germans to the local military administrations of the occupation zones.

In early 1944, the British, Soviet and US Foreign Ministers formed the European Advisory Commission (EAC), which was supposed to work out the terms of surrender and an occupation statute for Germany. By the summer of 1944, officials at the US State Department had drafted two memoranda that rejected the forced division of Germany, sought its economic recovery soon, favored reparations in the form of products instead of fines and a high level of production with few Allied controls, and a comprehensive democratization of Germany.

Debate about the future of Germany in the United States

In June 1944 the US General Dwight D. Eisenhower approved the “Handbook for the Military Government in Germany”, which provided for a German central government, early reconstruction, Germany's self-sufficiency and German export surpluses for Europe. Germany should therefore keep a large part of its industry and the Germans should receive adequate food rations. The third version of this manual was published in early August.

On August 5, 1944, Morgenthau read the manual on his way to Great Britain, according to his own report. He was also familiar with the second memorandum of the Foreign Ministry. He considered both plans to be inadequate. On August 7th and 12th, he informed his interlocutors Eisenhower, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill , his Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and Finance Minister John Anderson of his concerns: Germany must permanently lose its ability to go to war, so its arms and heavy industry must be irreversibly disempowered , even after the US withdrew from Europe. This should also serve the reconstruction and economic competitiveness of Great Britain. After his return to the USA, Morgenthau formed a committee for German policy in his ministry in mid-August 1944 and informed US President Roosevelt of his criticism of Eisenhower's handbook. At a cabinet meeting on August 25, Roosevelt shared his criticism: The measures previously planned for Germany were too mild. In a letter to Stimson he wrote: The whole German nation has violated the foundations of civilization. Historians judge Roosevelt's attitude at the time as consideration for Josef Stalin's demands for reparations , British export interests and the US population during his election campaign for re-election.

At the suggestion of Stimson, Roosevelt had a cabinet committee set up to set guidelines for the Allied troops in Germany. He appointed Hull, Stimson, Morgenthau, and Harry Hopkins to committee members. On September 1, after being informed of Morgenthau's reservations, Hull initiated a new memorandum from the Foreign Ministry: According to this, a deindustrialization of Germany should only be possible by killing or deporting many Germans. Reparations are then impossible. A division of Germany was still rejected. On September 2, Harry Dexter White presented the committee with a first draft of Morgenthau's views, later called the Morgenthau Plan.

The full text is unknown; the details have become known through a self-report by Morgenthaus from 1950. The draft reacted to agreements already reached by various British and US American ministries, which provided for extensive and permanent demilitarization, but no economic agrarianization of Germany, and to plans of the Allied High Command under Eisenhower, which aimed at the disempowerment of the Nazi regime and the NSDAP focused. Morgenthau's draft was intended to initiate a discussion about which branches of industry had made Hitler's rise and war of aggression possible and how these could be removed from the control of future German elites. However, he did not want to limit this discussion to Germany, but rather use his example to develop political strategies against government crime.

Vote between Great Britain and the United States

Churchill and Roosevelt agreed at the second Québec Conference (September 11-19, 1944) an agreement on the extension of US military and economic aid ( lending and leasing law ), which generally formulated common goals such as preventing German rearmament and determined the dismantling of the armaments industries. Finally, the text of the agreement contained a sentence from the Morgenthaus draft: "This program to eliminate the war industries in the Ruhr and Saar is intended to transform Germany into a country with a predominantly agricultural and rural character." The British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the US Secretary of State Cordell Hull protested. The British cabinet also rejected the agriculturalization formula of the Québec Agreement.

The plan was made public on September 21, 1944 through a deliberate indiscretion. The public reaction was so negative that Roosevelt distanced himself. The US State Department formulated its rejection in a memorandum, referring to two of the four freedoms :

“The United States has maintained the fundamental belief that all human beings have the right to live as free individuals and to seek their own happiness since it was founded. According to the Atlantic Charter , the victor and the vanquished are equally entitled to economic prosperity. However, the proposed treatment of Germany, if it were at all feasible, would consciously deprive many millions of people of the right to freedom from want and freedom from fear. All other peoples of the world would be shaken in their trust in our principles and begin to doubt the effectiveness of our economic and political measures against the vanquished. "

Churchill too distanced himself from the ideas about Germany's economic future that he had signed in Quebec.

reception

Allies

In a book published in 1968, the US author John Morton Blum described Morgenthau's diaries and notes in the Franklin-Delano-Roosevelt Library and, with Morgenthaus’s permission and assistance, his ideas about US policy on Germany. Blum also consulted the records of US Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson from the library of Yale University New Haven, Connecticut, who dismissed "collective revenge" as "senseless and dangerous" and in a memorandum to Roosevelt dated August 25, 1944 declared:

"I also cannot agree that one of our war goals should be to keep the Germans at the subsistence level, if this means practically complete poverty."

According to Blum, he continued:

“The German people would thereby be condemned to slavery, and they could not improve their position in the world economy even with the utmost diligence. The consequences would be new tensions and resentments, which would far outweigh the immediate security benefit and also make the Nazis' guilt fall into oblivion. "

At the end of September 1944, the Morgenthau draft was dropped without the relevant committees having dealt with it. The draft therefore played no role in the actual occupation policy of the Allies in post-war Germany .

National Socialist Germany

National Socialist propaganda headed by Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels used the Morgenthau draft after it became known in September 1944 to demonize the American enemy. At the beginning of October 1944, the Völkischer Beobachter reported that the American plans amounted to starving 30 million Germans. The plan of the so-called “Jew Morgenthau” with anti-Semitic intentions was placed in a series with the book Germany must perish (“Germany must go under”) by Theodore N. Kaufman , which suggested the sterilization of the German population and which Goebbels immediately called " Kaufman Plan " was named and published. Goebbels stylized the writing of Kaufman, completely unknown in the USA, into Roosevelt's personal plan for Germany and caused it to be brought to the people in an annotated documentary entitled "The war goal of the world plutocracy". To this day, these publications serve right-wing groups as a welcome hook for anti-Semitic propaganda.

The attempt by National Socialist propaganda to portray the impending British and American occupation in terrifying colors to the population in Germany in the final phase of the war failed thoroughly. The SD branch in Kitzingen reported as early as the end of 1943: "If we lose the war, the Americans will come to us and then we will not be much worse off than before." In October 1944, when the first American units crossed the border the district administrator of Bad Aibling and Rosenheim reported to the regional council in Munich: “The belief is widespread that the British and Americans would act less brutally in the event of an occupation than the Eastern peoples ... Some actually indulge in comfortable descriptions by the Anglo-Saxons ,Courtesy'."

According to a survey of 450 German prisoners of war in mid-January 1945, the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force recorded "a remarkable lack of hostility or fear of the American-British occupation". A month later, the head of the Intelligence Section of PWD noted : “Regardless of their political views, the majority of prisoners of war have no particular fears, either with regard to the behavior of the American-British occupation forces or with regard to the general living conditions in a Germany under American and British Occupation are to be expected. "

Historical classifications

Gebhard Diemer claimed in 1979:

“For Henry Morgenthau, the Germans were what the Jews were for the National Socialists: the incarnation of evil in politics. By relinquishing territory, splitting up and transforming Germany back into an agrarian state, Germany was to be deprived of the means to wage war forever. Morgenthau wanted to accept the starvation of many millions of Germans. "

Historians attribute the fact that Morgenthau's draft, despite its political irrelevance, was interpreted and passed on in this distorted form to the function of relieving the burden of dealing with and taking responsibility for the consequences of the Nazi era. The draft was suitable to imply at least the intention of the Allies to commit the kind of crimes that Germany had committed under the Nazi regime. From there, the American occupying power's moral right to the Nazi trials , to re-education and denazification was often contested.

In contrast, the head of the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin , Wolfgang Benz, judged : Morgenthau was a supporter of agrarian romantic ideas and understood the conversion of Germany into an agrarian state that he sought not only as an act of punishment and a measure to prevent another war, but also as a Implementation of a positive utopia. Benz counts the historical revisionist reception of the Morgenthau draft to be one of the most important legends about National Socialism :

“The Morgenthau Plan plays a considerable role as proof of the Jewish and American will to annihilate Germany, which has little to do with historical reality, but is still effective as an anti-American and anti-Jewish stimulant to this day. […] The episode was of no significance for the Allies' occupation and Germany policy. But Goebbels and Hitler used 'Judas Mordplan' to 'enslave Germany' with such success for their perseverance propaganda that many believed that the program had been realized in 1945. In right-wing extremist journalism, the plan still plays this role today. "

The historian Johannes Heil judges the frequent use of the Morgenthau topos for current political conflict issues:

“The authors of such arguments ... probably missed the fact that the current popularity of the Morgenthau Plan, or better: its title, is only the result of a mishap and its propagandistic exploitation by the National Socialists. Three points had an effect: The unofficial memorandum of Henry Morgenthau became known in the summer of 1944. Its author was a Jew. Its Jewish author was a member of the American government. In this way, the 'Morgenthau Plan' could become what it was not in Nazi propaganda: an official policy that unmasked the enemy's goals. "

Literary reception

There are several alternate world stories set in a world where the Morgenthau Plan was carried out. The Voices of the Night (1984) by Thomas Ziegler is a gloomy dystopia in which South America is ruled by emigrated National Socialists and becomes a superpower. Another novel on the subject is Kitahara's disease (1995) by Christoph Ransmayr . However, this does not explicitly refer to the Morgenthau Plan, but speaks of the "Peace of Oranienburg". A concrete version of the crime novel Number Man by Tilman Weigel, which is set in a de-industrialized Germany in 1963, creates a concrete version . Also in the early 1960s is the alternative world novel Im Jahre Ragnarök by Oliver Henkel (2009), in which a (fictional) second Morgenthau plan is dealt with.

See also

literature

  • Wolfgang Benz : Morgenthau Plan. In: Wolfgang Benz: Legends, Lies, Prejudices. A dictionary on contemporary history. dtv, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-423-30130-9 ( text online ).
  • Wilfried Mausbach: Between Morgenthau and Marshall. The USA's economic policy concept for Germany 1944–1947 (research and sources on contemporary history, vol. 30). Droste, Düsseldorf 1996, ISBN 3-7700-1878-8 .
  • Bernd Greiner : The Morgenthau legend. To the story of a controversial plan. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-930908-07-7 .
  • Klaus-Dietmar Henke: The American occupation of Germany. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-486-56175-8 .
  • Wolfgang Krieger: The American planning for Germany. In: Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed. On behalf of the Military History Research Office): End of the Third Reich - End of the Second World War. Munich 1995, ISBN 3-492-12056-3 , pp. 25-50.
  • Wolfgang Benz: From occupation to the Federal Republic. Stages in the founding of a state 1946–1949. Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-596-24311-4 .
  • John Morton Blum: Germany an arable land? Morgenthau and American War Policy 1941–1945. Droste, Düsseldorf 1968.
  • Harry G. Gelber: The Morgenthau Plan. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 13, 1965, issue 4, pp. 372–402, text ifz-muenchen.de (PDF; 5.9 MB).
  • Mirror article series by John Morton Blum:
    • Morgenthau: Plan of Vengeance . In: Der Spiegel . No. 51 , 1967, p. 81-84 ( online ).
    • John Morton Blum: These Germans are such devils: The story of the Morgenthau Plan . In: Der Spiegel . No. 51 , 1967, p. 86-102 ( online ).
    • John Morton Blum: 1st continuation: Competence battles in Washington . In: Der Spiegel . No. 52 , 1967, p. 68-83 ( online ).
    • John Morton Blum: 2nd continuation and conclusion: The fall of Morgenthaus . In: Der Spiegel . No. 53 , 1967, p. 40-57 ( online ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Johannes Heil: Matthaeus Priensis, Henry Morgenthau and the Jewish World Conspiracy. In: Wolfgang Benz, Peter Reif-Spirek (Hrsg.): Geschichtsmythen. Legends about National Socialism. Metropol, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-936411-28-X , p. 131 f.
  2. ↑ Steven Casey: The campaign to sell a harsh peace for Germany to the American public, 1944-1948. History , 90 (297), 2005, ISSN  1468-229X , pp. 62-92.
  3. ↑ Kurt Zentner: Ascent from nowhere. Germany from 1945 to 1953. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne / Berlin 1954, vol. 2, p. 104.
  4. ↑ Harry G. Gelber: The Morgenthau Plan. Institute for Contemporary History 1965 / Issue 3, pp. 372–382 (PDF; 5.9 MB).
  5. ^ Henry Morgenthau: Germany is our problem , 1950, p. 502.
  6. ^ Matthias Peter: John Maynard Keynes and the British policy on Germany. Claim to Power and Economic Reality in the Age of World Wars 1919–1946. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 1997, ISBN 978-3-486-56164-7 , p. 182 ff.
  7. ^ Thomas Neumann: Mythenspur des National Socialism. The Morgenthauplan and German literary criticism. In: Uwe Wittstock: The invention of the world. On the work of Christoph Ransmayr. 3. Edition. Fischer Tb., Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-596-13433-1 , p. 181 ff.
  8. ↑ Quoted from Wolfgang Krieger : The American planning for Germany. In: Hans-Erich Volkmann (Ed.): End of the Third Reich - End of the Second World War. A perspective review. Published on behalf of the Military History Research Office . Munich 1995, ISBN 3-492-12056-3 , p. 32.
  9. ^ Quoted from Hermann Glaser: 1945 - Beginning of a Future: Report and Documentation. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt 2004, p. 121.
  10. ↑ See excerpts in John Morton Blum: These Germans are such devils: The story of the Morgenthau plan . In: Der Spiegel . No. 52 , 1967, p. 68-83 ( Online - Dec. 18, 1967 ).
  11. ^ Theodore Wyckoff: Henry L. Stimson: American Minister of War in World War II. Bonn 1968, p. 211.
  12. ↑ quoted from John Morton Blum: These Germans are such devils: The story of the Morgenthau plan . In: Der Spiegel . No. 52 , 1967, p. 72 ( Online - Dec. 18, 1967 ).
  13. ^ Klaus-Dietmar Henke: The American occupation of Germany. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag 1995, ISBN 3-486-56175-8 , p. 89 ff.
  14. ↑ Jürgen Weber (Ed.): History of the Federal Republic of Germany: On the way to the Republic 1945-1947. Schöningh, 1979, ISBN 3-506-15021-9 , p. 214.
  15. ↑ Klaus-Dietmar Henke: The American Occupation of Germany , Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag 1995, ISBN 3-486-56175-8 , p. 116.
  16. ^ Wolfgang Benz: The Jewish declaration of war on Germany. In: Wolfgang Benz, Peter Reif-Spirek (Hrsg.): Geschichtsmythen. Legends about National Socialism. Berlin 2003, p. 12.
  17. ↑ Johannes Heil: Matthaeus Priensis, Henry Morgenthau and the Jewish World Conspiracy. In: Wolfgang Benz, Peter Reif-Spirek (Hrsg.): Geschichtsmythen. Legends about National Socialism. Berlin 2003, p. 132.