U.S. Government Plan 1943
Soon after the United States entered the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt entrusted the State Department under Cordell Hull with planning for defeated Germany’s political future.
In the following three years, the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Post-War Foreign Policy undertook the most comprehensive effort at outlining programs for Germany, Europe, and a cooperative international order. The committee drew in part on studies prepared by the Council on Foreign Relations with which it also shared advisers (Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Norman Davis). Even though there were differences in opinion, broadened by the participation of high-ranking media and academic experts on the committee (Anne O’Hare McCormick of the New York Times, Johns Hopkins University president Isaiah Bowman), this group of planners was largely guided by their faith in international free-market solutions and European economic integration as a guarantee for peaceful postwar cooperation. Germany’s swift economic reconstruction and eventual political rehabilitation were prerequisites for the success of this vision. Rather than overly restricting or even impeding German industrial production, because it served as the foundation of that country’s military might, the foreign policy experts intended to integrate the German economy into a larger European multilateral framework, using it as a powerhouse for European reconstruction and prosperity, thus also increasing German dependence on other markets. In political terms it was understood that democracy would have to be reestablished and that a reformed Germany would eventually be accepted by the family of nations on equal terms. The State Department’s memoranda moreover reveal the conviction that the Versailles Treaty, in particular the reparations issue, had been ill conceived and that it was of great importance that the Germans this time be reconciled with the peace settlement. Reparations should ultimately serve the purpose of reintegrating Germany into a multilateral economic system. The planners assumed that the democratization and peaceful reorientation of Germany required economic prosperity: living conditions had to be attractive enough for the Germans to accept the new political order. For all these reasons the State Department planners were adamantly opposed to dismemberment, which they feared would only provoke resentment and give rise to new forms of extreme nationalism. These foreign policy experts understood Nazism to have arisen out of nationalistic grievances and economic collapse, exploited by the Nazis, but partially caused by the earlier peace settlement. Leading State Department officials, however, also suggested that the implementation of these plans required the continued collaboration between the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union in establishing and maintaining a system of international security, which would further contribute to preventing a recurrence of German aggression.
In the meantime the inter-Allied wartime planning among the Big Three took a different turn. At the conference in Tehran in November 1943 Roosevelt was gratified by Joseph Stalin’s ready accession to his ideas for Germany’s partitioning (into five autonomous states and two internationalized regions) over Winston Churchill’s objections. Good working relations with the Soviet Union formed the basis for the president’s postwar vision. In general, Roosevelt—in contrast to his diplomatic experts—did not view rehabilitation and reconstruction as adequate solutions, and assumed that Stalin, too, was looking forward to a stern peace with the country that had brought so much devastation. The president was wary of Germany’s record of repeated aggression and of the Nazis’ extraordinary ambitions for reordering the world, politically and ethnically.
By late 1943 he publicly expressed his view that the German problem was not just one of bad leaders, but instead included the German people itself. Overall, however, Roosevelt was not of one mind as to what measures would render Germany more peaceful in the future. His own ambivalence reflected the larger picture of American wartime thinking.From the fall of 1943 on, the European Advisory Commission (EAC), where Ambassador John G. Winant represented the United States, served as the official inter-Allied agency of the Big Three to discuss and determine common postwar policies for Europe, including defeated Nazi Germany. But Roosevelt left American interagency conflicts over Germany unresolved and thus contributed to the paralysis and eventual failure of the EAC. From 1943 through the summer of 1944, questions relating to Germany’s future were pursued seemingly in isolation by various U.S. government agencies. Democratization, demilitarization, denazification, economic restructuring, and restitution were generally accepted aspects of any postwar plans. Disagreement existed over degrees, mechanisms, and extent of outside intervention and control and finally came to a head in the public eclat over the so-called Morgenthau Plan.
The secretary of the treasury reacted sharply to State Department documents in the summer of 1944 reflecting a preference for reconstruction and pragmatic leniency. Part of this set of documents was the final draft of the military handbook for occupation. For reasons different from those of the diplomats, the military also favored quick stabilization, a functioning economy, and, moreover, the retention of German specialists and administrators. In general, the military was intent on a short occupation period and worried over such practical aspects as its responsibility for feeding the defeated enemy population. As early as November 1943 the War Department’s Civil Affairs Division objected to certain aspects of the envisioned disarmament plans, pointing out that the material might still be needed in the war against Japan.
Morgenthau feared that this pragmatism and military expediency of “keeping the machine running” would prejudice the political goals of dismantling Germany’s industrial base as a step toward curbing its aggressive potential.In the fall of 1944 the Treasury Department prepared its critique of the State Department’s work and submitted its own “Program to Prevent World War III.” Morgenthau’s intervention was motivated by an overriding concern with security, in the formula of his assistant secretary, Harry Dexter White, “we want peace, not reparations.” Morgenthau emphasized in his memorandum to the president that the latter’s ideas, in particular regarding partitioning, had been entirely ignored by the foreign policy experts. Roosevelt, in turn, was impressed by the Treasury’s bold statement that it was a fallacy that European reconstruction required a strong industrial Germany. The president also was interested in the economic advantages of the Treasury plan for both Britain and the Soviet Union. Yet eventually, and for different reasons, both Allies opposed any plans of deindustrialization. Morgenthau and his advisers saw decartelization, a far- reaching reduction of the heavy industry in the Ruhr region, and comprehensive denazification as preconditions for a new democratic orientation of Germany. Moreover, in explicit contrast to the earlier draft of the military handbook, they wished to release the Allied Military Government of any responsibility for economic problems. The Treasury plan would have allowed the Allies to effect dramatic changes early on in the occupation, but to withdraw soon thereafter. The idea of turning Germany into a predominantly agrarian country did not lie at the heart of the Treasury plans; the envisioned partial deindustrialization served security purposes; the anticipated resulting sociomental reorientation owed itself more to a New Deal version of Jeffersonian agrarian idealism than to revenge. In the aftermath of the Quebec Conference of September 1944, where Roosevelt and Churchill had initialed a version of the Treasury plan, Roosevelt began to backpeddle in the face of opposition from different quarters.
Fundamentally, however, Roosevelt shared with Morgenthau a “Vansittartist” understanding of Nazism: they had little faith in German self-reformation and were deeply disturbed both by Germany’s record of military quests as well as by the broad popular support that the Nazis enjoyed. Morgenthau saw Germany’s economic structure, its cartels and heavy industry, as crucial tools for any German government to carry out a program of a century-old militaristic tradition, deeply rooted in German society.In the ensuing debate, the Department of War played a significant role, with Secretary Henry L. Stimson emerging as the most effective and eloquent advocate of plans for reconstruction and leniency, labeling Morgenthau’s ideas “a crime against civilization itself ” that would breed another war. Stimson belonged to that school of thought that held that Germany had temporarily been captured and led astray by a band of gangsters. His admiration for the German people themselves, their energy, vigor, and progressiveness, as well as their outstanding contributions in the arts and sciences, was obvious. Thus, Stimson stressed limited culpability and helped lay the legal procedures for prosecuting major war criminals. Beyond that, he was primarily concerned with German responses to measures they might regard as humiliating, such as partitioning or the restructuring of their economy. His assistant secretary, John J. McCloy, while maintaining close cordial relations with Morgenthau, worked behind the scenes to shift official wartime planning in a more constructive direction and to reach a compromise. As a result, U.S. occupation policy emerged with seemingly greater clarity in the fall of 1944 in JCS 1067, a postsurrender interim occupation directive. Its language recalled the rhetoric of the Treasury papers, prohibiting any steps toward Germany’s economic rehabilitation and clarifying that the country had not been liberated but defeated. Yet, the same text gave the U.S.
military commander substantial leeway to determine actual occupation policies, further enhanced through provisions granting him the explicit authority to ensure the production of goods and services essential for the prevention of disease and civil unrest.The diplomacy of the Big Three continued at meetings in Yalta in February and at Potsdam, with Harry S. Truman as the new U.S. president, in August 1945, transferring a fourth occupation zone to France and accommodating the Soviets on the reparations issue. Germany was to be treated as an economic and administrative unity under the supervision of the Allied Control Council. In reality, however, the de facto autonomy of the respective military governors became increasingly apparent.
The recurrent theme in much of the historiography on American official planning for Germany is the complaint about intra-administrative muddle, Roosevelt’s postponement tactic, and consequently the absence of a coherent plan. American wartime thinking was indeed plagued by conflicting impulses of finding an adequate safeguard against an enemy whose aggression appeared unquenchable and the sincere intention to integrate Germany into a peaceful world order. Roosevelt’s insistence that the war first had to be won was in part
motivated by his recognition of the many postwar contingencies. His prediction that a period of “trial and error” would characterize the occupation revealed a deeper understanding that there was an inherent tension in the project of “imposing democracy,” a conflict between military means and political ends, between outside intervention and the need for internal reform. By necessity this conflict could not be entirely resolved, but the partly piecemeal approach, both in Washington and by the military government in Germany under the direction of General Lucius D. Clay, opened the opportunity for corrective justice and reform as well as reconciliation. It also provided postwar Germans with a chance to engage in both spiritual and physical reconstruction.
Michaela Hoenicke Moore
See also Casablanca Conference/ Unconditional Surrender; Denazification; Morgenthau Plan; Tehran Conference; Treaty of Versailles; Vansittartism; World War II
References and Further Reading
Eisenberg, Carolyn. Drawing the Line. The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944—1949. New York: Cambridge University, 1997.
Gaddis, John L. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941—1947. New York: Columbia University, 1972.
Hammond, Paul Y. “Directives for the Occupation of Germany: The Washington Controversy.” American Civil-Military Decisions: A Book of Case Studies. Ed. Harold Stein. Birmingham: University of Alabama, 1963.
Mausbach, Wilfried. Zwischen Morgenthau und Marshall: Das wirtschaftspolitische Deutschlandkonzept der USA, 1944—47. Dusseldorf: Droste, 1997.
Snell, John. Wartime Origins of the East-West Dilemma over Germany. New Orleans: Hauser Press, 1959.