MORGENTHAU PLAN
Henry Morgenthau’s plan to dismember and convert Germany into a predominantly rural society was one of the most widely debated and criticized schemes for the postwar treatment of Nazi Germany.
The Morgenthau Plan was the most comprehensive scheme for the reconstruction of German society. This plan, named after its author, Henry Morgenthau Jr. (1891—1967), was published under the title Program to Prevent Germany from Starting a World War III. Morgenthau, U.S. secretary of the treasury between 1934 and 1945, argued that a powerful, industrialized Germany would inevitably attempt to wage war on its neighbors and the world again. He postulated that Hitler’s rise to power was the logical consequence of the German national character that had earlier produced Prussian authoritarianism and militarism. Only the country’s territorial dismemberment and its political and economic impotence would assure future peace. When, by summer 1944, Allied victory over the Third Reich had become a certainty, members of the Roosevelt administration began considering in earnest what the future occupation of Germany would look like. While ultimately a compromise between the two options of punishment and rehabilitation of Germany was reached, for a short time the strictly “corrective” plan devised by the secretary of the treasury gained the upper hand.Morgenthau favored severe punishment of the German people, first in retaliation to the ghastly crimes committed by the Nazis, and second to ensure once and for all that Germany would never again upset the European balance of power. In his plan, Morgenthau did not confine himself to a tough line on topics such as the reeducation of the German population, the
abolition of all Nazi Party organizations, and the punishment of its main figures, as well as the trials of war criminals. While these goals were shared among the Allies, Morgenthau’s economic vision for a defeated Germany was hotly contested among members of the Roosevelt administration and its military allies.
Morgenthau wanted to transform Germany into a country principally agricultural and pastoral in character and, moreover, split up into several independent states. Furthermore, the Ruhr area, the hub of Europe’s heavy industry, was to be stripped of all existing industries to ensure that it could not in the foreseeable future become an industrial area. All industrial plants, mines, and equipment not destroyed by military action were to be either entirely dismantled or completely destroyed.
Morgenthau PEa∩ 1944
Among the members of the Roosevelt administration, Morgenthau’s harsh punitive measures were far from unopposed. In fact, his ideas ran counter to the plans of both the State and War departments, which aimed at securing the German potential for the reconstruction of Western Europe. Henry M. Stimson, secretary of war, and Cordell Hull, secretary of state, were both aware of Europe’s dependence especially on the Ruhr coal and realized that without it European recovery would be impossible. Accordingly, they opposed the “corrective” policy and advocated a more constructive approach. Both argued, moreover, as Germany was grossly overpopulated owing to the cessation of territory and the influx of millions of expellees, it would be unable to provide sufficient food for its inhabitants. Consequently, to prevent starvation, U.S. taxpayers would have to shoulder an additional burden by supplying Germany with food.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, although more concerned with winning the war than with devising plans for the Allied occupation, decided to set up a Cabinet committee to deal with this matter. During discussions in the committee, on which all three above-mentioned secretaries served, Stimson again dismissed the Morgenthau Plan and stressed that the United States as a civilized power had the responsibility to treat its enemies humanely.
For the secretary of war, the dire economic consequences of a purely negative policy were evident. In Stimson’s view, poverty in one part of Europe would induce poverty elsewhere. Among both the War and State departments, the idea of a dismembered and poverty-stricken Germany also raised fears for the political stability of Europe. Given this apparently incompatible dissent in the committee, it was not surprising that the secretaries were unable to agree on a common draft.In this atmosphere of uncoordinated and competing Cabinet planning, in spite of Stimson’s and Hull’s criticism and the fact that the Cabinet committee failed to reach a conclusion on the character of the occupation policy, Morgenthau managed to win over the president. He was the only Cabinet member invited to the Quebec conference, where Roosevelt urged him to present his plan to British prime minister Winston Churchill on September 15, 1944. Although Churchill initially had rather harshly rejected the scheme, on the following day, after much thought, both the president and the prime minister accepted the Morgenthau Plan in essence.
However, only seven days later, Roosevelt withdrew his signature from the plan. The fact that the American public reacted violently to media coverage of details of the leaked Morgenthau Plan had helped to speed up the president’s change of mind. Just weeks before the November presidential elections, Roosevelt was careful not to make any decisions that were too unpopular. But the upcoming election was only one reason that helped to bring about this stunning shift of policy. In fact, it was the necessities of pragmatism that came to the fore and dictated a smooth shift away from punishment toward rehabilitation. Stimson’s and Hull’s view, that the West needed the German economic and political potential, won support among the political and economic elite in the United States.
While this was the end of the Morgen- thau Plan, some of its less radical provisions found their way into the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Directive 1067 on the treatment of Germany; e.g., certain stipulations concerning denazification and reeducation in this most important blueprint of American occupation policy for the immediate postwar period resembled the original plan very much.
It has to be stressed, though, that there was no mention of a deliberate destruction of German industry. Nevertheless, it was only with Roosevelt’s death and the accession of Harry Truman that Morgenthau’s influence finally came to a complete halt. Truman tolerated the restrictive JCS 1067 that was put into practice, yet it was watered down by Military Governor Lucius D. Clay in favor of a more positive occupation policy.Ulrich Schnakenberg
See also American Occupation Zone; Denazification; Nuremberg Trials; U.S. Plans for Postwar Germany (1941-1945); World War II
References and Further Reading
Blum, John Morton. From the Morgenthau Diaries. Years of War 1941—45. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.
Greiner, Bernd. Die Morgenthau-Legende.
Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995.
Mausbach, Wilfried. Zwischen Morgenthau undMarshall. Dusseldorf: Droste, 1996.