Less than a year before the end of World War II, then-U.S. Secretary
of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau drew up a nightmarish plan to punish
postwar Germany.
After the serial 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and
World War II—along with the failed Versailles peace treaty of 1919—the
Allies in World War II wanted to ensure there would never again be an
aggressive Germany powerful enough to invade its neighbors.
When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the press in
September 1944, at first it was widely praised. After all, it would
supposedly render Germany incapable of ever starting another world war
in Europe.
Morgenthau certainly envisioned a Carthaginian peace, designed to
ensure a permanently deindustrialized, unarmed, and pastoral Germany.
Postwar Germany would have resembled something akin to the ancient,
pre-civilized frontier that the first-century AD historian Tacitus wrote
about in his Germania.
The plan would have ensured that within six months of Germany’s
surrender, all of its industrial plants and equipment were to be
dismantled.
The Ruhr, the renowned center of European industrial strength, was to
be permanently neutered, starved of its energy, raw materials, and
infrastructure.
After the war, the plan demanded virtual complete disarmament of
Germany. Its once-feared armed forces were to be rendered nonexistent.
There were also promised massive reductions in Germany’s borders.
Various countries, such as the Soviet Union, Poland, and France, were to
be given large slices of the old Third Reich.
Future German security would hinge only on the power and goodwill of the victorious United States and its allies.
When the dying Nazi Party got wind of the plan, Adolf Hitler’s
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had a field day. He screamed to
Germans that they were all doomed to oblivion if they lost the war, even
growing opponents of the Nazi Party.
Even many Americans were aghast at the plan.
Gen. George Marshall, the Army chief of staff, warned that its mere
mention had galvanized German troops to fight to the end, increasing
American casualties as they closed in on the German homeland.
Ex-President Herbert Hoover blasted the plan as inhumane. He feared
mass starvation of the German people if they were reduced to a
premodern, rural peasantry.
But once the victorious allies occupied a devastated Germany,
witnessed its moonscape ruined by massive bombing and house-to-house
fighting, and discovered that their “ally” Russia’s Josef Stalin was
ruthless and hellbent on turning all of Europe communist, the Harry
Truman administration backed off the plan.
There is a tragic footnote to the aborted horrors of the Morgenthau
Plan. Currently, Germany is doing to itself almost everything Morgenthau
once dreamed of.
Its green delusions have shut down far too many of its nuclear, coal, and gas electrical generation plants.
Erratic solar and wind “sustainable energy” means that power costs are four times higher than on average in the United States.
Once-dominant European giants Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes are now
bleeding customers and profits. Their own government’s green and
electric vehicle mandates ensure they will become globally
uncompetitive.
The German economy actually shrank in 2023. And the diminished Ruhr
can no longer save the German economy from its own utopian politicians.
The German military is all but disarmed and short thousands of recruits.
German industries do not produce enough ammunition, tanks, ships, and
aircraft to equip even its diminished army, navy, and air force.
Just a few hundred miles from Germany in Ukraine, more than a million
Ukrainians and Russians are dead, wounded, or missing—in the costliest
European battle since the horrors of Stalingrad.
Yet the once postwar German dynamo nation now lacks the manpower,
munitions, and money to aid Ukraine in any meaningful way against an
ascendant Russian invader.
More than 1 million immigrants have entered the country illegally,
the vast majority of them from the Middle East. Many of them are hostile
to European values and culture, as recent terrorist killings have
shown. One-fifth of the population was not born in Germany.
The shrinking German people are growing angry, divided, and
depressed. Their 1.4% fertility rate is one of the lowest in the Western
world.
A tragic irony now abounds.
After World War II, the Truman administration rejected the notion of a
pastoral, deindustrialized, and insecure Germany as a cruel
prescription for poverty, hunger, and depopulation.
But now the German people themselves voted for their own updated
version of Morgenthau’s plan—as they willingly reduced factory hours,
curtailed power and fuel supplies, and struggled with millions of
illegal aliens and porous borders.
Germans accept that they have no military to speak of that could
protect their insecure borders—without a United States-led NATO.
Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected wrecking the
defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully
pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing—and destroying—itself.
