National Journal: First published 20/03/2012
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Winter in Germany 1946-1947
Peter Stuyvesant
What did actually happen to Germany in the years AFTER 1945 (“PEACE TIME”)?
Today we can hardly imagine that nearly 70 years ago the victorious
Allies were in the process of dismembering Germany, tearing down its
economy and starving out its population. Older Germans remember the
postwar winter of 1946/1947 as a dreadful hunger winter. In his book
The German Question and the Origins of the Cold War (Milan
2008) Nicolas Lewkowicz notes that Germany was given the most
comprehensive treatment ever dispensed to a vanquished nation in the
modern history of the international political system. (p. 11) The
question is how this treatment came to be and which forces played a
pivotal role in these developments. In 1942 the war was far from decided
as German submarines were cruising the American Eastcoast and German
tanks were relentlessly advancing in Russia and Africa. This did not
stop (or maybe actually encouraged) Jewish exiles from dreaming about
Germanys demise after the war. Tens of thousands of Jewish exiles from
Germany had found refuge in New York and even had their own newspaper
Aufbau (German word for build-up). They were not sitting idle
awaiting the end of hostilities, but were active in canvassing the
public opinion to lobby for imposing a hard peace on Germany. The most
active and outspoken among them was Emil Cohn, better known under his
German pen name Emil Ludwig.
Cohn delivered an important speech in New York in 1942, which was noted in the New YorkTimes (6th of July 1942) and printed in
Aufbau (July 24th1942): “Was soll mit Deutschland geschehen?”
(“What should happen with Germany?”). Ludwig advocated that Germany
should be totally occupied and not be able to exercise self-government
for a long time. Germany should go through a “probation” and should be
re-educated".
The date of these long standing suggestions is important, since the
allegation, Germany had murdered millions of convicts of the
concentration camps, which could never be proven by forensic evidence,
claims, the beginning of the mass murder lied in June 1942. Another
contributor to
Aufbau, Manfred George, made no secret about his primary allegiance when he noted in
Aufbau (March 19th 1943) that one time German-speaking Jews consider this problem [of Germanys fate after the war]
as Jews and not as Germans. There were many similar voices but Cohn was not a mere commentator as he was summoned to testify before the
Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives
on March 26 1943. He proposed a partition of Germany and a long period
of Allied control. In order to spread his radical ideas among the
American public he published a book with the title
“How To Treat The Germans” (New York: Willard, 1943). Note that there is no question mark in the title.
In Jewish circles there was little room for a distinction between
National-Socialist policies and the German people, which was contrary to
the American public opinion of Germany as I will illustrate below. The
idea of collective punishment based on collective guilt was paramount
among Jews. During a protest rally at Boston Garden on May 2 1943
assistant secretary of state Adolf Augustus Berle Jr. exclaimed:
"This guilt now generalized throughout the German people must
constitute one of the basic considerations in dealing with the German
people in the hour of their final defeat." The
World Jewish Congress published Berle’s speech at this rally in
the Jewish Comment (May 28, 1943).
Berle came from a family of
Zionists. His father, Adolf Augustus Berle Sr., was the author of the
book
The World Significance Of A Jewish State (New York: M.
Kennerly, 1918). Despite his seemingly rather lowly post Berle was a
confidant of Roosevelt and was part of his Brain Trust, a presidential
advisory group stemming from the 1930s and which also had several other
Jews. Knowing that Jewish activists with access to the White House were
advocating harsh measures to be imposed on postwar Germany, it is not
surprising that a harsh peace was being drafted long before the end of
the war. In April 1943 the American journalist Kingsbury Smith revealed
the blueprint for a defeated Germany under the title Washington’s Plan
for Postwar Germany in the
American Mercury 56 (April 1943). This plan was entirely congruent with the ideas of Cohn and Berle:
This plan meant that the abandonment of the Anglo-American Atlantic Charter
of August 1941, which stipulated that no territorial changes would be
made without the consent of the people concerned. Moreover, the plan was
highly criticized in the media and did not have any significant support
among the American public. A public opinion-poll of June 1943 showed
that only 11% of the people in the poll were in favor of carving up
Germany (Germany in the Dock, Fortune, June 27, 1943). In a
poll of September 1943 only a quarter of the American public responded
that Germany was inherently warlike (50% thought Japan was inherently
warlike). Apparently the American public did not hate (or fear) Germans.
In order to achieve this the Society for the Prevention of World War
III was found in December 1943. At a first glance non-Jews like the
German pacifist Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster and the American fiction
writer Rex Stout were in charge, but
the advisory committee was stacked with Jews like William Shirer, Paul Winkler, Louis Nizer and Clifton Fadiman.
Jews were also overrepresented among the contributors and writers,
because they were mustered in Jewish circles (S. Casey (2005),
"The campaign to sell a harsh peace for Germany to the American public, 1944?1948," p. 11) The Society was the vanguard of advocates for Germany’s dismemberment. In 1943 Paul Winkler published a book called
“The German Conspiracy: Secret Germany Behind the Mask” (New York: Charles Scribner’s sons, 1943). In 1944 Louis Nizer published his book
“What To Do With Germany” (Chicago: Ziff-Davis) in
which he advocated that Germany’s sovereignty as a nation should be
forfeited. The society was not very successful among the public. Indeed,
its hatred for the Germans as a nation caused indignation among some
writers and editors, who accused the society of bad history, bad logic,
and inverted
racism (Common Sense, June 1944 p. 207212).
In the summer of 1944 the defeat of Germany seemed imminent and
Roosevelt felt confident enough to propose an official postwar plan for
Germany to his Anglo-Saxon ally Churchill during the Quebec Conference
of September 1944. This time it was the Treasury Department of
Roosevelt’s long-time confidant Henry Morgenthau Jr. (also from the
above mentioned Brain Trust) who drafted the plan, circumnavigating the
State Department. Before Morgenthau submitted his plan during the
conference he visited the front in France in August 1944. He was
horrified to find out that
in London and among the American generals plans were afoot to
administer a conquered Germany not as a madhouse full of psychopathic
killers but as a defeated nation in need of rebuilding. (J.M. Blum,
From the Morgenthau Diaries, Houghton Mifflin 1967). Churchill
ultimately agreed to adopt the plan in exchange for a large loan which
Great-Britain desperately needed at this stage of the war. The plan was
again leaked to the press, causing indignation and criticism towards the
Roosevelt administration. Even from within the administration secretary
of state Henry L. Stimson criticized the
"Carthaginian peace."
Morgenthau envisaged the dismemberment of the German state and
decimation of the German people. A quarter of Germany’s territory was to
be given to neighboring countries and ethnically cleansed from Germans.
The rest was to be politically divided into several pieces, which were
under the control of the Allied nations. Germans were deprived of any
form of self-governance and political self-determination. Economically,
the remaining German territory was to be stripped of all its industry
and the German people were only to be fed on a subsistence level.
Germans were not allowed to emigrate and were liable to be conscripted
for forced labor abroad. Access by relief organizations was not allowed,
and any charity from abroad was forbidden. Germany was to become the
largest concentration camp on earth.
Goebbels described the plan as followed: "The Jew Morgenthau wanted to make Germany into a giant potato patch." The
Morgenthau Plan has often been downplayed: Morgenthau’s role
was diminished by the suggestion that it came largely from the pen of
Harry Dexter White (also Jewish, a target of Sen. Joe McCarthy, and
later shown to be a communist spy), that the plan was executed after
Morgenthau’s term of office, and that the Allied occupation in fact
ended in the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1948.
However, it should be noted that Morgenthau was committed to the
execution of his plan and published a book
Germany Is Our Problem (New York: Harper, 1945) to personally promote the plan.
The Allied occupation regime until 1948 largely executed the Morgenthau Plan by Joint Chiefs of Staff
Directive 1067 imposing a division of Germany into four
zones, restrictive food distribution which caused starvation in 1947,
and by dismantling German industries. Millions of Germans were submitted
to forced labor abroad and millions of Germans were on the brink of
starvation at home as pointed out in Herbert Hoover’s report
"German Agricultural and Food Requirements."
Eventually, it was the Cold War that hastened the creation of the
Federal Republic of Germany and its merging into the camp of the Western
Allies. As outlined above, the Roosevelt administration’s postwar plan
for Germany did not stem from the sentiment among the American public,
or even its generals at the front. The American public did not believe
in the inherent evil of the Germans, nor did it desire a harsh peace.
They did not hate the Germans, nor did they believe in collective
guilt/punishment.
It was the desire of small minority of Jewish activists and
policy makers with access to President Roosevelt. The Morgenthau Plan
did not come out of the blue; its outline was in place long before
September 1944. It stemmed from the same group of Jewish activists and
policy makers who had advocated its basic principles for years in many
publications. Morgenthau himself was deeply committed to his plan and
advocated its execution after his leave from office. The Morgenthau Plan
became the official Allied occupation policy of Germany until Cold War
reality forced its abandonment.
Still, it should be noted
Still today German chancellors are forced to sign a "Act of Submission"
(Die
Kanzler-Akte) to the Allied victors before entering office.
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Ilya Ehrenburg, Stalin's Jewish propagandist for genocide!
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"Kill! Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil; not
one among the living, not one among the yet unborn but is evil! Follow
the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for
all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German
women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, kill,
you gallant soldiers of the Red Army."
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurt, February 28, 1995 - p. 7
The above is one of the many thousands of genocide orders from
Stalin's official Jewish war propagandist. With these kind of orders of
the day, Ehrenburg spurred the Red Army soldiers on their way to
Germany. They murdered in the eastern territorries of Germany, which
they controlled and thanks to his effective propaganda of "humanity",
nearly three million women, children and old people perished in the
hands of his killing hordes. Ehrenburg is especially revered in Israel
and his memory is still kept in the highest esteem by World-Jewry.
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