Cordell Hull did not go with Roosevelt to Quebec, so it was odd that Roosevelt allowed Morgenthau to present a plan for the post-war treatment of Germany, a fantastically complicated subject for which Morgenthau had no training at all. His vengeful views were the opposite of Hull’s views on Germany. It was a tragedy for the United States and all Europe that Hull had no influence at Quebec, or at the major summit conference at Yalta four months later.
Hull was never consulted about any of this vengeful business, which he hated. He said after Quebec that, ‘This whole development at Quebec I believe angered me as much as anything that had happened during my career as Secretary of State.’21 He knew and said, along with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, that the Morgenthau Plan would mean the deaths of some twenty million Germans by starvation and exposure. If the plan were leaked, it would give Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, strong arguments for a bitter, futile resistance by the Germans. The plan was leaked, Goebbels soon obliged, and the Germans resisted to the bitter end. The Germans’ fear of Allied vengeance was so powerful that William Donovan, Director of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), wrote to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 27 November 1944 that, ‘The horrible prospects of exile to Siberia, eternal slavery, de-industrialization, break-up of Germany and even sterilization, have been carefully portrayed to the Germans by their Nazi leaders. It is considered that the German spirit of resistance has been bolstered greatly by fear of the consequence of unconditional surrender.’22 The Germans fought even when their country had been cut in half, but the Japanese, who for years had defended their conquered possessions to the last man, gave up before they were invaded.
In shutting out Hull, who was supported by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Roosevelt and the Morgenthau planners were also deliberately shutting out from government the opinions they represented. In the nation these were clearly in the majority. The majority of the press also opposed the Plan.23 Hull was admired and respected throughout the United States and the world because he was free of the vengeful violence that infected the Morgenthau supporters. In 1945, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Churchill told Stalin a few weeks after Quebec that the public reaction to the Morgenthau Plan had displeased Roosevelt and him. They were ‘not very happy about its reception’. But he added, ‘Great Britain would not agree to mass execution of Germans, because one day British public opinion would cry out.’24 Yet development of the Morgenthau Plan went ahead in secret.
Eisenhower began to carry it out on his own initiative in 1944. The first to suffer were the German prisoners. American prison camps under Eisenhower’s command in France were kept far below the standards set by the Geneva Convention.25 These camps were described by Lt. Col. Henry W. Allard, who was in charge of the US camps in France in 1945: ‘The standards of PW [prisoner of war] camps in the ComZ [the US Army’s rear zone] in Europe compare as only slightly better or even with the living conditions of the Japanese PW camps our men tell us about, and unfavourably with the Germans.’26 To maintain such camps was a war crime punishable by death, according to the Americans after the war. They shot Japanese General Masaharu Homma in 1946 for maintaining camps in approximately the conditions described by Allard. After the German surrender on 8 May 1945, the American camps grew steadily worse.
The total occupation of Germany, and the destruction of Germany’s armed forces, national government, political parties, coupled with the trials of the war criminals, was the beginning of the Allies’ post-war policy. At the surrender in May 1945, schools and universities were closed, as well as radio stations, newspapers, the national Red Cross and mail service. Germany was also stripped of much coal, her eastern territories, industrial patents, lumber, gold reserves, and most of her labour force. Allied teams also looted and destroyed Germany’s factories, offices, laboratories and workshops. So much food was confiscated that Max Huber of the International Red Cross complained about it in August 1945 in a letter to the US State department.27 Starting on May 8, the date of the surrender in the West, German and Italian prisoners in Canada, Italy, the USA and the UK, who had been fed according to the Geneva Convention, were suddenly put on greatly reduced rations. In the US, some ex-prisoners allege, starvation set in.28
Gruesome expulsions of civilians from the eastern territories now began. These were described by some writers in the West as ‘orderly and humane population transfers’, while others reported the lethal conditions as they were. German industrial production in the winter of 1944–45, which even under the Allied bombings was 105 per cent of pre-war levels, was reduced under the Morgenthau Plan to 25 per cent of pre-war levels by autumn, 1945.29
The public was fooled time and again into believing that the Plan had been abandoned when it had not; that there was a fatal world food shortage, when world food supplies were down by only 2–10 per cent; that there was a shipping shortage, when scores of ships lay idle at wharves in North America and Europe.30 Even so seasoned an observer as British historian Martin Gilbert has mistakenly written, after years of research on the war and its aftermath, that: ‘In the event, it was the State Department which rejected it [the Morgenthau Plan].’31 Morgenthau himself wrote, in the New York Post on 24 November 1947, after long study of Germany: ‘Much has been said and written about the so-called Morgenthau Plan for Germany from its first beginnings until it ceased to be attributable to any one individual. Then it became part of the Potsdam Agreement, a solemn declaration of policy and undertaking for action … for the three greatest powers on earth.’
Morgenthau’s friends were clearly more interested in vengeance than in reparations. As Senator William Langer of North Dakota stated in the United States Senate: ‘History already records that a savage minority of bloody bitter-enders within this government forced the acceptance of the brutal Morgenthau Plan upon the present administration. I ask, Mr President, why in God’s name did the administration accept it? … Recent developments have merely confirmed scores of earlier charges that this addlepated and vicious Morgenthau Plan had torn Europe in two and left half of Germany incorporated in the ever-expanding sphere of influence of an oriental totalitarian conspiracy. By continuing a policy which keeps Germany divided against itself, we are dividing the world against itself and turning loose across the face of Europe a power and an enslaving and degrading cruelty surpassing that of Hitler’s.’32
Senator Langer was not alone. His speech was warmly applauded. The Senate voted in approval of a resolution that stated in part, ‘Whereas … reports reaching the United States indicate that … the policies of the victor powers are subjecting millions to mass starvation, and whereas the United States has been a party to the commitments and agreements reached among the victor powers which have led to these conditions; and whereas the Congress has been bypassed and the American people have been ignored in the formulation and implementation of these policies, and whereas it is essential that the Congress of the United States should obtain the necessary information to enact legislation and to request the President to take executive action designed to eliminate the starvation conditions resulting from the policies for which this Government is directly responsible, Therefore, be it resolved …’ And the resolution went on to set up a group with a budget to study conditions in Germany and to report in detail.
This resolution was proposed by the influential Senator Kenneth Wherry, together with several others, including Capehart, Hawkes, La Follette, Hickenlooper and Taft. In presenting the motion, Wherry said, ‘Much has been said and little done relative to opening the mails to Germany and providing sufficient food to prevent mass starvation in Germany, Austria, Italy and other countries of Europe. Terrifying reports are filtering through the British, French and American occupied zones, and even more gruesome reports from the Russian occupied zone, revealing a horrifying picture