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 media 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 envisioned a permanently deindustrialized, unarmed and pastoral Germany. The plan would have ensured that within six months of Germany’s surrender, all of its industrial plants and equipment were to be dismantled.
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.
When the dying Nazi Party got wind of the plan, 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.
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 Joseph Stalin, was ruthless and hellbent on turning all of Europe communist, the 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.
The German economy actually shrank in 2023, and 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.
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.
Victor Davis Hanson is a historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.