Michael Kenny wrote:sandeepmukherjee196 wrote:
The Morgenthau plan.............................
Was never sanctioned and was never implimented. Just like War Plan Red and Operational Unthinkable.
You are simply repeating the WW2 Goebbel's lie.
Heed the warning from your own source:
Nazi propaganda on the subject had a lasting effect and ......... it is stil lused for propaganda purposes by extreme right-wing organizations
I would add it is also being used by those who have a lingering admiration for Hitler.
Germans did not fight to the end because they wanted too but because if they did not the Nazi's would have them all swinging from lamposts. Fear was the driver and no attempt to hide the facts will work
The Morgenthau Plan was THE official policy of the Roosevelt regime. It ran up against resistance from other saner elements in the US Govt. Churchill was brought around by turning the screws on him regarding post war financial assistance. Churchill once famously burst out " What do you want me to do? Go up on my hind legs and beg like Fallah?"
Roosevelt's untimely death in April 45 was a bit of a dampener for Morgenthau's team but the JCS 1067 was modified and used to execute the main points of the plan. Please read the following :
INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW
The Morgenthau Plan and the Problem of Policy Perversion
Prof. Anthony Kubek
" The Morgenthau Diaries consist of 900 volumes located at Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York. As a consultant to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, I was assigned to examine all documents dealing with Germany, particularly ones related to the Morgenthau Plan for the destruction of Germany following the Second World War. The Subcommittee was interested in the role of Dr. Harry Dexter White, the main architect of the Plan."
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" Stated in its simplest terms, the objective of the Morgenthau Plan was to de-industrialize Germany and diminish its people to a pastoral existence once the war was won. If this could be accomplished, the militaristic Germans would never rise again to threaten the peace of the world. This was the justification for all the planning, ...."
" How the Treasury officials were able to integrate basic features of their plan into the military directive, originally prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and known as JCS 1067, is fully disclosed in the Diaries. White saw to it that many elements of his thinking were embodied in ICS 1067. Previous directives for guidance of American troops upon entrance into Germany, which already had undergone six or more revisions of a stylistic nature, were now brought more in line with the punitive thinking of Morgenthau and White. A new directive, which called for a more complete de-nazification, was, with some modifications, the spirit and substance of the Treasury plan. In the two full years that ICS 1067 was the cornerstone of American policy, Germany was punished and substantially dismantled in accord with the basic tenets of the Morgenthau Plan. JCS 1067 forbade fraternization by American personnel with the Germans, ordered a very strict program of de-nazification extending both to public life and to business, prohibited American aid in any rebuilding of German industry, and emphasized agricultural rehabilitation only."
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" At the Yalta Conference on February 4, 1945, the question of postwar treatment of Germany was the most important item on the agenda. The President's conduct suggests the powerful effect on his thinking of White's masterplan and Morgenthau's salesmanship. On the major points regarding Germany the President easily capitulated to the Soviets. Stalin and Roosevelt were in general accord that the defeated Germans should be stripped of their factories and left to take care of themselves. But Churchill wished to preserve enough of the existing economic structure of Germany to permit the defeated nation to recover to some degree."
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" What were the final results of the Morgenthau Plan? What actual effect did it have on Germany? "While the policy was never fully adopted," wrote W. Friedmann, "it had a considerable influence upon American policy in the later stages of the war and during the first phase of military government." Although President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill eventually recognized the folly of what they had approved at Quebec, Morgenthau, White, and the Treasury staff saw to it that the spirit and substance of their plan prevailed in official policy as it was finally mirrored in the punitive directive known as JCS 1067.
In a very definite way JCS 1067 determined the main lines of U.S. policy in Germany for fully two years after the surrender. Beginning in the fall of 1945, to be sure, a new drift in American policy was evident, and it eventually led to the formal repudiation of the directive in July of 1947. Until it was officially revoked, however, the lower administrative echelons had to enforce its harsh provisions. "The military government officers," writes Prof. Harold Zink, "were unable to see how Germany could be reorganized without a substantial amount of industrialization. They tried to fit the Morgenthan dictates into their economic plans, but they ended up more or less in a state of paralysis.
As White had certainly anticipated, the economic condition of Germany was desperate between 1945 and 1948. The cities remained heaps of debris, and shelter was at a premium as a relentless stream of unskilled refugees poured into the Western zones, where the food ration of 1,500 calories per day was hardly sufficient to sustain life. As Stimson, Riddleberger, and others had predicted, the economic prostration of Germany now resulted in disruption of the continental trade that was essential to the prosperity of other European nations. As long as German industrial power was throttled, the economic recovery of Europe was delayed -- and this, in time, led to serious political complications. To nurse Europe back to health, the Marshall Plan was devised in 1947. It repudiated, at long last, the philosophy of the White-Morgenthau program."
Goebbels used the spectre of the Morgenthau plan to harden the resolution and desperation of Germans to resist. Just like he used the Russian atrocities in the East to drum up fear driven motivation. Both were based on reality. Just like the Stalinists used the German atrocities in Russia to drum up patriotism and dispel any threat of widespread collaboration on an anti Bolshevik agenda.