Scott Smith wrote:General Lucius Clay, in his memoirs
Decision in Germany, (Greenwood Press, CN: 1950) calls JCS 1067 a "Carthaginian Peace."
General Lucius Clay wrote:
There is no doubt that JCS 1967 contemplated a Carthaginian peace, which dominated our operations during the early months of our occupation.
Unfortunately, there is only one copy of the book in the entire Phoenix area so I would have to get it via Interlibrary Loan to mine more "smoking-gun" quotations for Roberto.
Another witness speaking horrors about this mysterious document JCS 1067.
Why does none of the witnesses get more specific about the contents of that document ?
Scott Smith wrote:Nevertheless, Edwin Hartrich's The Fourth and Richest Reich, (Macmillan, NY: 1980) has chapters on Disarmament, Denazification, Deindustrialization, and Democratization, which are interesting, especially the chapter on deindustrialization (pp. 74-90). However, I am not too inclined to type it all out for him.
Smith should realize that he is doing nothing for me. Whether and to what extent he provides evidentiary support to his contentions is his problem.
Scott Smith wrote:The Morgenthau Plan of the Quebec conference in September, 1944 was leaked and Nazi propagandists used it to rally their forces, so it was officially dropped, although FDR liked it.
My source tells me something else:
Wolfgang Benz (translated by Roberto) wrote:Morgenthau, who was a friend of US-president Roosevelt, seemed to be successful when at the British-American conference in Quebec on 15 September 1944 Premier Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt initialed an (already softened) version of the Morgenthau plan. But Cordell Hull, the American foreign minister, as well as his British colleague Anthony Eden protested against the plan already on the following day, and the American war minister Stimson called the program “a crime against civilization“. When the Morgenthau Plan reached the public due to a deliberate indiscretion on 21 September 1944, the reaction was so negative that even Roosevelt distanced himself from the plan. The Morgenthau Plan disappeared in the drawers already at the end of September 1944 without ever having been formally discussed by the competent bodies.
So it seems that
a) the leaking was deliberate and
b) what caused Roosevelt to distance himself from the plan was the negative reaction of British and American public opinion, rather than its use by Nazi propagandists.
But I’m willing to consider Smith’s contentions if he can demonstrate a causal sequence between the Nazi propaganda use of the plan and its being dropped.
Scott Smith wrote:Stimson and Hull did not like it because forcing Germany to fight to the bitter end only destroyed more infrastructure that they wanted for Germany to produce reparations with.
In my last post I quoted Stimson’s assessment of the plan in his memorandum for Roosevelt of 15 September 1944.
Smith is invited to demonstrate, on hand of that assessment, that Stimson’s primary considerations were the ones he alleges.
The next paragraph of Smith’s post contains one of his irrelevant statements of opinion decorated with some of his staple rhetorical baloney, so I’ll skip it and move to the ensuing statement:
Scott Smith wrote:The JCS 1067 directive was the new Morgenthau Plan as implemented with compromises from Stimson's and Hull's plans, and Hartrich too calls it a Carthaginian Peace and "unworkable" (pp. 108-109).
Now we seem to have three negative assessments of that mysterious directive, but still nothing about its contents that would allow us to establish whether and to what extent those assessments were justified.
Never mind, I’ll accept that Murphy, Clay and Hartrich knew what they were talking about, for want of evidence to the contrary.
Clay’s statement provided by Smith is of special interest in one respect, however:
General Lucius Clay wrote:
There is no doubt that JCS 1967 contemplated a Carthaginian peace, which dominated our operations during the early months of our occupation.
Emphasis is mine.
Compare this with the assessment of American diplomat Robert Murphy, also quoted by Smith:
Robert Murphy wrote:
The spirit-and sometimes the letter-of the Morgenthau Plan was reflected in many mandatory provisions of the top-secret directive JCS 1067, which haunted Military Government for several postwar years.
Emphasis is mine.
While Clay states that JCS 1967 dominated occupation policies during the
first months, Murphy maintains that it “haunted” the military government for
several years.
Is Clay understating the significance of the directive, or is Murphy exaggerating it?
Scott Smith wrote:Permanently hauling away industrial plant as infrastructure and using Germans for forced-labor were key features of the Morgenthau Plan as initially envisioned. Hartrich estimates that only about one-third of infrastructure could actually be relocated successfully, and most was merely shipped away and scrapped, i.e., simply destroyed, but lost to Germany nevertheless. Some 25 percent of their 10 billion dollars in reparations promised to the Soviets at Yalta and Potsdam came from Western Allied sectors; and additionally, the Soviets traded foodstuffs to the Allies for additional plant from western sectors. It is estimated that $12.5 to $25 billion was extracted from East Germany in reparations (pp. 82-83). The Allies could never completely agree on the issue of war-booty, and when the Soviets defaulted on their food shipments the first cracks developed in the wartime alliance with the Soviets.
In this respect it is interesting to have a look at the assessment of German historian Wolfgang Ramonat, published on pages 128 to 132 of Wolfgang Benz et al,
Legenden, Lügen, Vorurteile, 12th edition 2002 by dtv Munich. The translation from the German original is mine, as are the emphases where not otherwise indicated.
[…]The problem of reparations and thus a decisive war aim of the USSR initiated the sneaking breach of the “Anti-Hitler Coalition” in the spring of 1945. At the Potsdam Conference from 17 July to 2 August 1945 the “Big Three” reached a no more than formulary agreement on the principles of democratization, demilitarization, denazification and decentralization of Germany, while about the amount of material reparations to be provided by Germany (Stalin had already at Yalta proposed 20 billion dollars and claimed half thereof for the USSR) no agreement was reached. According to the London Agreement among the four powers an international military tribunal was organized, which at Nuremberg tried the major National Socialist war criminals from November 1945 to August 1946. All that remained of the original war aim of dismemberment [italics in the original] was the postulate of decentralization and thus the creation of federalist internal structures in Germany in contrast to the centralized National Socialist state. The concept of a common “democratization” of Germany failed due to the differences between the liberal-democratic system of parliamentary representation in the western zones of occupation and the communist-directed pseudo-democratic “block politics” in the Soviet occupation zone.
About the extent of the hauling away of industrial plant no agreement could be reached. The Soviet plans required a reduction of German heavy industry to 20 per cent of its volume. The USSR at Potsdam supported the principle of an economic union of Germany out of an elementary interest of its own, for it thus hoped to obtain reparations also from the western occupation zones. It required a special four-power administration for the Ruhr area, but fell through with this pretension due to the protest of the US. The principle of reparation policy established at Potsdam, according to which each occupation power should satisfy its reparation claims mainly out of its own occupation zone, soon made the principle of economic unity become obsolete.[…]
The above suggests that the “Carthaginian” nature of directive JCS 1967, which seems to have resided especially in the hauling away of German industrial plant, was related to Soviet reparation claims rather than to the Morgenthau Plan. Accordingly Clay (an early and determined opponent of Soviet policies, as far as I know) doesn’t seem to have seen a relation between directive JCS 1967 and the Morgenthau Plan, as Murphy did.
Scott Smith wrote:The premise of the Truman Doctrine was that stable and prosperous allies would act as a conterpoise to Communist subversion and thereby contain it. Hence, on account of Cold War pressures, the Marshall Plan replaced the Morgenthau Plan and politico-economic balkanization, and therefore I stand by my previous assertion that the Morgenthau Plan was initially implemented.
Fine. I stand by mine that whatever resemblance of the Morgenthau Plan characterized Allied occupation in its early days was based not on that plan, but on the policies that the four victorious powers agreed upon or failed to completely agree upon, the hauling away of German industrial plant being mainly related to
Soviet demands that the Western Allies, as pointed out by Ramonat, did not wholly agree with.