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 Franco-Prussian War series of 1870-1871, World War I and World War II, as well as the failure of the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919, the World War II allies were looking for that. Never be a competitive Germany resilient enough to invade its neighbors.
When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the press 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 imagined a Cartaginian peace, designed to ensure a pastoralized pastoral, disarmed and permanently unarmed.
Postwar Germany would have seemed to resemble the old pre-commission frontier, adding that the first-century advertising historian Tacit spoke in his Germania.
The plan would have ensured that within six months of Germany’s surrender, all of its industrial plants and equipment were to be dismantled.
The Ruhr, the medium of the European commercial force, had to be permanently castrated, hungry for its energy, raw materials and infrastructure.
After the war, the plan demanded a general virtual disarmament of Germany. Its previously assigned armed forces will become non -existent.
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.
The long -term security of Germany would have the strength and goodwill of the victorious United States and its allies.
When the dying Nazi Party got wind of the plan, Adolf 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 dismayed through 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.
Former President Herbert Hoover paraded the plan as inhuman. He feared the massive hunger of the other German people if they were reduced to a premodern rural peasantry.
But once the victorious allies have occupied a devastated Germany, witness of their lunar landscape ruined through large bombings and space fights of the plan.
There is a tragic note in the aborted horrors of the Morgenthau plan. In time, Germany is doing everything Morgenthau ever dreamed of.
Its green illusions have closed too much of their nuclear electricity, coal and fuel production factories.
Erratic solar and wind “sustainable energy” means that power costs are four times higher than on average in the United States.
The former formerly dominant European giants, Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes, are now bleeding from consumers and profits. Your own government’s green and electric car mandates ensure that they won’t be competitive around the world.
The German economy actually shrank in 2023. And the diminished Ruhr can no longer save the German economy from its own utopian politicians.
The German army is unarmed and short thousands of recruits.
German industries produce enough ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft to equip even their minimization in the army, navy, and air force.
A few hundred miles from Germany in Ukraine, more than a million Ukrainians and Russians have died, wounded or lacking, in the European war since the horrors of Stalingrad.
Yet the once postwar German dynamo nation now lacks the manpower, munitions, and money to aid Ukraine in any meaningful way against an ascendant Russian invader.
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 German people who shrink are angry, divided and depressed. Its 1. 4% fertility rate is one of the lowest in the western world.
A tragic irony is now abundant.
After World War II, Truman’s management rejected the perception of a pastoral, deindustrialized Germany and underscored as a ruthless prescription of poverty, hunger, and depopulation.
But now, the other German people voted for their own edition of update of the Morgenthau Plan: when they have voluntarily reduced the factory hours, they reduce food for energy and fuel foods and fought with millions of illegal foreigners 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, the former German conquerors refused to destroy the defeated country as too harsh. But now Germany is willingly pastoral, disarming, deindustrializing, and destroying itself.
(C) Agency 2025 Tribune, LLC.
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