[The following relates, in part, to the talks within the United States government that would eventually lead to the disastrously-received Morgenthau Plan. It proposed absolutely draconian measures to be taken against a defeated Germany.]
Morgenthau reported that Roosevelt was “entirely agreeable” to closing down the Ruhr: “Just strip it. I don’t care what happens to the population. I would take every mine, every mill and factory and wreck it… Steel, coal, everything. Just close it down… Make the Ruhr look like some of the silver mines in Nevada.”
”Sherman’s march to the sea!” said Daniel Bell.
”No, some of those ghost towns,” said Morgenthau. “Make this a ghost area.” If the region were “stripped of its machinery” and its mines “flooded, dynamited, wrecked,” he said, Germany would be “impotent to wage more wars.”
Harry Dexter White proposed putting the Ruhr under international control. Other countries could “strip it of any machinery they want.”
Morgenthau said no. He warned that if the Ruhr were internationalized, the Germans would stage a “revolution” and seize it, and the region would revert to “the German war people”: “All the war has sprung from that area. They cannot make war if that area is shut down.” As for the Saar, “shut that down or give it to France.”
White warned that shutting down the Ruhr would exile millions of Germans and harm the rest of Europe.
”May I just stop a minute?” said an irritated Morgenthau. “I have brought back a message to you as to where the President stands and where I stand. Why don’t you go to work on it, see?”
Morgenthau went on, “I am for destroying it first and we will worry about the population second… I am not going to budge an inch… The President is adamant on this thing. Sure, it is a terrific problem. Let the Germans solve it! Why the hell should I worry about what happens to their people?”
Morgenthau recalled his father’s World War I experience as Wilson’s ambassador to Turkey: “One morning, the Turks woke up and said, “We don’t want a Greek in Turkey… They moved one million people out. They said to the Greeks, ‘You take care of them.’… The people lived. They got rehabilitated in no time… It seems inhuman. It seems cruel.” But “we didn’t ask for this war. We didn’t put millions of people through gas chambers.” The Germans had “asked for it… For the future of my children and my grandchildren, I don’t want these beasts to wage war… I am not going to be budged.”
Note:
The incident that Morgenthau is so casually mentioning, that took place in Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire) while his father was ambassador there, is known today as the Greek Genocide or the Pontic Genocide. I’ve provided a link below at the end of the ‘Further Reading’ section.
Source:
Beschloss, Michael R. “Christianity and Kindness.” The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007. 103-4. Print.
Further Reading:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt / FDR
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