[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.]
Although a Southerner, Hull, knowing that Roosevelt was in a tough mood, suggested the American Reconstruction as a model for treating Germany. After the Civil War’s devastation, he said, it took Southerners “seventy-five years to get back again.” Germany’s living standard should be “held down to subsistence levels,” its economic power crushed. The Ruhr might have to be closed. “We may even have to sacrifice a little of our trade to make the Germans suffer… This Nazism is down in the German people a thousand miles deep, and you have just got to uproot it. And you can’t do it by just shooting a few people.” Once again Hull recalled what a hit he felt he had made with the Russians in Moscow by saying he would have a “drum-head court-martial and shoot all the people.”
Stimson crisply insisted, as he had the night before, that Germany be treated with “Christianity and kindness.” They must follow some kind of “legal procedure” before people were shot. Stimson said it was “very singular” that he, the man in charge of the department [of War] that had done “the killing in the war,” was the “only one” who seemed to have “any mercy for the other side.”
[…]
Stimson warned his colleagues that “thirty million people will starve if the Ruhr is closed down… This is just fighting brutality with brutality.”
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. 105-6. Print.
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