ABSTRACT
Henry Morgenthau (born 1891) was US Treasury Secretary from 1934 to 1945, a person with strong views on the German question who had drawn up a plan in 1944 which was initialled by President Roosevelt, but met with considerable opposition within and outside the administration, and never became official US policy. The Morgenthau plan envisaged a radical deindustrialisation of Germany as the precondition to a lasting demilitarisation: Morgenthau’s view was that Germany would remain a threat to world peace for the foreseeable future, and if the Germans were in a position to produce prams, then they could also make aeroplanes again. However far this plan was from realisation-and any attempt to establish an agrarian island in the centre of an industrialised continent would certainly have presented almost insurmountable practical problems-it did have a psychological effect in Germany itself where the vision it conjured up became one of the great and persistent bugbears of the post-war period. One important element of Morgenthau’s reasoning has tended to be ignored by posterity, and that is the fact that he foresaw in a US policy directed towards the re-establishment of a strong economy in Germany the root of a serious confrontation with the Soviet Union. The following statement was to be presented to Roosevelt on 10 January 1945, but the Treasury Secretary decided against it because, as he said to his staff, ‘the President was very tired’ when he saw him. The statement puts its case in very direct terms, and whatever one assumes the many likely negative consequences of implementing Morgenthau’s policies would have been, there is a ring of truth in his prophetic warnings.
