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Henry Morgenthau, The German Character
Five chapters from Morgenthau’s book, Germany is our Problem, here published with an introductory note by Ellopos. Emphasis, in bold or italic letters, by Ellopos. Complete book in print.
52 Pages
Page 14
A PATH TO PEACE
MY OWN PROGRAM FOR ENDING THE menace of German aggression consists, in its simplest terms, of depriving Germany of all heavy industries. The reason for selecting heavy industries is that with them Germany can quickly and terribly convert once more to war. Without them, no matter how savage her aggressive aims may be, she cannot make war. For longer than living men can remember, the greatest threat to peace anywhere in the world has been Germany's lust for armed conquest. Even more than the German Army, that lust has found its release through German heavy industry. It was done in two ways, both of which will be not only possible but probable again if we permit Germany to retain the basic means of aggression.
First, of course, was the actual manufacture of the weapons of modern war. The guns, planes, tanks, submarines which a Germany with heavy industry could produce fifteen or twenty years from now would be as far beyond present weapons as ours today are beyond those of 1917. We had just a taste of that future in the jet-planes and buzz bombs of last year. If Germany keeps the means to perfect such weapons, she will use them.
The second role of heavy industry in the German plan of aggression was and will be economic blitzkrieg. This can be and has been as demoralizing as the military article. The heavy hand of German power was laid upon the economy of her neighbors—and throughout Europe industries withered, scarcity grew, fear multiplied. Any country's war potential these days can be measured by its heavy industries much more accurately than by the size of its army, navy and air force at any given moment. In four years the peacetime industrial machine of the United States was converted into a weapon that dwarfed Germany's once famous Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht and the rest.
Cf. H. Arendt: totalitarianism reduces men to impersonal natural forces * German philosophers in support of Nazism * Beethoven and Mauthausen * The Superior Race of Germans * Kalergi, European Spirit must Precede Europe's Political Unification * La Construction de l'Europe selon Jean Monnet * Plan Fouchet * Mitterrand and Kohl urge European Political Union * Il Manifesto di Ventotene
