The Jew Who Defeated Hitler Page 28
During the conference, Roosevelt had confirmed that he would run again and chose as his running mate a little-known senator from Missouri named Harry Truman. The beachhead in Western Europe was expanding. Henry Morgenthau was entering the endgame of World War II and the postwar world as the architect of the emerging global economic order.
Harry Dexter White could probably sense his boss was ready for a new challenge as they winged their way toward Scotland in a C-54 Skymaster on August 5. The monetary conference had been an unqualified triumph, and the Allies were advancing on all fronts. Mussolini had been imprisoned, and Hitler almost killed in an assassination attempt. The Soviets were on the verge of Romania and Lithuania. In the Pacific, the Americans continued their tortuous island-hopping. Roosevelt would likely win another four-year term. Now Morgenthau, White, and a few staff members were flying to Britain and France to assess Allied needs in the next stage of the war. Wanting to steer his boss toward one particular aspect of the victory, White handed Morgenthau the State Department document he'd secured a few days earlier.
Written by Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s underling Leo Pasvolsky, the memorandum on the postwar strategy for Germany highlighted the need to rebuild the country. It argued that German goods would be needed after the war, so the Allies would have to rebuild German industry and make them pay short-term reparations. Germany, it said, should remain a unified country and retain sufficient factories to maintain a comfortable standard of living. White had gotten hold of a copy of the document through an interdepartmental committee he served on and strongly disagreed with it. Morgenthau read the paper silently, growing more and more furious.1 White obviously wanted to lure the secretary into the planning for postwar Germany, but he probably had no idea the forces he was unleashing. By the time the plane landed in Scotland, Morgenthau was obsessed with postwar Germany.
Soon they were on a train heading south with Col. Bernard Bernstein, a former Treasury lawyer now serving with the Civil Affairs section of SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. He told them the SHAEF staff believed they should bolster the German economy after the war to “keep our troops from bogging down in a morass of economic wreckage.”2
By noon, they had arrived at Portsmouth, where Morgenthau and White wasted no time in asking their host, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower, his position on the treatment of defeated Germany. Still fighting a war, Eisenhower had given little thought to the coming occupation. But he had just learned that morning of the Nazi barbarity at some of the death camps and made it clear the Germans would have to make amends for starting the war and committing crimes against humanity. “I am not interested in the German economy and personally would not like to bolster it if that will make it any easier for the Germans,” one Treasury member remembered him saying.3
“He was very positive that he was going to treat them rough,” Morgenthau said weeks later, pleased with what he had heard. “He was perfectly willing to let them stew in their own juice at the beginning,” even though such thoughts were contrary to the official document.4 Morgenthau continued to investigate the matter as he met with military leaders like Chief of Staff Bedell Smith and General Omar Bradley. In all these meetings, he sought reassurance that the military would be tough on Germany, and his impressions were no doubt shaped by the fervency of his own position.
The next day he flew under fighter escort to Cherbourg, France, where he was awestruck by the wooden pilings and concrete breakwaters being thrown up to handle the massive import of men and equipment. “I mean, I have never seen any place where the electricity is so in the air and the drive behind this thing, you just can't understand it until you see it and feel it,” he later told his colleagues. Standing amid the stacks of ordnance and supplies, he learned that 500,000 men had come ashore through one beach alone. He had an emotional reunion with Henry III, who later noted his father put on his dark glasses when they parted so no one would see the tears in his eyes. After sleeping in a French farmhouse, Morgenthau met Bradley, whose military bearing impressed the secretary. Morgenthau was allowed within five hundred yards of the front, where the US troops faced a German force that included three SS divisions. On his last night in France, he visited an evacuation hospital, where men injured only hours earlier awaited transportation to England or back home. He boarded one evacuation plane and had to battle nausea from the smell of the wounded. “There were sixty boys and I shook hands with every one of them, and some of them are very, very sick,” he said later.5
He settled into London, where buzz bombs (unmanned craft that flew across the channel and exploded on impact) had replaced the Luftwaffe as the main threat. He wrote his wife from his hotel room at Claridge's, saying: “I have returned from France where both Henrys were well.” (Censors actually eliminated the word “where” presumably because it identified the location of a soldier.)6 Morgenthau wanted to meet common people as well as decision makers, so Clementine Churchill, the prime minister’s wife, and Lady Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the head of the British forces in India, led him one night to converted tube stations to visit the homeless. Morgenthau adored Mrs. Churchill, who reminded him of Eleanor Roosevelt, and had sent her through US ambassador John Gilbert Winant a selection of eggs and ham from his farm.7
Morgenthau was moved by the people in the shelters—which ranged from a new, clean tube station to a grotto by the Thames. The warmth and spirit of the people dissolved his natural shyness, and he reveled in chatting with whole families that had moved into these bunkers. “You see a family—there was one family there that had no home and they had been there for six weeks, living there,” he later told his staff. “That was their home. I saw one mother with five children. I saw another mother with an eight-months-old baby…. You go in and see these people—this is London—and see the spirit.”8
His main duty was to meet government officials, so he spent about two hours with Churchill in his subterranean map room near Whitehall and with Chancellor of the Exchequer John Anderson and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Churchill kept driving home the point that Britain was broke and needed financial aid. Morgenthau sympathized but also wanted to probe the German question. He got the impression that Churchill favored a harsh policy, but he also learned many Conservatives wanted to rebuild Germany to provide a market for British goods and a bulwark against the Soviet Union. He came away believing that Anthony Eden wanted to dismember Germany. Eden revealed to him that Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill had all agreed at Tehran that Germany should be partitioned, which demonstrated to Morgenthau that Pasvolsky’s document contradicted the president’s wishes. Morgenthau later told his staff Eden “wants to take Germany apart. Completely apart. He is very good on this thing.”9
During their meeting, Churchill said he'd heard Morgenthau was “unfriendly” toward Britain—a surprising statement given that the “Morgenthau-Purvis Channel” was three years earlier the best way to get support in Washington. Morgenthau said it wasn't so but that he didn't like the way the British would play one party against another. He suggested the prime minister be frank with the president about the country’s position and proposed a committee to study the financial matters. The British had been surviving on phase one lend-lease, which the United States had authorized to prosecute the war up to victory in Europe. The Allies had yet to finalize lend-lease arrangements for phase 2 (between the fall of Germany and victory over Japan) and phase 3 (after the fall of Japan). Britain believed it was only fair that the United States, with its financial might, continue the program through reconstruction. But powerful people within Congress believed the program was designed for military action, not reconstruction. The lend-lease payments were substantial, amounting by August 1944 to $26.9 billion over three years.10 To put that in perspective, the entire US government expenditures in 1944 were $100 billion. The matter was further complicated because Britain wanted a role in providing aid to mainland Europe while receiving aid from the United States. The Americans believed
Churchill wanted to use the aid to garner support for reestablishing monarchs in countries like Greece and Italy in spite of American opposition.11
On August 12, Morgenthau invited Ambassador Winant and several of his advisers to lunch at a country house in Wiltshire, where the secretary was now staying. Winant had been serving with British and Soviet representatives on the Europe Advisory Commission, which was drawing up surrender documents for the coming victory. He favored a magnanimous peace. After lunch, they sat out on the broad lawn, and Morgenthau, with backing from White, outlined his position on the German question for the first time. He said Germany should never again be in a position to wage war, so it might be necessary to reduce Germany to a fifth-rate power. He failed to convince Winant and the other guests, one of whom said White came close to “clothing a bad thesis with an appearance of intellectual respectability.” Philip Mosely said Morgenthau’s plan would simply drive Germany to Russia and give the Soviets control of central Europe.12
As the trip wound down, Morgenthau told the British people in a radio broadcast that the Allies had to do more than defeat Germany and hope it remained disarmed. They had to permanently disarm the Nazis.13 The Germans, meanwhile, broadcast their own propaganda, saying Morgenthau during his trip to Normandy had “appropriated” the historic 230-foot Bayeux Tapestry, showing William the Conqueror’s preparations for his invasion of England. (It had previously been reported that Reich Marshall Hermann Göring had taken the tapestry for his own art collection, though it was later found in the Louvre in Paris.)14
By the time Morgenthau returned to Washington on August 16, he had formulated the framework of a plan for postwar Germany. Though Morgenthau is often portrayed as a lone voice crying for retribution against Germany, he was no doubt influenced by the volumes of books and articles published during the war warning that Germany unchecked would grow bellicose again. On the weekend that Morgenthau flew to England, the New York Times Magazine had run a feature titled “The Nazis Dig In for World War III.” It noted that the Nazis for five years had seen people in their occupied territories fight an underground war against the Reich. The article postulated that the Germans were now preparing similar tactics to employ when they were occupied by the Allies. It was why they were fighting so furiously even though they knew they had lost the war. “They are playing for time to complete their ‘post-war plans’ for the survival of Nazism,” said the article.15 So officials debated not only how to prevent the Nazis from becoming a guerilla force but also how to ensure Germany lacked the power ever to wage war again. As early as 1942, British author Paul Einzig had published Can We Win the Peace?, which advocated the abolition of German military production. It said Germany’s arms buildup in 1933 to 1939 was one of the most spectacular economic and technical achievements in history. “To prevent Germany after this war from preparing for another war of aggression, it is vitally important for us to realise the importance of the economic factor among the factors that enabled Germany to rearm in record time,” wrote Einzig, who wanted to remove its capacity for producing arms and ordnance.16 Books on the postwar world were popular in the early 1940s, and several argued for some means of suppressing Germany’s potential for waging war. In What to Do with Germany, Col. T. H. Minshall argued that international commissions would be needed to monitor German factories, including airplane factories, to make sure only domestic planes were built.17 C. J. Hambro, in How to Win the Peace, advocated “public control” in the armament industries.18 But many supported rebuilding Germany. “To dismantle German industry would be to leave in the heart of Europe a cancer that would eventually destroy not only the Germans but the Continent itself,” said Vera Micheles Dean in On the Threshold of World Order. “And it would be a great waste of skills, energies and ingenuity that the Germans have in so large a scale.”19 In his own book, Sumner Welles agreed that the Nazis were already planning to rise again after losing the current war, but he warned against punishing Germany. “The Policy to be followed should be designed not to destroy Germany, but to construct out of Germany a safe and co-operative member of world society.”20
The day before Morgenthau left for Europe, Arthur Krock noted that several plans for postwar Germany had circulated within the administration, but attention was being centered on an economic solution. “To prepare for, make and sustain war, a nation must depend on heavy industry,” wrote Krock. “This suggestion is to internationalize the areas in Germany proper on which heavy industry depends. The Germans would be allowed to share in the products of these areas up to a point where they could begin to pile up reserves sufficient to start another war.” The column said that when occupied land was returned to original countries, the German industrial capacity would have shrunk dramatically.21
Polls showed 81 percent of Americans supported the notion of unconditional surrender. Most believed Germany would start planning a new war soon after the current one ended and wanted Germany reduced to a third-rate power.22 But Morgenthau, the strongest hawk in the administration, took the idea of German suppression further than anyone else and devised a plan to put it into action. On his return to Washington, he met first with the 9:30 Group to brief them on his discussions in Europe. (Daniel Bell’s first question was, “Do you have this tapestry with you?”23) Morgenthau said the president “will have to get awfully busy. It took me days, and days, and days, but I got the story. There isn't anything in regard to Germany which is being carried out [as the president wants]. I am going to tell Hull so, because his boys are the worst.”24
Morgenthau visited Hull’s office on August 17 and found him exhausted and confused about what the three powers had agreed to. “I have never been permitted to see the minutes of the Tehran Conference,” Hull said. “I have asked, and I have not been allowed to see them, and what you have told me is the first time I have heard this.” He described the European Advisory Committee as a “complete failure” and left Morgenthau with the impression that he too favored a harsh settlement for Germany. Morgenthau ended the meeting by asking him definitively what he would like to do with Germany, “I don't have a chance to do anything,” he said. “I am not told what’s going on.”25
Two days later, Morgenthau complained again to the president about the State Department, detailing the Pasvolsky report and what Hull had said. “The President didn't like it, but he didn't say anything,” he later dictated into his diary. “He looked very embarrassed, and I repeated it so that he would be sure to get it.” Morgenthau then told him about the work of Winant and the European Advisory Committee and concluded that nobody “has been studying how to treat Germany roughly along the lines you wanted.”
“Give me thirty minutes with Churchill and I can correct this,” Roosevelt finally said. He added the Allies had to be tough not just with the Nazis but also with the German people. “We either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such a manner so they can't just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.”
“Well Mr. President, nobody is considering the question along those lines,” said Morgenthau. “In England they want to build up Germany so she can pay reparations.” He left the meeting convinced that the president “personally wants to be rough with the Germans.”26
Morgenthau immediately formed a Treasury committee with John Pehle, Harry Dexter White, and Ansel Luxford—men he believed shared his views on Germany. He wanted them to write a memo proposing policy on Germany. Historian John Morton Blum later wrote that Morgenthau dominated this committee, and the members did his bidding even when they disagreed with him. They collected materials far and wide, even from John Maynard Keynes, who had opposed the harsh peace settlement of the previous war.27
Henry Stimson invited Morgenthau to lunch with John J. McCloy a few days later, and the atmosphere among the administration’s leading hawks was convivial. When the talk turned to Germany, McCloy revealed he was focused on the short-term problem of how the army would oversee Germany and the period afte
r the armistice, but Stimson was worried mainly about long-term considerations. He said the Allies may need to patrol Germany for decades, until another generation grew, and seemed to support a proposal by French statesman Jean Monnet to make the industrialized Saar Basin an international zone.
“Well, if you let the young children of today be brought up by SS Troopers who are indoctrinated with Hitlerism, aren't you simply going to raise another generation of Germans who will want to wage war?” asked Morgenthau. “Don't you think the thing to do is to take a leaf from Hitler’s book and completely remove these children from their parents and make them wards of the state, and have ex–US Army officers, English Army officers and Russian Army officers run these schools and have these children raised in the true spirit of democracy?”
He also said the Allies should remove industry from Germany. Stimson replied that would mean removing a lot of people from the country because agriculture could not support the current German population.
“Well, that is not nearly as bad as sending them to gas chambers,” said Morgenthau, who proposed a committee made up of himself, Stimson, and Hull to draw up proposals for the president on a policy for postwar Germany.28
The German policy soon occupied more and more of the secretary’s time because he was involved in postwar planning, occupation currencies, and the efforts to help Jewish refugees. The refugee issue itself could only have amplified Morgenthau’s hatred of the Nazis as he received several briefings a week from Pehle proving the tyrannical evil of the regime. Most Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe had been murdered, and the Germans were now turning their attention to the remaining pockets in Bulgaria, Romania, and especially Hungary. On August 23, for example, Morgenthau learned of twenty thousand Jewish men, women, and children, sleeping for four or five days in a field in Hungary, who were then herded into boxcars for transportation. Sixty people were packed into each car, which was then nailed shut. “The people are packed in the cars like sardines with no possibility of sitting or moving,” said one report from Pehle. “Many must have been dead on arrival.” Though the Allies were certain 400,000 Hungarian Jews had already been deported and murdered, Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian leader, had offered to release surviving Jews as long as the Allies accepted responsibility for their resettlement. Yet the Gestapo was actively trying to prevent any Jewish escape, especially to Palestine.29