The Splendid Blond Beast

by Simpson, Christopher; Miller, Mark Crispin;

  12

  Morgenthau’s Plan

  The broad, popular demands that the U.S. take harsh action against those who had committed atrocities collided with the legal professionals at the State Department in much the same way as they had in the wake of the Armenian Genocide of World War I. This time, though, Herbert Pell and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., insisted upon clarifying the calculated ambiguities on war crimes policy in which the State Department had taken refuge for several years. State’s bureaucrats fought back and boldly pursued their own policies as President Roosevelt’s health deteriorated in 1944 and 1945.

  By the summer of 1944, there were three main centers within the U.S. government engaged in long-range thinking about Germany and the USSR, and two of the three were dominated by leading advocates of the “Riga” faction within the State Department. The first of these was the European Advisory Commission, which was ostensibly an inter-Allied consultative committee created to work out the details of decisions reached at the Big Three summit in Tehran in November 1943. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had agreed in principle on key aspects of military strategy in Europe, a plan for a postwar United Nations Organization, and the general outlines of policies on war crimes and denazification. Though many details remained to be resolved, the three Allies agreed that they would eventually separate Prussia from Germany, that there would be some form of isolation or international control of the German military-industrial complex, and that Nazis would be permanently barred from any position of responsibility in postwar Germany. Stalin and Churchill disagreed on the location of several borders and on the extent of Soviet claims for reparations from Germany. Those questions were referred to the new European Advisory Commission (EAC) for study.

  All of the U.S. representatives to the new commission—George Kennan, Philip Mosely, and E. F. Penrose—were openly hostile to any accommodations with the Soviets on postwar policy toward Germany.1 Instead, they used the EAC to promote a strategy calculated to rapidly establish a post-Hitler Germany as an economic, political, and eventually military bulwark against the USSR. The Soviets could see the drift at the EAC and soon decided to remain aloof from the postwar planning process that they had agreed at Tehran to support.

  The second main planning committee was a politically similar group with overlapping personnel organized at State Department headquarters in Washington. This group and the U.S. delegation to the EAC each pushed for a “stern peace with reconciliation,” as the slogan went.2 They favored rapid elimination of Allied controls on the German economy, maintenance of German industrial production at something close to wartime levels (though without arms production), and sharp limits on prosecutions for war crimes.

  This ran counter to what Roosevelt had personally promised Stalin and Churchill on these issues at Tehran and other international conferences. This division between White House promises and the State Department’s implementation planning can be traced in part to Roosevelt himself. By 1944, FDR had grown so suspicious of the Foreign Service that he withheld even from his own secretary of state the details of his international commitments, including those reached at Tehran.3

  The third center for postwar planning consisted of civil affairs specialists on the staffs of the War Department and of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces, Europe), commanded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. SHAEF anticipated carrying much of the responsibility for the U.S. role in the occupation of Germany, so its civil affairs departments took up consideration of war crimes prosecutions and even aspects of U.S. economic policy toward Europe. During the spring and early summer of 1944, the SHAEF staff drafted a handbook of directives for use in the military administration of Germany that recommended that the occupation government import food and relief supplies into Germany and use German labor to operate coal mines, public utilities, and the transportation network. Overall, SHAEF ordered that the occupation forces should ensure that “the machine [of German society] works and works efficiently.”4

  This strategy had considerable impact on the day-to-day conduct of the war itself. Army Air Forces officers favored saturation bombing of the coal mines in the Ruhr Valley in 1944, for example, as a means of striking at Germany’s most important energy supplies. But outside specialists (notably Frank Collbohm of Douglas Aircraft, who was later to found the RAND Corporation) successfully argued that these resources should not be destroyed because they would be useful for postwar reconstruction of Germany. The bombing was canceled.5

  Morgenthau got hold of a copy of the SHAEF occupation policy handbook and of a collection of State Department planning papers on Germany. He contended that their approach failed to make good on the Allied promises to the victims of the war. They did not extirpate the roots of Nazism and would thus set the stage for renewed German aggression within the next decade, he contended. Morgenthau traveled to London in early August 1944, officially to review U.S. financial policy toward Britain, but in reality to investigate the whole scope of U.S. postwar policy.6

  He met with Churchill, General Eisenhower and his staff, and with the U.S. staff at the European Advisory Commission. Anthony Eden provided Morgenthau with the confidential notes taken at Tehran concerning U.S., Soviet, and British grand strategy during the years ahead,7 and Herbert Pell briefed him on the obstructions faced by the UNWCC.8 Morgenthau aides Harry Dexter White and Bernard Bernstein provided him with detailed reports and copies of the State Department and War Department’s most recent policy documents, which they had obtained through service on interagency planning committees.9

  For the moment, at least, Henry Morgenthau emerged as by far the best-informed senior U.S. official about the various inchoate U.S. postwar strategies for Europe.

  He didn’t like what he saw. In Morgenthau’s eyes, the same factional split within the U.S. government over policy toward Germany and the USSR that had characterized much of the 1930s, and which had obstructed U.S. responses to the Holocaust, was also making it difficult to develop postwar plans for Germany, particularly in the case of U.S. war crimes policy and postwar treatment of the German industrial elite. SHAEF’s proposed handbook was the most immediate problem, as he saw it: if adopted, it would institutionalize policies that Morgenthau saw as appeasement of Germany.

  To Morgenthau, Germany had been responsible for two world wars within his lifetime. He had seen German complicity in the brutal crimes of the Armenian Genocide during World War I and Germany’s direct responsibility for the Holocaust. The Nazis had ruled Germany with wide popular support for more than a decade, creating an effective system of indoctrination calculated to foster race hatred. More than that, Germany remained an industrial power capable of dominating European business and strongly influencing world events. Morgenthau tended to disregard the political (and legal) significance of splits and rivalries within Germany, because virtually the entire German power structure had publicly supported Hitler and participated to a greater or lesser degree in the regime’s crimes.

  He saw German militarism and the country’s industrial and banking cartels as the root causes of European wars, and he believed that German culture showed an almost instinctive tendency toward brutality and aggression. Even if Germany was defeated militarily, the country was, for Morgenthau, inherently flawed, perhaps inherently criminal, and would remain the most important threat to world peace in the postwar years.

  Meeting the German threat, he reasoned, required continuation of the U.S.-British-Soviet alliance into the postwar era. Only in this way could peace be maintained in Europe, and this in turn required Western acceptance of the USSR as an equal among nations, stripping Germany of its industrial centers in the Saar and the Ruhr, and implementing a broad program of mass reeducation of the German people—all of which had been agreed to at the Tehran Conference. At times, Morgenthau even argued that an entire generation of German children should be taken from their parents and educated in Allied schools. This extreme step was necessary so that the ideology the Nazis seemed to ha
ve so effectively inculcated in the parents might be trained out of the children.10

  Upon his return to the U.S., Morgenthau approached FDR with a detailed critique of the SHAEF handbook. A few days later, Roosevelt blasted the handbook and sketched out for the first time his own vision of U.S. postwar policy for Germany. “This so-called ‘handbook’ is pretty bad,” Roosevelt wrote in a long memorandum to the secretary of war. “I should like to know how it came to be written and who approved it down the line.… It gives me the impression that Germany is to be restored just as much as the Netherlands or Belgium, and the people of Germany brought back as quickly as possible to their pre-war estate.” (That, of course, was precisely the intention of State’s planners.)

  Roosevelt went on: “It is of the utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation. I do not want them to starve to death but, as an example, if they need food to keep body and soul together beyond what they have, they should be fed three times a day with soup from Army soup kitchens. That will keep them perfectly healthy and they will remember that experience all their lives. The fact that they are a defeated nation, collectively and individually, must be so impressed upon them that they will hesitate to start any new war.”11

  FDR singled out pages of quotations from the proposed directives to emphasize his point. The conception that postwar Germany should be made to work “efficiently” was fundamentally wrong, as Roosevelt then saw it. “There exists a school of thought both in London and here which would, in effect, do for Germany what this Government did for its own citizens in 1933 when they were flat on their backs. I see no reason for starting a WPA, PWA or a CCC for Germany.…

  “Too many people here and in England hold the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place—that only a few Nazi leaders are responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people as a whole must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.”12

  By September 4, Morgenthau’s team at the Treasury Department had drawn up a detailed counterproposal. Its “Suggested Post-Surrender Program for Germany” began by laying out the Tehran program for division of Germany and creation of non-German “international zones” in the Saar and Ruhr. It included bans on parades and marching bands—FDR was convinced that this was an important psychological measure—and provided an outline of permissible structures for local governments once the Nazis had been driven out.

  The heart of the plan, however, was a series of harsh measures against German industry and against Nazi war criminals. The Ruhr—“the cauldron of wars,” in the words of the document—was to be “stripped of all presently existing industries [and] so weakened that it can never become an industrial area.” All plants and factories in the Ruhr were to be dismantled and moved or destroyed. The mines were to be sabotaged so as to “make it as difficult as possible ever to return the mines to operation.”13

  The proposed measures against war criminals were equally harsh. Under the plan, the United Nations would draw up a list of “arch criminals … whose obvious guilt has been generally recognized.” They were to be summarily shot shortly after capture. A simple system of Allied military courts would be set up to deal with less well-known offenders. These courts could set death sentences for any German who had murdered hostages, who had killed persons because of their race, religion, or political conviction, or who had committed certain other crimes. All members of the Gestapo, SS, and Nazi party were to be arrested and detained “until the extent of guilt of each individual is determined.”14

  Morgenthau convinced Roosevelt and Churchill to back the plan at the Quebec Conference later that month. He argued that title to the best German factories and industrial equipment should pass to the Allied countries, including the USSR, as partial payment for Nazi war damages. But Britain should become first among equals and assume virtually all of Germany’s highly lucrative export trade. This move would eventually end Britain’s growing financial dependence on the U.S. Some German resources would be closed down altogether to punish the Germans and, not coincidentally, to head off economic competition for Britain before it began. Morgenthau’s aides reassured Churchill that this strategy not only had the support of the U.S. president and his secretary of the treasury, but of England’s most prominent economist, Lord Keynes, as well. (Keynes had been among the most articulate opponents of heavy reparations for Germany after World War I, which gave his early support of the Morgenthau plan all the more weight.)15

  On the legal front, Morgenthau strongly backed Pell’s insistence that Nazis must be punished for crimes against Axis civilians and that tough, immediate action be taken immediately to rescue Hungarian Jews bound for Auschwitz. Learning of Pell’s ongoing troubles with the State Department, Morgenthau contacted his former aide, John Pehle, the recently appointed chief of the U.S. War Refugee Board. Pehle went directly to the acting secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, who had taken over for the ailing Cordell Hull. Pehle said that the War Refugee Board needed a public U.S. commitment to punish those who were persecuting Axis Jews if its own efforts at rescue and relief were to be successful. Failure to take action against these atrocities would be a “fearful miscarriage of justice,” Pehle said, and would result directly in further loss of innocent lives in Europe.16

  Stettinius sent Pehle a vague but courteous reply that basically ignored his plea.

  Herbert Pell continued to pepper Washington with reports on UNWCC activities and requests for new “instructions,” by which he meant a reversal of State’s veto of prosecution of Nazis for crimes against the Jews of Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Green Hackworth ignored him. He considered his earlier letter to Pell (which had gone out over Secretary of State Hull’s signature) to have been perfectly clear. Hackworth was not about to issue new “instructions,” and he certainly did not intend to change his mind about the jurisdiction of the UNWCC.

  But the situation was becoming increasingly embarrassing for the State Department. UNWCC chairman Cecil Hurst dropped a bombshell at a press conference in late August: No war crimes case had as yet been prepared against Adolf Hitler and other senior Axis leaders, Hurst said. There were only 350 names now on the UNWCC’s list, most of whom were small fry who had committed crimes against British POWs. The Washington Post, the Chicago Sun, and other major papers carried on their front pages a syndicated report from London stating that Herbert Pell had been “fighting a losing battle for speedy justice, but others have retarded everything.” The 350 names on the list were compared to “semiofficial estimates”—most likely leaked from Pell himself—that put the number of Nazi “war criminals” at 6 million: 1.5 million Gestapo and SS officers and 4.5 million SA (Sturmabteilung) brownshirt militia troops. These men were simultaneously criminals and “the greatest potential force and manpower reserve for a Nazi military rebirth,” the press report continued. “The legal basis of the commission’s work now bars punishment of Nazis for maltreating and slaughtering the Jews of Germany or of other Axis nationality, stateless persons or German-Jewish citizens of Polish, Czech, French or other Allied origin, [because] the Hague convention defines a war crime as an offense by one belligerent against the army or citizenry of another belligerent.”17

  Pell offered his solution through the newspapers. The definition of international crimes should be rearticulated, he contended, to include “all offenses against persons because of race, religion or political beliefs, irrespective of the victim’s nationality or the territory on which the crimes were committed.”18

  The proposal was visionary, yet it was in tune with the earlier legal conclusions of the London International Assembly and similar groups. It infuriated Hackworth. Lobbying in the press for policy changes was strictly forbidden for U.S. representatives abroad. Worse than that, the prevailing political climate suggested that Pell might succeed in his effort.

  Hackwort
h began a determined campaign to have Pell dismissed once and for all. He cultivated Acting Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, who appears to have disliked Pell for his independence and refusal to be a team player rather than for differences over policy. The hostility was evidently mutual, for Pell remembered the acting secretary of state as “one of the stupidest men I have ever known.”19

  The War Department meanwhile organized its own effort to head off Morgenthau’s initiative. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson saw Morgenthau’s plan as a disaster for Germany and for Europe generally, for much the same reason that John Foster Dulles and others had opposed high German reparation payments in the wake of World War I. Harsh Allied punishment of Germany would lead to an unraveling of European business, he reasoned, and perhaps to revolution.

  The secretary passed FDR’s tough marching orders to draw up a new handbook on Germany to his aide John J. McCloy, who in turn passed the problem of war crimes prosecutions to his specialist on the topic, attorney Murray Bernays. During two weeks in early September 1944, Bernays hammered out a six-page memorandum that in time became the legal foundation for much of the work of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

  As Bernays saw his task, he was to defer action once again on the war crimes issue until the war was over, thereby avoiding reprisals against U.S. POWs. He did not intend to develop a plan to slow the pace of Nazi atrocities, as was favored by Morgenthau, Pell, and Pehle. Bernays’s work at the War Department up to that time had consisted in important part in heading off attempts by the American Jewish community, and from the OSS and other U.S. agencies promoting psychological warfare, to open anti-Nazi war crimes trials while the conflict was still under way.