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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 28
The firm of Friedrich Krupp of Essen presents a clear warning as to how German heavy industry would rebuild for war if we allowed it to exist. After World War I, Krupp was required to destroy machinery of war. But a $9,000,000 loan from the United States in 1924 helped it to regain its old position, which before 1914 had enabled it to force the United States Navy to pay three times as much for armor plate as Europeans paid. After the loan, Krupp was sufficiently recovered to invade the United States. Under the laws of Delaware it organized the Krupp-Nirosta Company to hold and license patents. Some of these patents were for stainless steel, and by pooling with our own steel firms, Krupp was able to exercise a tight control over stainless steel companies here. Not only was production restricted, but KruppNirosta sent reports to Essen giving technical information on American producers and telling how much they were producing. When war broke out in 1939, Krupp-Nirosta (the Krupp part of the name was dropped in January, 1940, and a camouflaged Swiss ownership attempted) tried to put through a plan by which German firms in Latin America could get American supplies to maintain German influence there.
Even when a United States firm tried to escape some of the restrictions imposed by Germany, the system was too strong. The American Bosch Company had a series of agreements with Robert Bosch of Stuttgart, made in 1930. Besides the usual clauses limiting production and market territories, American Bosch had to pay such high royalties to Germany for fuel injection pumps and nozzles that in 1939 it wrote the parent company: "The production of Diesel engines during the past year has declined greatly.... The fundamental problem affecting the further development of Diesel engines in our country today ... is almost entirely one of price." But Bosch of Stuttgart kept the royalties so high that American manufacturers preferred gasoline engines. By 1941 this so seriously hampered our Navy in its building program that on June 19 it pleaded for a "second source of supply." American Bosch had no right to license any other firm to make the vital fuel injection pumps. It had to ask Germany for permission to give this aid to the American defense program! In 1942 one of the reasons given for the success of the U-boats against our shipping was our hopelessly inadequate Diesel engine production. Germany had barred us from going into large-scale manufacture of an essential anti-submarine aid.
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
