Blog ||| Special Homages: Meister Eckhart / David Copperfield
| |
|
|
|
|
|
Start |||
The
Philosophical Europe ||| The Political Progress ||| European Witness ||| EU News
Blog ||| Special Homages: Meister Eckhart / David Copperfield |
|
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 29
The occupation of Germany has revealed a great many details, suspected but now proved, of how the German heavy industrialists prepared for this war and then, seeing defeat, began preparing for the next. When our troops went into Frankfurt, military government officers headed straight for the main offices of I. G. Farben, greatest of German trusts. The officers got there while shells were still bursting in the area. The Germans had done a very thorough job of mixing up the records. Trash and secret agreements, dead files and important contracts were scattered all over the floors and staircases of six stories. Essential documents had been shipped all over Germany. One official had hidden a ten-inch pile of international dye agreements under an innocent layer of family silver. The military found valuable I. G. Farben papers in beer halls, caves, salt mines and even monasteries. Out of the documents sorted out from the wastepaper emerged proof of German schemes both past and present.
One example is the minutes of a meeting at which on March 17, 1939, the legal brains of I. G. Farben met to safeguard the German trust's assets abroad during the war. In the United States this was to be done by transferring patents to General Aniline & Film. Approval of the German Economies Ministry was obtained, and Farben officials wrote: "We know from previous experience that our American friends are handicapped in their work for us by the existing links and believe that we must help them in the defense of our interests by carrying out the measures described above which they have recommended to us." Fortunately, Farben's "American friends" had underestimated the vigilance of the Treasury and other American officials. The Treasury took over General Aniline & Film, and the minutes of the German meeting are chiefly interesting as proving the wisdom of our course and as evidence of a plot that failed. But we should not be in the least complacent. For other plots did not fail.
At a whole series of vital points, American production for war was hampered as it had been for peace by the dominant position of German heavy industry. It happened in optical goods, in synthetic rubber, in tungsten carbide for machine toots, in atabrine to fight malaria, in high octane gas, in the new explosive tetracene, in magnesium and beryllium and plexiglass. If Germany could fit the industrial powers of the United States into her pattern of world conquest, it is easy to guess how completely she could control nearer and weaker neighbors. But we do not need to guess. We know.
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
