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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 3
But Germany kept intact far more powerful forces for evil than those she lost.
She kept her people's lust for conquest, her heavy industries, her general staff.
She kept her shipyards, her research laboratories, her shrewd cartel system.
She kept extensive assets abroad, an illusion that she had been betrayed instead of beaten, the know-how and the skilled labor in all the fields essential to war.
Upon this foundation, she built for war so skillfully and camouflaged it so well at first that only a few realists, dismissed outside Germany as crackpots or hate mongers, were aware of it.
Once the camouflage was thrown aside, the world could hardly believe its eyes. Yet the relentless, almost logical progress of a nation's will to war had been going on for years without a check.
Cautious at first but gradually accelerating, Germany moved toward her goal. She seemed invincible until she hit something even stronger—the British spirit of the blitz in 1940; the Russian spirit of Stalingrad and Leningrad in 1942. These were the high-water marks of Germany's sea of blood. How did the waves rise so high in so short a time?
The preparation for 1939 began even before the armistice of 1918. That summer the military leaders knew they were beaten, at least for the time being. To Ludendorff, the strategist of German headquarters, August 8 was the "black day" of the German Army, although the Allied generals were grimly preparing for a campaign of 1919 and even 1920. It was the German high command that engineered the "revolution" which sent the Kaiser into exile and brought forward a group of unhappy civilians to take the odium of surrender. The high command never loosed its grip on the strings that controlled this and the succeeding puppet governments of republican Germany.
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
