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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 36
The Nazis pushed these theories further in practice than any of their predecessors, but they could not have done it without the generations of preparation. The German people had to be cultivated intensively for nearly two hundred years before they could produce those finest Nazi flowers—the gas chambers of Maidaneck and the massacre of Lidice. It would be a highly reckless gamble to act on the wishful thought that the blood of nearly six years of war has not only fertilized this soil but changed its character.
For the traditional German will to war goes back as far as our own traditional will to freedom. While Americans were debating the rival political philosophies of Jefferson and Hamilton, and deciding that they preferred the greater promise of democracy, Germans were reading a complete preview of the Nazi regime.
It was 1800 and the United States was enjoying the hottest presidential campaign of the new century, but Johann Gottlieb Fichte had just anticipated Hjalmar Schacht with a book called "The Closed Commercial State". Briefly his program called for a planned economy, barter trade with other countries, blocked currency, concealed inflation, ersatz materials. The objective was Lebensraum, and to get this German living space, Fichte called for intensive armaments, the occupation of desirable territory and the transfer of populations.
In a Europe dominated by Napoleon, this could be confused with patriotism, but it did not die with the French dictator. In the next generation, while the British people were concerned with no political subject so much as the Reform Bill, which finally passed in 1832, Germans were studying Hegel.
This paladin of German philosophy taught that the state was the most perfect manifestation of God in the world of men; that the Prussian state was the noblest expression of that heavenly mandate, and that its emergence was the culmination of the historical process. During this period and for many years afterward, the German people's resources for war and conquest were ridiculously inadequate to the grandiose tasks for which they were being prepared. France, England, Russia, Austria were the big powers, and even Prussia could not at the time be considered in the first rank. But German teachers continued to preach a gospel of war and racial superiority. As Heine said, they were in no hurry.
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
