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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 37
About the middle of the century one of the Germans whose words were most widely quoted, was Johann Wappaus, a geographer. He was instilling into the German people a belief that the Latin, Negro and Indian races were quite incapable of any sustained effort unless driven to it by their superiors "through the weight of an iron will or the foreman's lash." Wappaus left no doubt that both the will and the lash should be German.
By 1862 the means for conquest were beginning to bear some proportion to the German lust for it. The first seizures of territory were to begin in two years, and one of the earliest German "Big Navy" advocates, J. J. Sturz, put out a popular book in which he made the lordly assumption, apparently shared by his readers, that territorial aggrandizement by Germany was a law of nature. The seizure of Schleswig-Holstein after a short war with Denmark in 1864, seemed to Germans to confirm this point of view.
If further proof was needed, it was supplied by the Six Weeks War of 1866, by which Austria was ousted from her leadership among German states, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which added Alsace-Lorraine to a new German Empire.
Germany was suddenly the most powerful nation in Europe, and the education of her people in their self-assigned role of master race was stimulated through all possible media of propaganda. The schools were mobilized from kindergarten to university; books and magazines were dedicated to the proposition that Germans loved war and were destined to rule the world; public figures proclaimed the beauties of German domination over lesser tribes, and in 1890 the Pan-German movement was launched to foster more systematically the ideas of territorial expansion and world conquest.
As early as 1893, one of its publications, prophetically entitled Greater Germany and Central Europe Approximately in 1940, trumpeted:
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
