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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 42
Since Stresemann died, the German people have been subjected to a more sustained program for strengthening the will to war than he could have imagined. For twelve years the whole force of the most highly organized propaganda machine in history has played upon the German mind, already well prepared to receive it. Contrary points of view have been silenced with unusual ferocity and also with unusual thoroughness.
Defeat by the United Nations has brought no visible signs that the German dream of conquest had faded any more than it did in 1918. Hitler himself realized that this would be true when, fresh from the seizure of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938, he was quoted as saying: A defeated nation can even better than a victorious nation be trained and prepared for the day of final victory. It may happen that I cannot win victory at once in this coming war; we may be forced to interrupt it. Then we will all be back underground. But after some years, when the weak and inefficient democracies will have utterly failed to solve the world's postwar problems, then we will suddenly break loose from underground and our stupefied enemies will discover all too late that millions of their own youth, misguided by weak education, disappointed by democracy's failure, will be on our side. Victory in this Third World War will be quick and easy.
American observers who have entered captured German towns find no weakening of the German will. It is as strong today as was Hitler's in 1938. Its persistence is reflected in the woman of Aachen, quoted in the New York Times. Indicating the burning city she said: "If the British had only surrendered in 1940, none of this would have happened." Inevitably Germans will remember much more clearly how close they came to victory than how they came to be defeated. But even if they had not come so close, the will which has supported two world wars with terrible tenacity and virtual unanimity will not be broken by a few disasters. Desire for war has been as firmly planted in the German as desire for freedom in the American. The process has been going on in both for about the same length of time. Few people would suggest that the German is the less stubborn of the two. Yet how many decades would a conqueror need to kill the spark of freedom in America?
Optimists may hope that the extinction of Germany's lust for war could be accomplished in no longer a period. But if they are realists, too, they will not take a chance that it can be done any more quickly.
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
