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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 45
Germany now finds herself in much the same position, so far as democracy is concerned, as in 1918 but with the conditions aggravated many times over. Her defeat has been more complete and more devastating than before. Her own land bears the terrible open wounds of war, as it did not in 1918. Her people have been much more elaborately miseducated for freedom and common decency. They face a much more difficult task of reconversion and reconstruction, a much more disastrous period of poverty and hunger. They are hated with a virulence unknown in modem times because it has never been so richly deserved.
Any government that has to deal with a people in this situation is going to be extremely unpopular. If it takes a democratic form, it is going to labor under the additional handicap of ingrained German dislike. The test of any German's fitness for public office under Allied occupation should not be so much his sentiments, but whether or not he is likely to help lead his community and his country away from their desire to rebuild heavy industry's war potential. This, even more than the pro-Nazi records of individuals selected for key posts, can be a danger. It is a danger that apparently was overlooked or minimized in the first months of Allied occupation. Even where it was recognized at the top, it was neglected by minor officials. Ample evidence of this accumulated rapidly. Not only was the reconstruction of industries turned over to the management which had served the Nazis, but public and financial posts were bestowed by American officers upon Germans who perhaps had not been active party members but had collaborated with and prospered under the Third Reich. The same thing has been noted by British officers in their zone of occupation. Representative of many lesser selections, was the choice of Friedrich Schaeffer as Minister President of Bavaria. The choice was made by Colonel Charles E. Keegan, the American military government official, and it roused a good deal of adverse comment at the time. Most of the objections to Schaeffer were made on the ground of his reactionary past rather than active collaboration with the Nazis, since he actually had been jailed by them and held for a time in Dachau. The real peril in the Schaeffer appointment is that he is identified in the mind of Germans with that democratic philosophy they have been taught to despise.
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
