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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 49
The optimistic belief that thousands of true German democrats survived the Nazi terror in exile or in underground movements rests upon no evidence so far as the German underground is concerned. The Nazis ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, and for years we heard little of the underground. When Allied troops took over Germany, the reason was apparent. The German underground had perished in Buchenwald and Dachau, its last representatives shipped home to relatives in those horrible little clay pots which Nazi brutality used as a final device of torture for the living.
A democratic form of government would have to be set up by outsiders, whether Germans in exile or Allies, and would be sustained either by Allied force or the belief of the German people that by submitting to democracy they could ease the terms to be granted them. This last was what happened after 1918. The Social Democrats accepted the blessing of the general staff to form a government. They adopted at Weimar a constitution which, on paper, was more democratic than our own. Certainly it undertook to guarantee all the freedoms of our own, and seemed to be as well protected with provisions for popular rule as any document could be. The supposedly democratic parties won overwhelming majorities in the earliest elections. If such a regime could not break with the military past, certainly there is nothing that could do so now.
The Weimar Republic was not strong enough to take control of the Army out of the hands of its enemies. It dared not, or at least did not remove anti-republican judges, teachers and civil servants from their public duties, even when these functionaries openly agitated against democracy and the republic. On rare occasions when this grew too violent, or seemed to the timid men of Weimar to be compromising them in the eyes of the Allies, an official would be retired on a full pension, presumably to give him more time and scope for his political activities. If a clash occurred between monarchists and republicans, Nazis and pacifists, the republicans and the pacifists took the more severe punishment. Men who exposed the illegal activities of the Army were murdered with impunity and some of these murders were rewarded later with high positions in the Nazi hierarchy.
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
