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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 5
While European industry was struggling to complete reconversion to peace—much of it had to be rebuilt because of German destruction—Germany reached her prewar industrial output by 1922. Krupp and Thyssen converted their heavy gun factories—the weapons they could make were obsolete anyway—and concentrated on building up their modern plants for peace. These could be producing steel for war just as well at any time. The shipyards turned from submarines to merchant vessels, which soon were competing to advantage with the older, slower ships surrendered to the Allies. The chemical industries regained their place in world cartels. And everywhere research into new war weapons and the techniques for making them was carried on in secret or camouflaged laboratories. A hidden general staff co-ordinated the work of these recruits of industry with the regular army's hundred thousand men who were being trained as a nucleus of specialists. Around them a mass machine would one day be assembled. It would then take in the hundreds of thousands of Germans who drilled enthusiastically in sports clubs and longed for the day of real military training, the airplane pilots who were being trained abroad, the German-owned industries established outside the Reich to produce military instruments which the Allies had forbidden in Germany.
One of the supposed reasons for the speed-up of German industry and trade was the need to export in order to meet reparations payments. A great part of these was expected to come from a tax on exports. But although Germany's production was growing, the reparations schedules were so far from met that in the whole course of the struggle to collect, Germany actually paid out less than half as much as she received in foreign loans which were never repaid. By 1924, the Allies had tried in turn friendly negotiations, threats and the actual occupation of the Ruhr by French and Belgian armies. Each attempt added to the perplexities of the reparations problem which baffled the experts. But the result of every procedure was simple. None of them worked.
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
