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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 51
The United Nations will be perpetrating a grim disservice to the cause of democracy if they impose a democratic form of government upon Germany. For it can be only form, not substance. The present generation have become the most fanatical haters of democracy ever known in the world. They have been taught with every artful device which a ruthless propaganda machine could invent that democratic regimes are weak, inefficient and corrupt. No government practicing the slightest degree of tolerance and freedom could possibly have operated so thorough a propaganda. Furthermore, no government of practicing democrats, however efficient and idealistic, will be able to bring anything but suffering to the German people in the next few years. Every family will be mourning its dead and its cripples. Food shortages are and will continue to be extremely severe, the more so if the Germans are not encouraged by every means, and especially the destruction of their heavy industry, to grow their own crops on their own land. There is an acute housing problem and very little warm clothing. Medicines are bound to be scarce, and disease will be aggravated by hunger and cold. The amount of relief that the United Nations can bring to Germany is bound to be inadequate. A dozen other countries in Europe are as greatly in need as the Germans and far more deserving. The United Nations have been able to spare shipping for only a minimum of relief needs for liberated areas. Peoples who bore the brunt of Nazi brutality should certainly have priority over a people who encouraged and supported and even shared that brutality.
Germans are human beings. Like all human beings, they will blame their sufferings on the government. For the Allies to saddle democracy with the odium of inevitable hardships will mean the destruction of any hope that a new generation of Germans might learn to understand and to embrace liberty. If the new German government adopts a conciliatory or a fawning attitude toward the victors, it will earn the contempt of the German people. If it seeks to oppose Allied terms and defeat the conditions under which it is proposed to hold Germany in leash, it will earn the enmity of the United Nations. If it is a democratic regime, it will lose the support of the people in the first case and forfeit the support of the Allies in the second. Either way, democracy will be discredited. The greatest mistake of those who urge a democratic form of government upon a reluctant German people is that they fail to grasp the realities of their subject.
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
