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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 7
The next year Germany entered the League of Nations, where her chief role was to disrupt disarmament discussions by arguing for equality of armaments. It became plain that Germany did not want the world disarmed if it included herself; she wanted the right to build her armies up to the level of any others. Actually, she already was the strongest power in Europe. Her strength was in steel and coal, chemicals and synthetics, electric power and light metals—the real sinews of modem war. But in December, 1926, the Allies declared themselves satisfied with German disarmament, and on January 31, 1927, the Inter-Allied Commissions of Control were withdrawn. The only vestige of supervision over Germany was that exercised by the commissions watching reparations. Even this came to an end when the Dawes plan was replaced in June, 1929, by one named after Owen D. Young. Besides scaling down the German debt still further, the Young plan abolished the watching commissions. Probably they were quite useless since they were without authority to do more than report. But their departure removed the last remnant of Allied control over German economy, even in theory. Then on June 30, 1930, the last Allied troops left Germany, too, five years ahead of the time fixed eleven years before in the Versailles Treaty.
The pace of German rearmament was faster after that. For several years the leaders of industry had been giving increasing support to the Nazis. Attacks upon the republic grew more open and frequent, and as the depression deepened everywhere Hitler, whose attraction for a people bent on war could never be understood by peaceful nations, came to power. That day, January 30, 1933, served notice on the world that Germany was committed to conquest. The last traces of freedom were being stamped out under Nazi boots; the last few Germans who dared to talk of peace and mean it were fleeing into exile or dying behind the barbed wire of concentration camps. Germany was strong enough to assume the offensive. It came at first in the form of the world-wide propaganda of Pan-Germanism, in demands for colonies and boundary "rectification," in fierce economic aggression which brought smaller states into the German trade orbit, in an almost open campaign of stockpiling and industrial development. Within six months the course was so plain that Douglas Miller, United States commercial attaché in Berlin, wrote on August 1, 1933, to his superiors that the Reich's Assistant Secretary of Commerce Feder had expressed privately the real Nazi aims. The first two were:
1. Breaking the Versailles Treaty
2. Restoring Germany's military superiority
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
