The Origin of the Morgenthau Plan in Theodor Nathan Kaufman's 'Germany Must Perish!'

In my recent article on Theodor Nathan Kaufman's 1941 book 'Germany Must Perish!' (1) - which was subject to translation and mass reprints by Joseph Goebbels with his head of radio broadcasting Wolfgang Diewerge writing the foreword and doing some necessary editing - I alluded to the fact that Kaufman's plan to exterminate the Germans in 1940 was almost plagiarised by the plan dreamed up by Henry Morgenthau Jr in 1944 – that I have documented point by point in a separate article – (2) and which was actually implemented to an extent by the Allies at the end of Second World War.

Such a parallel is often simply ignored by historians of the Third Reich and the Morgenthau plan itself in so far as Morgenthau was a high-ranking jewish official in the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (filling a similarly powerful rule as his father had done during the First World War), (3) while Kaufman was a political non-entity with no known connections to any jewish organizations or access to powerful jewish figures.

In spite of this silent treatment in official circles at least one anti-jewish writer Comte Leon de Poncins (4) that I am aware of has picked up on the parallels and I suspect (but have not found) that other Francophone and probably Germanophone authors did as well.

Returning to the point we need to understand - as I have illustrated in my original article - that this should not be seen as meaning that because Kaufman himself was without power that his booklet did not attract considerable attention in the establishment circles in the United States. Indeed, I would argue that Kaufman himself - after the failure of his attempt to build an elite anti-Third Reich jewish co-ordinating organization off the back of his book - was actually more influential in political death than he could ever have been in political life.

Several facts about 'Germany Must Perish!' and Kaufman's campaign are of importance in understanding this.

These are simply thus: (4)

A) Kaufman wrote his book between 1938 and 1940 finally self-publishing via Argyle Press (of which he was the sole proprietor) in March 1941 before the United States entered the war.

B) Kaufman sent his book - which remember was expensively bound (i.e., not cheaply produced for a mass audience) - to a large number of influential journalists and politicians in the United States. Diewerge also claims it was sent to similarly influential politicians and journalists in the United Kingdom, but I have found no confirmation of this assertion as of yet.

C) Kaufman's publicity campaign (i.e., sending small black cardboard coffins in the post to the soon-to-be owners of the book with a simple message that 'Germany Must Perish!') that preceded his book by a day was elaborate and very effective.

D) The circulation of copies of Kaufman's work - or rather Goebbels and Diewerge's well-edited version of the original rather turgid offering (Kaufman was by any measure an appalling and rather limited writer) - was massive with half a million copies in the first print run alone.

If we combine these facts along with Kaufman's own political death (i.e., his not being able to significantly influence the interpretation and use of his own work) then we get an interesting albeit speculative picture unfolding before us in that Kaufman's work was distributed free of charge in a very public and eye-catching way to major policymakers like Morgenthau.

In addition, it was constantly referred to in German anti-jewish propaganda relating to the United States meaning that it would be a 'must read' for understanding Germany's ideas about jews in the United States on the part of senior politicians and journalists.

This would mean that Morgenthau had almost certainly read the book by 1944 when he wrote his memorandum or that Soviet intelligence - which remember had a very large espionage and information gathering network in the United States and Europe at this time - were aware of it and certainly would have read it. The reason I include Soviet intelligence in this picture is precisely because Morgenthau's influential jewish chief of staff Harry Dexter White is known to have been an active Soviet espionage agent (5) and the Morgenthau Plan is often seen as a Soviet plan to trigger Communist revolutions in Allied occupied areas of Germany.

Interesting: isn't it?

We have a plan - which caused untold suffering and death within Germany - that was very likely the brainchild of Soviet intelligence that was drafted - through a key jewish espionage agent - and brought to the fore and implemented through the agency of an important jewish politician in Roosevelt's administration, which as I have documented closely resembles a genocidal jewish plan for Germany from 1941. (6)

What I would propose is very simply this: despite Kaufman's failure to create his jewish co-ordinating association to implement his plan on the Third Reich and his resultant brief sojourn in the jewish political limelight.  His book created a sufficient enough stir - and remember it was reviewed by several different major newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times and Time Magazine - through its initial marketing and Goebbels' considerable use of it in his propaganda campaign. That it was brought to the attention of Morgenthau, White and/or Soviet intelligence and that Goebbels' heavy usage of the work kept awareness of the book high among these parties.

As the war began to turn against Germany in late 1943 - some historians would say decisively while others think that the decisive tipping point only came in late 1944/early 1945 - there became an increasing need to look to a post-war plan to deal with a defeated and/or occupied Germany. Now one or several of these parties looked to one of the few documents that proposed a post-war plan for 'decisively dealing' with Germany, which would Kaufman's plan from 1941.

The plan would seem to have great appeal to all three parties at this point as it focuses on the need to destroy the German capacity to make war or conduct any industrial activity at all. It is also focused heavily on revenge for real and alleged (but largely unspecified) 'German atrocities' which - given the atrocity propaganda that was then doing the rounds about nearly every group and nationality of people under German rule - (7) would likely not be unappealing as Morgenthau and White were both jewish while Soviet intelligence in the USA at the time was being run by Rudy Baker - (8) nee Rudolph Blum - who was himself also jewish and White's ultimate Soviet handler in America through his similarly jewish fellow Soviet spy in the US government: Nathan Silvermaster. (9)

Now if one studies Kaufman's plan it is fairly obvious that it is but a general outline with a lot of genocidal hatred of Germans filling in the practical policy gaps. Such an observation seems not unlikely to have been made by our three parties and they simply took Kaufman's basic framework and bent it to their own objectives.

The point as such would be less to sterilize every German so as to exterminate them (as Kaufman's plan explicitly demanded in spite of his modern jewish apologists' attempts to downplay this fact), (10) but rather to - in Morgenthau's case - to prevent Germany ever being a problem again and in White and Soviet Intelligence's case to create a plan that would eliminate the traditional German elite (the aristocracy or simply put the junkers) as a ruling class, remove the cohesion of Germany as an economic and military power and then subject its people to penurious economic conditions and mass starvation so that - as the common Soviet interpretation of Marx at the time told them - (11) the German 'proletariat would have nothing left to lose but their chains'. Since National Socialism had lost the war and the capitalist democracies had exploited and starved them: thus, creating a situation, which to Marxist thought, would naturally lead to a 'proletarian revolution'.

If we understand this then we can very easily see how the Morgenthau plan came to be conceived from Kaufman's plan in 'Germany Must Perish!'

This is my proposed theory, but how does it stack up with the historical evidence?

I have already explained in detail why Jeffrey Herf and Wolfgang Benz’s arguments about the ‘irrelevancy’ of Kaufman’s book are simply wrong and contain material omissions/oversights. (12) However, there is also interesting evidence and commentary from the literature that supports my position.

That evidence can be found in the fact that in 1944 a US Cabinet Committee was formed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (hereafter FDR) to come up with a plan for governing occupied Germany after the end of the Second World War, which consisted of Cordell Hull (US Secretary of State), Henry Stimson (US Secretary of War) and Henry Morgenthau Jr. (US Secretary of the Treasury) with Hull being the chairman. (13)

Morgenthau drafted the Morgenthau Plan between January and early September 1944 without reference to - or even telling - Hull and Stimson (who only found about it four days after Roosevelt had signed and authorized it for implementation) (14) in connivance with FDR (who later claimed that he hadn’t actually read it before he signed it and blamed Morgenthau (15) despite the fact that we now know he was supportive of it and had read the whole thing) (16) because Morgenthau believed Hull and Stimson as well as their respective departments were ‘too soft’ on the Germans. (17)

John Dietrich has pointed out that Harry Dexter White almost certainly was influential in drafting the Morgenthau Plan (18) with which position Matthias Riedel independently agrees (19) and Morgenthau’s own diary certainly indicates as much with White stated to ‘have the plan in draft’ ready for Morgenthau. (20) Morgenthau ironically also gave the Soviet Ambassador a copy of the full details of the plan over dinner being unaware that White was a Soviet espionage agent acting on behalf of the Soviet intelligence apparatus in the United States, which was immediately forwarded to Stalin. (21)

Breitman and Lichtman rather bizarrely envisage the Morgenthau Plan to have been conceived ex nihilo (‘out of nothing’) (22) which is not only unlikely but must be completely abandoned by comparing the sheer number of direct parallels and incidences of near plagiarism of Kaufman’s 1941 ‘Germany Must Perish!’ by the Morgenthau Plan. (23)

This is partly understandable in the fact that Breitman and Lichtman are both jewish and seem to have let their ethnic affiliation influence their belief given that they fail to condemn (or even really mention) the genocidal nature of the Morgenthau Plan, but instead choose to roundly condemn Stimson’s appalled comment that the Morgenthau Plan was ‘Semitism gone wild’ as ‘evidence of anti-Semitism’ in FDR’s Cabinet. (24)

Both Hull and Stimson were indeed appalled and understandably so. (25) Nor despite Breitman and Lichtman’s attempt at handwaving and minimizing were they the only ones with James Byrnes – later President Harry Truman Secretary of State – declining the position of High Commissioner for Germany precisely because he refused to enact the Morgenthau Plan as he regarded it as utterly evil and immoral. (26)

British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden was also horrified (27) and FDR only got British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to accept a revised Morgenthau Plan at the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944 – with some of the nastier elements removed but still genocidal in nature – by threatening to cut the British Empire’s access to further a $6 billion in Lend-Lease funding to continue the war effort against the Axis Powers. (28)

The only reason that the Morgenthau Plan was modified to be far less vicious was the fact that the details of the plan were leaked to the American press (via the journalist Drew Peterson; who - ironically - actually supported the Morgenthau Plan) and a massive furore erupted as Americans – particularly German-Americans - were absolutely appalled by the proposal to effectively wipe out the German people which threatened FDR’s political future in an election year. (29) Breitman and Lichtman also handwave this away and claim it ‘didn’t matter’, (30) but the broader literature disagrees with their attempt to try and rewrite American history. (31)

Flynn writes about the public reaction to the Morgenthau Plan as follows:

‘The barbarians could sweep into enemy countries and ravage their fields, burn their cities and murder their leaders. This is a job from which a civilized people must recoil if they have not lost their souls. But these considerations had no weight with those elements in the population whose minds were aflame with vengeance. They wanted blood. They wanted reciprocal horrors.’ (32)

The ‘elements in the population’ to whom Flynn was referring were the jews since as Bendersky has pointed out many – if not most – American CIC officers in post-war Germany were jews who fully believed they were to implement the Morgenthau Plan and begin the effective genocide of the Germans and were thoroughly and doggedly opposed by the US military in their work. (33)

Since the cat was out of the bag so-to-speak Stalin modified his plan to ‘run down the Anglo-Americans in the eyes of the Germans’ (34) and also used it as part of Soviet propaganda that the Germans would be better as part of the Soviet Union because of what the British, French and Americans were doing to them in their zones of occupation. (35)

It was only with the lifting of the remaining elements of the Morgenthau Plan on 10^th July 1947 by President Truman that Germany was saved from a plan which envisaged the extermination of at least forty percent of its population (circa 25 million people) via mass starvation and reduction to an agricultural and semi-medieval vassal state. (36)

This was but one of several failed jewish attempts to exterminate millions of Germans in the wake of the Second World War – the most famous being the Nakam plot of jewish Soviet partisan and later Israeli national poet Abba Kovner to kill six million Germans by poisoning the water supply of major cities like Nuremberg – (37) and while the post-war atrocities against the German people ethnically cleansed and killed hundreds of thousands as well as displaced millions of ethnic Germans both in Germany and across Europe.

Had Henry Morgenthau Jr. and Harry Dexter White gotten their way then at some 25 million more Germans would have been wiped out by jews bent on industrial genocide on a helpless defeated nation that had unconditionally surrendered.

Never forget, never forgive.

References

(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-relative-importance-of-theodor

(2) Documented in my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/germany-must-perish-theodor-nathan

(3) Sean McMeekin, 2011, 'The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power 1898-1918', 1^st Edition, Penguin: New York, pp. 126-128

(4) Leon de Poncins, Timothy Tindal-Robertson (Trans.), 1975, 'State Secrets: A Documentation of the Secret Revolutionary Mainspring Governing Anglo-American Politics', 1^st Edition, Britons: London, p. 48

(5) John Earl Haynes, 1996, ‘Red Scare or Red Menace?: American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era’, 1st Edition, Ivan R. Dee: Chicago, pp. 77; 84

(6) Documented in my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/germany-must-perish-theodor-nathan

(7) For example: cf. The Polish Ministry of Information, 1942, ‘The German New Order in Poland’, 1^st Edition, Hutchinson: London

(8) Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, 1995, 'The Secret World of American Communism', 1^st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven, pp. 204-205

(9) Haynes, Op. Cit., p. 77

(10) Jeffrey Herf, 2006, 'The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust', 1^st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, pp. 110-111

(11) Sean McMeekin, 2003, 'The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Muenzenberg, Moscow's Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West', 1^st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven, pp. 165-173

(12) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-relative-importance-of-theodor

(13) John T. Flynn, 1948, ‘The Roosevelt Myth’, 1st Edition, Devin-Adair: New York, p. 380; Richard Breitman, Allan J. Lichtman, 2013, ‘FDR and the Jews’, 1^st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, p. 296

(14) Flynn, Op. Cit., p. 382

(15) Ibid., pp. 383-384

(16) Breitman, Lichtman, Op. Cit., p. 296

(17) Ibid.

(18) John Dietrich, 2002, ‘The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy’, 1^st Edition, Algora: New York, p. 17

(19) Cf. Matthias Riedel, 1971, ‘Morgenthaus Vernichtungsplan fur das Ruhrgebiet’, Tradition: Zeitschrift fur Firmengeschichte und Unternehmerbiographie, Vol. 16, No. 5/6, pp. 209-227

(20) Quoted by de Poncins, Op. Cit., p. 110; also see 111-112

(21) Robert Gellately, 2013, ‘Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: Oxford, p. 281

(22) Breitman, Lichtman, Op. Cit., p. 296

(23) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/germany-must-perish-theodor-nathan

(24) Breitman, Lichtman, Op. Cit., p. 296

(25) Flynn, Op. Cit., p. 380; Gellately, Op. Cit., p. 281

(26) Flynn, Op. Cit., p. 383

(27) Ibid., p. 382

(28) Ibid.

(29) Ibid., p. 383

(30) Breitman, Lichtman, Op. Cit., pp. 296-297

(31) Michael Beschloss, 2002, ‘The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941–1945’, 1^st Edition, Simon & Schuster: New York, p. 149

(32) Flynn, Op. Cit., p. 381

(33) Joseph Bendersky, 2000, ‘The “Jewish Threat: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army’, 1st Edition, Basic Books: New York, p. 366-367

(34) Gellately, Op. Cit., p. 281

(35) Ibid., p. 296

(36)                 https://web.archive.org/web/20080414103548/http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2008/webarticles/080103_marshallplan.html

(37) Cf. Dina Porat, 2022, ‘Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors Who Sought Full-Scale Revenge’, 1^st Edition, Stanford University Press: Palo Alto