@ladymccormick Generally speaking, I wouldn’t recommend using speculative forum posts as source material for a university thesis. Anyway, for some more details, see: https://coolinterestingstuff.com/did-hitler-escape-to-spain
But I don’t really believe it, as I already explained in my 2016 reply to this topic (see above).
What If Hitler Had Used Nerve Gas?
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From what I’ve read, Hitler believed that the Allied powers also had never gas and would use them against Germany’s own cities in retaliation if Germany used them. However, it seems that he was wrong.
So, that begs the question, how might have World War II changed if Hitler had decided to use nerve gas? Nerve gas could be dropped over cities to produce horrendous casualties, such as London, and could have been used tactically to destroy opposition forces, much like nuclear weapons were used. With such a powerful weapon on his side, could Germany have conquered the eastern Soviet Union and at least forced a armistice with Britain?
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The battle that comes to mind where such a weapon would have proved effective is Stalingrad. The Eastern front is the most likly front to see such a weapon.
The thought of Nerve Gas getting dropped on civilian populations is evil. Glad the war did not drop to that level of depravity.
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Actually the 1930s was filled with such vid thoughts on the topic and it was assumed that in case of war all powers would resort to he use of such weapons; H.G. Well’s The Shape of Things to Come was filled with air bombardment filled with Chemical Weapons. Even though such a weapon existed (in Primitive form) as early as 1917 it was never used. Some have thought that Hitlers own expierence being gased in the first war had something to do with his own reluctence to use it as well as his own fear of national level retaliation. Small uses did ocure in ethiopia and chinia however and the use of smoke (yes it is is classified as a Chemical) was common throughout the war.
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@ABWorsham:
The battle that comes to mind where such a weapon would have proved effective is Stalingrad. The Eastern front is the most likly front to see such a weapon.
The thought of Nerve Gas getting dropped on civilian populations is evil. Glad the war did not drop to that level of depravity.
The Germans simply forgot!..a couple of years ago they found large portion of it and figured what it was…they were to fast in Blitzkriegen so they couldn’t use it anyway…
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I think Bluecoat1861 hit the nail on the head. Hitler had suffered a gas attack during WWI and was temporarily blinded. Churchill had warned Hitler that if he used them against Russia then Germany would be attacked in kind. The US had the largest stockpile of chemical weapons by far though the German nerve gas was far superiour.
If anyone wanted to use gas attacks it was Churchill……
http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/WSC/gaswar.html
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1985/5/1985_5_40.shtml
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v06/v06p501b_Weber.html
This coming from a guy who shares Winston’s last name…
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Yep, I agree, based on everything I have read Hitler’s own experience with the weapon during the first war had a huge impact on him. Warlimont and Speer both mention in their books the discussions of the use of chemical and biological weapons, and that Hitler seemed quite disinterested at best.
Couple the shock of being gassed and blinded with a serious threat of retaliation in kind, seems logical as to why the Germans did not use those weapons.
And it does appear that some of his commanders did try to persuade him to use it on the approaching Russians in 1944-45, particually after the destruction of Army Group Center in the summer of 44. The Russian infantry of 44-45 did not carry gas masks generally, they tended to travel light. It could have decimated them.
The thought of Nerve Gas getting dropped on civilian populations is evil. Glad the war did not drop to that level of depravity.
No they just nuked them instead. :|
Has anybody read about the plan to defoliate and kill the rice crop in Japan? The US had a plan to go after the rice crop with some form of early defoliate or poison dropped from planes in 1943. It was assumed that massive starvation (beyond what was already being felt on the home islands) would help to crush the Japanese will to fight. FDR nixed the plan after several of his senior military staff opposed the plan and viewing it as just to inhumane.
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Remember that we didn’t know about radiation poisoning before we used the bombs on Japan. Also, reflect on what the US did with the Marshall Plan after the war.
I am sure if Germany used mustard gas or some other chemical agent we would have dropped it on them in greater quantities and with more effect. I can’t imagine what we would have done during the middle of the war if we had truely understood the conditions in the German POW camps. War is about winning. Please don’t moralize about it after.
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I am sure if Germany used mustard gas or some other chemical agent we would have dropped it on them in greater quantities and with more effect. I can’t imagine what we would have done during the middle of the war if we had truely understood the conditions in the German POW camps. War is about winning. Please don’t moralize about it after.
Don’t be so sure, Japan has also a great quantities of biologic weapon, pleague and gas weapon.
The first lesson from WWI was….eveybody lose if you use this kind of weapon. -
The allies would have used WW I mustard gas to Germany’s high-tech nerve agents….I think the axis would have had the advantage as well as less morality in which to offer a free hand in usage.
The main reason the atom bomb was used was to halt the Russian offensive against Japan. The russians would have had no problem using up a million or two russian soldiers and the near total destruction of Japan as they did with Berlin in order to conqour that nation. If anything, it can be argued the atom bomb saved lives.
Sun Tse said, if you fight war, make it total war. Better to slaughter 10,000 in one day and end the war as the enemy fears your barbarism so greatly the capitulate rather than a long drawn out campaign that kills a 1000 per day for months. Well, to that effect in any event.
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What is the above post about… exactly?
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Remember that we didn’t know about radiation poisoning before we used the bombs on Japan. Also, reflect on what the US did with the Marshall Plan after the war.
I am sure if Germany used mustard gas or some other chemical agent we would have dropped it on them in greater quantities and with more effect. I can’t imagine what we would have done during the middle of the war if we had truely understood the conditions in the German POW camps. War is about winning. Please don’t moralize about it after.
The Marshall Plan was implemented in 1948. It represented a radical departure from the previous Allied postwar plan, which was intended to starve millions of Germans.
Unhappy with the Morgenthau-plan consequences, in a March 18, 1947 report former U.S. President Herbert Hoover remarked:
“There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.” [10]
From the same article:
Germany was closed to relief shipments until December 1945. The given reasons were that they might tend to negate the policy of restricting the German standard of living. CARE package shipments to individuals remained prohibited until 5 June 1946. U.S. troops and their families were also under unders to destroy their own excess food rather than letting German families have access to it.
In 1945 the German Red Cross was dissolved[58][59] , and the International Red Cross and other international relief agencies were kept from helping ethnic Germans through strict controls on supplies and on travel.[60] The few agencies permitted to operate within Germany, such as the indigenous Caritas Verband, were not allowed to use imported supplies. When the Vatican attempted to transmit food supplies from Chile to German infants[61] the U.S. State Department forbade it.[61]
These policies represented a continuation of the Anglo-American food blockade that had been imposed on Germany during the war. The effects of that food blockade were eloquently described by Adam Tooze in his book The Wages of Destruction. From page 477:
As we have discussed, the ‘bread basket of the Ukraine’ played a key role in all the various military-economic assessments of the Barbarossa campaign prepared over the winter of 1940-41. For Hitler, it was the key priority, to be achieved prior to any other military consideration, the importance of which was only reinforced by the alarming decline in German grain stocks. By December 1940 the military was convinced that this was the last year in which they could approach the food question with any confidence. Nor was this simply a German problem. All of the Western European territories which had fallen under German domination in 1940 had substantial net grain deficits.
The food shortage which Tooze described led the Nazi regime to starve or otherwise exterminate those groups which it liked the least, or which were the least useful to the war effort. From pages 539 - 541:
Bread rations had only been sustained by making severe inroads into grain stocks. By the end of 1941, these were nearing exhaustion. WHen the order to ship large numbers of Eastern workers to Germany for work was first given by Goering in November 1941, Backe protested vigorously. The 400,000 Soviet prisoners of war already in Germany were more than he could provide for. Goering had spoken casually of feeding the Eastern workers on cats and horse-meat. Back had consulted the statistics and reported glumly that there were not enough cats to provide a ration for the Eastern workers and horse-meat was already being used to supplement the rations of the German population. . . .
Backe was in an impossible position. The Fuehrer had demanded more workers. Gauleiter Sauckel was dedicated to delivering them. Hitler and Sauckel now demanded that the workers be fed, which was clearly a necessity if they were to be productive. And yet, given the level of grain stocks, Backe was unable to meet this demand. What was called for was a reduction in consumption, not additional provisions for millions of new workers. The seriousness of the situation became apparent to the wider public in the spring of 1942 when the Food Ministry announced cuts to the food rations of the German population. Given the regime’s mortal fear of damaging morale, the ration cuts of April 1942 are incontrovertible evidence that the food crisis was real. . . . [The morale effect of the ration cuts was], reported the SD’s informants, ‘devastating’ like ‘virtually no other event during the war’. Studies by nutritional experts added to the leadership’s concerns.
To prevent the slow starvation of the German people, the Nazi leadership took the following action. (Described on page 544:)
By the end of May 1942 Backe had met both with Hitler and General Governor Frank and had agreed that food was to be redistributed on a massive scale. . . . Entire groups were to be excluded from the food supply, most notably the Jews. As Goebbels noted in his diary, the new regime would be based on the principle that before Germany starved ‘it would be the turn of a number of other peoples’.
These measures did not entirely eliminate the food problems within Germany. They allowed the German government to avert the slow starvation of the Germans themselves, but were not enough to prevent the starvation of many Soviet POWs. (A group which, as noted earlier, Hitler had ordered to be fed because he needed their labor.)
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The Allies were ready and willing to retaliate with such. A US Liberty ship with Mustard Gas on bard was sunk in Italy in 1943.
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Obviously that random post by immundLig was SPAM. Notice the links in the body of the message, no doubt the attempt is to have people open said links, I suggest you don’t.
I should google this to get exact details but I have to run for now. There was a US proponent of the idea of turning Germany into basically an agrarian based economy and de-industrialize it to prevent it ever from having the means to threaten it’s neighbours. The threat of the USSR prevented this, Germany’s industrial prowess was required to balanced the Warsaw Pact nations.
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Obviously that random post by immundLig was SPAM. Notice the links in the body of the message, no doubt the attempt is to have people open said links, I suggest you don’t.
I should google this to get exact details but I have to run for now. There was a US proponent of the idea of turning Germany into basically an agrarian based economy and de-industrialize it to prevent it ever from having the means to threaten it’s neighbours. The threat of the USSR prevented this, Germany’s industrial prowess was required to balanced the Warsaw Pact nations.
Good call about the spam-like post from immundLig. As for the rest of your post, the stated rationale behind the Morgenthau Plan was as you have described. However, it is not always wise to accept each of FDR’s claims at face value.
As Adam Tooze pointed out in his book Wages of Destruction, Germany ran at both a food deficit and a raw materials deficit. To achieve a balance of payments while adequately feeding its people, the value it obtained from the sale of exported manufactured goods had to balance out the payments it made for imported food and imported raw materials. To “pastoralize” Germany by eliminating its manufacturing capability, as the Morgenthau Plan was designed to do, would prevent Germany from obtaining the money it needed to pay for food imports. Also note that during the initial postwar period, relief organizations and others had been forbidden from importing food into Germany.
In a report from March of 1947, Herbert Hoover wrote,
| “There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It
| cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.”One of the strongest supporters of the Morgenthau Plan was FDR. FDR was pro-communist, and he wanted to kill large numbers of Germans both during and after the war. FDR’s death meant that the responsibility for implementing the Morgenthau Plan shifted to Truman; who was less radical in political outlook than FDR had been. This is not to suggest that Truman’s policies should be even remotely confused with humanitarianism. However, Truman was more willing to bend to political pressure than FDR had been. The cruelest and most genocidal aspects of the Morgenthau Plan were gradually eliminated due to political pressure.
The radical shift in American postwar policy came in 1948. Because the German people were being deliberately starved to death under the Morgenthau Plan, many were turning to communism. Motivated by some combination of compassion for the starving Germans, and a desire to stop the spread of communism, the Congressional Republicans pushed through the Marshall Plan.
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Some interesting points Kurt and some key words and citations to search on in order to broaden my knowledge for which I thank you.
Hoover did state that and although he had a fair bit of experience with the German economy that statement was an opinion with some slanting, Hoover (Republican) did lose his presidency to FDR (Democrat) and also did preside over the initiation of the great depression (questions about economic policy prowess and predictive accuracy). Stating FDR as being pro-communist and Hoover as uberHero I think treads closely on the avoidance of political talk and that of factual accuracy.
The initial Morgenthau Plan had been modified with the influence of Winston Churchill who was against it and was considered 'The real Morgenthau Plan". Still nasty and stupid in my humble opinion but not as…. It can be found here: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?id=FRUS.FRUS1944
After FDR died, the Morgenthau Plan died, granted, aspects did influence allied planning. Stating Germans were starving due to allied planning is indeed correct and a travisty. Stating it was done under the “Morgenthau Plan” is factucally inaccurate. The intimation in the form of the socractic path from FDR to Morgenthau Plan to Genocide ergo one political spectrum being better than the other I hope is merely a phantom of my paranoid mind. But just because I am paranoid does not mean they are not out to get me…
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The Marshall plan began to aid Greece and Turkey, and was expanded after
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Some interesting points Kurt and some key words and citations to search on in order to broaden my knowledge for which I thank you.
Hoover did state that and although he had a fair bit of experience with the German economy that statement was an opinion with some slanting, Hoover (Republican) did lose his presidency to FDR (Democrat) and also did preside over the initiation of the great depression (questions about economic policy prowess and predictive accuracy). Stating FDR as being pro-communist and Hoover as uberHero I think treads closely on the avoidance of political talk and that of factual accuracy.
The initial Morgenthau Plan had been modified with the influence of Winston Churchill who was against it and was considered 'The real Morgenthau Plan". Still nasty and stupid in my humble opinion but not as…. It can be found here: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?id=FRUS.FRUS1944
After FDR died, the Morgenthau Plan died, granted, aspects did influence allied planning. Stating Germans were starving due to allied planning is indeed correct and a travisty. Stating it was done under the “Morgenthau Plan” is factucally inaccurate. The intimation in the form of the socractic path from FDR to Morgenthau Plan to Genocide ergo one political spectrum being better than the other I hope is merely a phantom of my paranoid mind. But just because I am paranoid does not mean they are not out to get me…
I think we’re in agreement on most points. There are a few things I’d like to address, however. First is my assertion that FDR was pro-communist. That assertion is based on a number of facts. Consider, for example, the information contained in the following text:
Davies even contrived to make a brief for bugging. In one scene, set in the American Embassy in Moscow, the Ambassador’s assistants warn him of listening devices, but he rebukes them severely:
I say nothing outside the Kremlin that I wouldn’t say to Stalin’s face. Do you? . . . We’re here in a sense as guests of the Soviet government, and I’m going to believe they trust the United States as a friend until they prove otherwise. Is that clear?
When the assistant persists that still, after all, there may be microphones, Davies, played with aplomb by FDR’s favorite actor, Walter Huston, cuts him off: “Then let ’em hear! We’ll be friends that much faster!”4
This cinematic scene was based on an actual incident. In 1937, when a bug was discovered directly over the Ambassador’s desk at the US Embassy in Moscow, the real Davies laughed it off. If the Soviets wanted to listen in, he told his incredulous staff—which included George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and other skilled State Department diplomats—they would only obtain proof of America’s sincere desire to cooperate with them.5
FDR strongly approved of the film. In his assessment of Soviet politics, he was much closer to Davies, his second Ambassador, than to his first, William C. Bullitt.
The propaganda film Mission to Moscow was openly and unabashedly pro-Soviet, and was specifically approved by FDR himself. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_to_Moscow . The film’s producer described it as “an expedient lie for political purposes, glossily covering up important facts with full or partial knowledge of their false presentation.” This film was the first in a series of movies FDR had arranged to be distributed to the American people as part of his wartime pro-Soviet propaganda effort. The nature of that overall effort is summed up fairly well by the below propaganda poster:
http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc230/small/
The aforementioned CIA article hinted at the overall theme of FDR’s foreign policy in the following paragraph:
When [future U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union] Davies arrived in Moscow, Amb. Standley, not informed of the mission in advance, resigned in disgust. Davies met Stalin in the Kremlin and read him the letter. He emphasized the US government’s disapproval of British imperialism and broadly hinted that the USA and the USSR, without the British, could rule the world together. Having betrayed British allies and destroyed the incumbent Ambassador, Davies then retired with Stalin to the Kremlin screening room to watch Mission to Moscow, where his cinematic glorification of the dictator, to his disappointment, did not win a rave review, but only a grunt or two. However, Davies got what he came for: Stalin agreed to meet FDR in Alaska. Davies’ biographer, Elizabeth Kimball MacLean, calls it “the coup of his diplomatic career.”10
The twin pillars of FDR’s foreign policy were the destruction of Nazi Germany, and a Soviet-American alliance that would largely control the postwar world. FDR believed that his New Deal and Soviet communism were two sides to the same coin; and that whatever differences existed between the two systems were differences of degree, not differences of kind. That view of the subject is far closer to being correct than many realize; as indicated by the following link:
Below is a quote from the Mackinac Institute:
The man Roosevelt picked to direct the NRA [National Recovery Administration] effort was General Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson, a profane, red-faced bully and professed admirer of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Thundered Johnson, “May Almighty God have mercy on anyone who attempts to interfere with the Blue Eagle” (the official symbol of the NRA, which one senator derisively referred to as the “Soviet duck”). Those who refused to comply with the NRA Johnson personally threatened with public boycotts and “a punch in the nose.” . . .
A New Jersey tailor named Jack Magid was arrested and sent to jail for the “crime” of pressing a suit of clothes for 35 cents rather than the NRA-inspired “Tailor’s Code” of 40 cents.
In “The Roosevelt Myth,” historian John T. Flynn described how the NRA’s partisans sometimes conducted “business”:
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The NRA was discovering it could not enforce its rules. Black markets grew up. Only the most violent police methods could procure enforcement. In Sidney Hillman’s garment industry the code authority employed enforcement police. They roamed through the garment district like storm troopers. They could enter a man’s factory, send him out, line up his employees, subject them to minute interrogation, take over his books on the instant. Night work was forbidden. Flying squadrons of these private coat-and-suit police went through the district at night, battering down doors with axes looking for men who were committing the crime of sewing together a pair of pants at night. But without these harsh methods many code authorities said there could be no compliance because the public was not back of it.[27]
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The above text is from the essay “Great Myths of the Great Depression.” Unfortunately, you have to give them your email address before you can see the text.
FDR’s domestic agenda was one of several ways in which his government’s behavior was like a milder version of the Soviets’. In his foreign relations, he became a direct participant in Soviet atrocities. The provisions FDR agreed to at Yalta included the following
German [postwar] reparations were partly to be in the form of forced labor. . . .
The Polish eastern border would follow the Curzon Line, and Poland would receive territorial compensation in the West from Germany. . . .
Citizens of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia were to be handed over to their respective countries, regardless of their consent.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference
The first of the three above-mentioned provisions was a polite way of stating that Germans would be converted into slave laborers.
[General Patton] commented in his diary, “I’m also opposed to sending PW’s to work as slaves in foreign lands (in particular, to France) where many will be starved to death.” He also noted “It is amusing to recall that we fought the revolution in defence of the rights of man and the civil war to abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles.”
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Patton#Relations_with_Eisenhower
The second-noted provision regarding the westward movement of the Polish and German borders effectively meant the ethnic cleansing of millions of Poles from lands being transferred from Poland to the Soviet Union. It also meant the ethnic cleansing of 13 million Germans from lands being transferred from Germany to Poland. The democratic government of West Germany estimated that 1.8 million people died as a result of the latter ethnic cleansing effort.
The third-listed provision is in many ways the most sinister single thing to which FDR had agreed. In 1940, the Soviet Union had annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. When Germany invaded in 1941, many people from those three nations rose up against Soviet rule. For the most part, these were ordinary people who wanted to liberate their homelands, and protect their families, from the brutality of Soviet occupation. As the Soviet Army pressed westward, large numbers of people from the Baltic States fled into Germany for protection. Those people were to be turned over to Soviet authorities.
During WWII, about 1 million citizens of the Soviet Union had fought against it. Those people were generally motivated by anti-communism; and many were also motivated by nationalism, the desire to defend Christianity against Soviet mass murder, or other motives. Whichever of those people fell into British or American hands were to be turned over to the Soviet government. More generally, anyone who had taken refuge from the cruelty and barbarism of the Soviet Union by fleeing westward into Germany would now be placed at the mercy of Stalin. FDR’s agreement to that provision represented direct American participation in Soviet mass murder; and demonstrated exactly how far FDR was willing to go to help the Soviet government punish those who had opposed communism.
Another provision of the Yalta Conference, not mentioned in the above article, was that surrendered German servicemen would be turned over to whichever Allied nation against which they had done most of their fighting. In practice, this meant that 80% or more of captured German servicemen were to be turned over to the Soviet Union. See the first sentence of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Hartmann#Imprisonment . The section describes how the highest scoring fighter ace in history (with 352 victories) was turned over to the Soviets for torture as part of a more general program.
To address your point about Herbert Hoover: Truman appointed him to ascertain the situation in postwar Germany. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover#Post-World_War_II .) I doubt Truman would have done this if he had expected Hoover to exaggerate the severity of the situation for political gain. I’ll grant that what Truman expected Hoover to do, and what Hoover actually did, are not necessarily identical concepts. However, the conclusions reached by the Hoover Report (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President’s_Economic_Mission_to_Germany_and_Austria ) appear neutral; were shared by General Clay, and have been echoed by historians. On page 675 of The Wages of Destruction Tooze noted that
By the early summer of 1946 rations in many parts of urban Germany were below 1,000 calories per day. . . . The evidence of serious malnutrition was unmistakable. Mortality increased as did the incidence of hunger-related diseases. Infection rates for diptheria, typhoid, and tuberculosis in the British and American zones doubled. The birth rate for babies fell drastically. . . . Germany’s former enemies thought it better to forget the sense of rage that clearly motivated much of Allied policy in the immediate aftermath of the war.
On page 675, Tooze wrote,
As early as the autumn of 1943, after the Battle of Kursk, the United States had realized that the dominant power in Europe for the foreseeable future would be the Soviet Union, not Britain, let alone France. At first Roosevelt’s administration had hoped to adjust to this new reality in cooperation with the Soviets. Together the two superpowers would rule both Europe and the world, under which circumstances it might have been possible to ‘do without Germany’.
The last phrase refers to doing without Germany as a national power, and does not refer to any effort on FDR’s part to employ genocide against the Germans themselves. Nevertheless, genocide against the Germans was clearly a major part of FDR’s policy, both during and after the war. The terror raids against German cities, and the “shoot anything that moves” air missions conducted in the German countryside, were clearly intended to eliminate large numbers of Germans. The genocide of Germans that took place during the war was to be followed up by the Morgenthau Plan. Even though the brutal provisions of that plan were only partially implemented, it nonetheless caused widespread starvation among the German people. As for the Anglo-American food blockade that had been imposed during the war–it is not immediately clear (at least, not to me) whether FDR and Churchill had hoped Hitler would allocate the resulting starvation to the Germans (thus helping to destroy the German people) or whether they hoped for him to allocate the starvation to the Jews and Slavs (thus handing the Allies an enormous propaganda weapon). Given Hitler’s statements in Mein Kampf and elsewhere, the Allied leaders had to know that Hitler was far more likely to choose the latter option than the former.
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you’d think that with hitlers idea at the bitter end that germany should be destroyed b/c they failed him, that he’d order chemical bombardments of at least the soviet army that was on the outskirts of berlin.
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Some interesting points Kurt and some key words and citations to search on in order to broaden my knowledge for which I thank you.
Hoover did state that and although he had a fair bit of experience with the German economy that statement was an opinion with some slanting, Hoover (Republican) did lose his presidency to FDR (Democrat) and also did preside over the initiation of the great depression (questions about economic policy prowess and predictive accuracy). Stating FDR as being pro-communist and Hoover as uberHero I think treads closely on the avoidance of political talk and that of factual accuracy.
The initial Morgenthau Plan had been modified with the influence of Winston Churchill who was against it and was considered 'The real Morgenthau Plan". Still nasty and stupid in my humble opinion but not as…. It can be found here: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?id=FRUS.FRUS1944
After FDR died, the Morgenthau Plan died, granted, aspects did influence allied planning. Stating Germans were starving due to allied planning is indeed correct and a travisty. Stating it was done under the “Morgenthau Plan” is factucally inaccurate. The intimation in the form of the socractic path from FDR to Morgenthau Plan to Genocide ergo one political spectrum being better than the other I hope is merely a phantom of my paranoid mind. But just because I am paranoid does not mean they are not out to get me…
I think we’re in agreement on most points. There are a few things I’d like to address, however. First is my assertion that FDR was pro-communist. That assertion is based on a number of facts. Consider, for example, the information contained in the following text:
Davies even contrived to make a brief for bugging. In one scene, set in the American Embassy in Moscow, the Ambassador’s assistants warn him of listening devices, but he rebukes them severely:
I say nothing outside the Kremlin that I wouldn’t say to Stalin’s face. Do you? . . . We’re here in a sense as guests of the Soviet government, and I’m going to believe they trust the United States as a friend until they prove otherwise. Is that clear?
When the assistant persists that still, after all, there may be microphones, Davies, played with aplomb by FDR’s favorite actor, Walter Huston, cuts him off: “Then let ’em hear! We’ll be friends that much faster!”4
This cinematic scene was based on an actual incident. In 1937, when a bug was discovered directly over the Ambassador’s desk at the US Embassy in Moscow, the real Davies laughed it off. If the Soviets wanted to listen in, he told his incredulous staff—which included George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and other skilled State Department diplomats—they would only obtain proof of America’s sincere desire to cooperate with them.5
FDR strongly approved of the film. In his assessment of Soviet politics, he was much closer to Davies, his second Ambassador, than to his first, William C. Bullitt.
The propaganda film Mission to Moscow was openly and unabashedly pro-Soviet, and was specifically approved by FDR himself. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_to_Moscow . The film’s producer described it as “an expedient lie for political purposes, glossily covering up important facts with full or partial knowledge of their false presentation.” This film was the first in a series of movies FDR had arranged to be distributed to the American people as part of his wartime pro-Soviet propaganda effort. The nature of that overall effort is summed up fairly well by the below propaganda poster:
http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc230/small/
The aforementioned CIA article hinted at the overall theme of FDR’s foreign policy in the following paragraph:
When [future U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union] Davies arrived in Moscow, Amb. Standley, not informed of the mission in advance, resigned in disgust. Davies met Stalin in the Kremlin and read him the letter. He emphasized the US government’s disapproval of British imperialism and broadly hinted that the USA and the USSR, without the British, could rule the world together. Having betrayed British allies and destroyed the incumbent Ambassador, Davies then retired with Stalin to the Kremlin screening room to watch Mission to Moscow, where his cinematic glorification of the dictator, to his disappointment, did not win a rave review, but only a grunt or two. However, Davies got what he came for: Stalin agreed to meet FDR in Alaska. Davies’ biographer, Elizabeth Kimball MacLean, calls it “the coup of his diplomatic career.”10
The twin pillars of FDR’s foreign policy were the destruction of Nazi Germany, and a Soviet-American alliance that would largely control the postwar world. FDR believed that his New Deal and Soviet communism were two sides to the same coin; and that whatever differences existed between the two systems were differences of degree, not differences of kind. That view of the subject is far closer to being correct than many realize; as indicated by the following link:
Below is a quote from the Mackinac Institute:
The man Roosevelt picked to direct the NRA [National Recovery Administration] effort was General Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson, a profane, red-faced bully and professed admirer of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Thundered Johnson, “May Almighty God have mercy on anyone who attempts to interfere with the Blue Eagle” (the official symbol of the NRA, which one senator derisively referred to as the “Soviet duck”). Those who refused to comply with the NRA Johnson personally threatened with public boycotts and “a punch in the nose.” . . .
A New Jersey tailor named Jack Magid was arrested and sent to jail for the “crime” of pressing a suit of clothes for 35 cents rather than the NRA-inspired “Tailor’s Code” of 40 cents.
In “The Roosevelt Myth,” historian John T. Flynn described how the NRA’s partisans sometimes conducted “business”:
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The NRA was discovering it could not enforce its rules. Black markets grew up. Only the most violent police methods could procure enforcement. In Sidney Hillman’s garment industry the code authority employed enforcement police. They roamed through the garment district like storm troopers. They could enter a man’s factory, send him out, line up his employees, subject them to minute interrogation, take over his books on the instant. Night work was forbidden. Flying squadrons of these private coat-and-suit police went through the district at night, battering down doors with axes looking for men who were committing the crime of sewing together a pair of pants at night. But without these harsh methods many code authorities said there could be no compliance because the public was not back of it.[27]
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The above text is from the essay “Great Myths of the Great Depression.” Unfortunately, you have to give them your email address before you can see the text.
FDR’s domestic agenda was one of several ways in which his government’s behavior was like a milder version of the Soviets’. In his foreign relations, he became a direct participant in Soviet atrocities. The provisions FDR agreed to at Yalta included the following
German [postwar] reparations were partly to be in the form of forced labor. . . .
The Polish eastern border would follow the Curzon Line, and Poland would receive territorial compensation in the West from Germany. . . .
Citizens of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia were to be handed over to their respective countries, regardless of their consent.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference
The first of the three above-mentioned provisions was a polite way of stating that Germans would be converted into slave laborers.
[General Patton] commented in his diary, “I’m also opposed to sending PW’s to work as slaves in foreign lands (in particular, to France) where many will be starved to death.” He also noted “It is amusing to recall that we fought the revolution in defence of the rights of man and the civil war to abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles.”
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Patton#Relations_with_Eisenhower
The second-noted provision regarding the westward movement of the Polish and German borders effectively meant the ethnic cleansing of millions of Poles from lands being transferred from Poland to the Soviet Union. It also meant the ethnic cleansing of 13 million Germans from lands being transferred from Germany to Poland. The democratic government of West Germany estimated that 1.8 million people died as a result of the latter ethnic cleansing effort.
The third-listed provision is in many ways the most sinister single thing to which FDR had agreed. In 1940, the Soviet Union had annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. When Germany invaded in 1941, many people from those three nations rose up against Soviet rule. For the most part, these were ordinary people who wanted to liberate their homelands, and protect their families, from the brutality of Soviet occupation. As the Soviet Army pressed westward, large numbers of people from the Baltic States fled into Germany for protection. Those people were to be turned over to Soviet authorities.
During WWII, about 1 million citizens of the Soviet Union had fought against it. Those people were generally motivated by anti-communism; and many were also motivated by nationalism, the desire to defend Christianity against Soviet mass murder, or other motives. Whichever of those people fell into British or American hands were to be turned over to the Soviet government. More generally, anyone who had taken refuge from the cruelty and barbarism of the Soviet Union by fleeing westward into Germany would now be placed at the mercy of Stalin. FDR’s agreement to that provision represented direct American participation in Soviet mass murder; and demonstrated exactly how far FDR was willing to go to help the Soviet government punish those who had opposed communism.
Another provision of the Yalta Conference, not mentioned in the above article, was that surrendered German servicemen would be turned over to whichever Allied nation against which they had done most of their fighting. In practice, this meant that 80% or more of captured German servicemen were to be turned over to the Soviet Union. See the first sentence of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Hartmann#Imprisonment . The section describes how the highest scoring fighter ace in history (with 352 victories) was turned over to the Soviets for torture as part of a more general program.
To address your point about Herbert Hoover: Truman appointed him to ascertain the situation in postwar Germany. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover#Post-World_War_II .) I doubt Truman would have done this if he had expected Hoover to exaggerate the severity of the situation for political gain. I’ll grant that what Truman expected Hoover to do, and what Hoover actually did, are not necessarily identical concepts. However, the conclusions reached by the Hoover Report (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President’s_Economic_Mission_to_Germany_and_Austria ) appear neutral; were shared by General Clay, and have been echoed by historians. On page 675 of The Wages of Destruction Tooze noted that
By the early summer of 1946 rations in many parts of urban Germany were below 1,000 calories per day. . . . The evidence of serious malnutrition was unmistakable. Mortality increased as did the incidence of hunger-related diseases. Infection rates for diptheria, typhoid, and tuberculosis in the British and American zones doubled. The birth rate for babies fell drastically. . . . Germany’s former enemies thought it better to forget the sense of rage that clearly motivated much of Allied policy in the immediate aftermath of the war.
On page 675, Tooze wrote,
As early as the autumn of 1943, after the Battle of Kursk, the United States had realized that the dominant power in Europe for the foreseeable future would be the Soviet Union, not Britain, let alone France. At first Roosevelt’s administration had hoped to adjust to this new reality in cooperation with the Soviets. Together the two superpowers would rule both Europe and the world, under which circumstances it might have been possible to ‘do without Germany’.
The last phrase refers to doing without Germany as a national power, and does not refer to any effort on FDR’s part to employ genocide against the Germans themselves. Nevertheless, genocide against the Germans was clearly a major part of FDR’s policy, both during and after the war. The terror raids against German cities, and the “shoot anything that moves” air missions conducted in the German countryside, were clearly intended to eliminate large numbers of Germans. The genocide of Germans that took place during the war was to be followed up by the Morgenthau Plan. Even though the brutal provisions of that plan were only partially implemented, it nonetheless caused widespread starvation among the German people. As for the Anglo-American food blockade that had been imposed during the war–it is not immediately clear (at least, not to me) whether FDR and Churchill had hoped Hitler would allocate the resulting starvation to the Germans (thus helping to destroy the German people) or whether they hoped for him to allocate the starvation to the Jews and Slavs (thus handing the Allies an enormous propaganda weapon). Given Hitler’s statements in Mein Kampf and elsewhere, the Allied leaders had to know that Hitler was far more likely to choose the latter option than the former.
Oh, god. Another “think tank” that thinks all democrats are communists
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Oh, god. Another “think tank” that thinks all democrats are communists
I drew from several sources, including The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze, the CIA website, the Mackinac Institute, and elsewhere. As for The Wages of Destruction, The Times (London) labeled it as “A magnificent demonstration of the explanatory power of economic history.”
To the best of my knowledge, no one from any of the sources I have quoted has asserted that all or most Democrats are communists. This is a discussion about FDR and his administration, specifically, and not of differences between American political parties in general. If I have labeled FDR pro-communist, it is because of the following actions (among others):
- Warmly referred to Stalin as “Uncle Joe,” and cultivated a consistently pro-Soviet foreign policy throughout his administration.
- Engaged in a pro-Soviet propaganda effort, as I described in my earlier post.
- Built his foreign policy largely on the long-term goal of cementing an alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union
- Allowed his administration to become influenced by Soviet agents, including Harry Hopkins, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and others. There were also significant numbers of people in FDR’s administration who, while not Soviet agents, were nonetheless Soviet sympathizers or fellow travelers.
- Directly participated in Soviet mass murder through the Yalta Conference. One of the provisions to which FDR agreed involved handing over most German POWs, all Soviet POWs, and all Soviet and Baltic States refugees, to the Soviet government.
- Adopted the Morgenthau Plan, which had initially been proposed by Harry Dexter White. That plan resulted in the starvation of millions of Germans after the war. According to the Hoover Report, that number would have increased to tens of millions had FDR’s postwar plan been allowed to remain in place. As a result of this postwar genocide, West Germany was starting to turn to communism out of desperation. It very well could have become communist had the Republicans not passed the Marshall Plan in 1948.
- Back in the U.S., FDR raised the top income tax rate first to 79% and later to 90%. He once proposed a top marginal rate of 99.5%; and later issued an executive order increasing the top marginal rate to 100% for all income over $25,000 a year. (That executive order was later rescinded by Congress.)
- Empowered the National Recovery Agency (NRA) and other federal agencies to use thug-style tactics to enforce restrictions on free enterprise.
- When the NRA was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, FDR attempted to neuter the court by packing it with additional justices. Had he been successful in that plan, it would have eliminated what up until then had been one of the largest obstacles to making the U.S. more like the Soviet Union.
Please do not construe my reference to Republicans’ support for the Marshall Plan as an indication that I think that all Republicans of the era were humane in their treatment of Germans after the war. As I have noted elsewhere on this board, Eisenhower strongly supported JCS 1067 and its implication of postwar starvation in Germany. He even went so far as to remove Patton from command due to the latter’s opposition to JCS 1067.
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