With less than a year to go until the end of World War II, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau hatched a nightmarish plan to punish Germany after the war.

After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, World War I, World War II, and the failure of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Allied powers of World War II were forced to attack He wanted to ensure that Germany would never again become a powerful force. Invade neighboring countries.

When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the press in September 1944, it was initially widely praised. Ultimately, it is believed that this will prevent Germany from starting a new world war in Europe.

Morgenthau certainly envisioned a peace for Carthage aimed at securing a permanently deindustrialized, demilitarized, and idyllic Germany.

Postwar Germany would have resembled the ancient pre-civilized frontier of which the first century AD historian Tacitus wrote. germania.

The plan was to ensure that all of Germany’s industrial plants and equipment would be dismantled within six months of Germany’s surrender.

The Ruhr, famous as the center of European industrial power, was to be permanently emasculated and starved of energy, raw materials, and infrastructure.

After the war, this plan called for the virtual complete disarmament of Germany. The once feared military was to disappear.

A major reduction in Germany’s borders was also promised. Large parts of the former Third Reich were given to various countries, including the Soviet Union, Poland, and France.

Germany’s future security will depend solely on the strength and goodwill of a victorious United States and its allies.

When the dying Nazi party learned of the plan, Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels went on a field trip. He shouted to the Germans that if they lost the war, they were all doomed to be forgotten, and opposition to the Nazi Party increased.

Even many Americans were stunned by the plan.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall warned that the mere mention of the word galvanized German forces to fight to the end, increasing American casualties as they closed in on the German mainland.

Former President Herbert Hoover denounced the plan as inhumane. He feared that mass starvation would occur if the German people were reduced to pre-modern rural peasants.

January 10, 1955. photograph. MUNICH, GERMANY: Residents of Munich, Bavaria, recently demonstrated against German rearmament. It depicts young people who do not want West Germany to rearm, holding up posters with slogans like “I don’t want to die for the dollar or the ruble.”

A man exhales cigarette smoke as he reads a copy of the Minneapolis Morning Tribune with the headline “Russ Rejects Empire Merger Plan” in Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 31, 1949. May 31, 1949 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The headline refers to the merger of the United States, Britain, and France. Russia’s refusal to agree to an agreement on the occupied territories of West Germany and the terms of its merger after World War II. Additionally, on the top page there is a message that reads “Holland sets speed record,” referring to Bill Holland’s win at the Indianapolis 500. (Photo by Graphic House/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

However, the victorious Allies occupied a devastated Germany, witnessed a lunar landscape ruined by massive bombing and house-to-house fighting, and their “ally”, Russia’s Joseph Stalin, was ruthless. Upon discovering that Truman was intent on making all of Europe communist, the administration withdrew the plan.

There is a tragic footnote to the aborted horrors of the Morgenthau program. Today, Germany has achieved almost everything Morgenthau once dreamed of.

That green fantasy has shut down too many nuclear, coal and gas power plants.

Due to the unreliability of “sustainable energy” from solar and wind, electricity costs are four times higher than the U.S. average.

Once-dominant European giants Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes are now losing customers and profits. Green and electric car mandates from our governments are sure to make cars uncompetitive globally.

In fact, the German economy shrank in 2023. And the decline of the rule can no longer save the German economy from its own utopian politicians.

The German army is nearly disarmed and is short of thousands of new recruits.

German industry does not produce enough ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft to equip a diminished army, navy, and air force.

In Ukraine, just a few hundred miles from Germany, more than a million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed, wounded or missing in Europe’s deadliest battle since the Stalingrad disaster.

But the once post-war German dynamo state now lacks the manpower, munitions and money to support Ukraine in any meaningful way against a powerful Russian aggressor.

More than 1 million immigrants are in the country illegally, the majority from the Middle East. Many of them are hostile to European values ​​and culture, as recent terrorist killings have shown. One fifth of the population was not born in Germany.

Germany’s shrinking population is growing angry, divided and depressed. The birth rate is 1.4 percent, one of the lowest in the Western world.

Tragic ironies abound now.

After World War II, the Truman administration rejected the idea of ​​an idyllic, deindustrialized, and unstable Germany as a cruel recipe for poverty, hunger, and population decline.

But now Germans themselves are willing to cut back on factory hours, cut power and fuel supplies, and grapple with millions of illegal immigrants and porous borders in the latest version of Morgenthau’s plan. I voted.

The Germans accept that without US-led NATO, they do not have a military capable of defending their volatile borders.

Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected the idea of ​​destroying a defeated country as too harsh. But now Germany is deliberately herding, disarming, deindustrializing, and destroying itself.

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About the author

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(Victor Davis Hanson is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “World War II: How the First Global Conflict He is the author of “Fought and Won” (Basic Books).