Guenter Reimann

Germany is Our Problem, by Henry Morgenthau, Jr.

Shall Germany be Ruralized?

January 1946  Foreign Affairs

2025.10.05.

Germany is Our Problem.
by Henry Morgenthau, jr.
New York, Harper & Bros., 1945. 239 pp. $2.00.

 

Henry Morgenthau.Jr

Shortly after Hitler’s rise to power prominent Nazi politicians drew up a plan for the "solution of the Jewish problem." Under its terms the Jews of Europe, and perhaps those of other continents as well, were to be deported to Kenya in Africa. Nazi propagandists stressed that their plan was extremely humane: several million Jews, by dint of hard manual labor, would live and prosper as farmers tilling the virgin African soil. But the entire plan was sheer propaganda. The real intentions of the Nazis were to exterminate the Jews, in accordance with their thesis that their elimination would resolve Europe’s social crisis.

Mr. Morgenthau blames the Germans for most of the wars of the last one or two hundred years and fixes upon them sole responsibility for the deeds of their Nazi masters, as well as for militarism and for imperialist power politics in general. Germany Is Our Problem proposes, therefore, to exclude the German people from the necessities and advantages of modem technology and science. Germany is to be made harmless and the world forever peaceful by the transformation of the most highly developed industrial economy of Europe into one of farmers and artisans. No German would be permitted to work in a chemical laboratory or participate in physics or other scientific research. German scholars might, however, be permitted to study old folk-songs or how to milk a cow.

The former Secretary of the Treasury is confident he knows how to establish peace and prosperity on a world-wide scale. The basis will be provided by the destruction of Germany’s heavy industries. The menace of German imperialism will then disappear. German industries will never again supply German armies with weapons for totalitarian war. American industrialists will profit by the disappearance from world markets of their strongest competitor. British industrialists will be able to take over former German export markets. Other European countries will develop new industries. Russia, feeling safe, will become cooperative. In short, the end of German industrialism will coincide with the beginning of a new era of prosperity and universal peace.

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The thesis of this book, that a highly industrialized country be reduced to the status of a backward, mainly agricultural country, has no precedent in modem .history. The evolution of an agrarian into an industrial economy and a coordinate rise in the general level of productivity of labor coincided with a growing population. Thus the population of Germany doubled between the middle of the nineteenth century and 1938. Mr. Morgenthau denies that his solution would destroy the basis for the mere physical survival of about half the population of Central Europe and generally impoverish the entire Continent. He even makes an effort to prove that his plan is practical and humane; but the facts and figures he quotes are often false or misleading. A few examples chosen at random are typical.

Germany’s territorial losses are actually more than twice as large as the book premises. Mr. Morgenthau takes account of the loss of Eastern Prussia and Sile?ia but does not refer to other, even greater, losses of German territory, millions of whose inhabitants have been deported into rump Germany. (This oversight is particularly strange in view of the fact that the author refers to the Potsdam Conference, at which these territorial changes were discussed.) Thus his figures on the future German deficit of foodstuffs that will result from loss of agricultural territories are quite misleading and underestimate the deficits in various items of food by from I 5 to 35 per cent on the average. Mr. Morgenthau habitually gives the postwar population of Germany as 60 million persons living within an agricultural area of about 107 million acres. Actually, the population of rump Germany will amount to 5 to 10 million persons more, and the arable land to 5 million acres less.

Mr. Morgenthau writes that 34,000 large estates took up more than one third of the farmland in pre-war Germany. As a matter of fact, the 34,000 largest estates, those of 100 or more hectares (247 acres or over), occupied only 11.7 per cent of arable land.

Mr. Morgenthau claims that German agriculture was backward. The exact reverse is true. In all Europe only Sweden, Holland and Belgium had a higher output of grain per acre, and this was largely owing to better soil conditions or greater specialization. All other European countries produced less grain per acre than did Germany.

Mr. Morgenthau claims that there is adequate unused arable land in Germany. It is true that forests and pasture land are still to be found in Germany, although in far smaller proportions than in France, Britain or most other European countries. Of course, one could institute a program of extensive deforestation in Germany in order to provide more farmland. But one need not be an agricultural expert to predict the dire effects this would have on soil and climatic conditions throughout Central Europe.

The author’s suggestion, that 5 million industrial workers be settled on 2.5 million new farms in order to increase Germany’s total agricultural yield, assumes, for one thing, that a skilled metal-worker or bookkeeper can become an efficient independent farmer overnight. For another thing, he has no difficulty finding land for these two and a half million additional farms. He has somehow discovered plenty of arable wasteland that the highly qualified German agrarian experts simply overlooked. Furthermore, he would break up all large estates. But if all of the twenty thousand large estates of 247 acres and over in rump Germany were to be divided into 2.5 million little farms, each farm would total 2.i acres. The minimum-size farm that before the war could support a hard-working, efficient and experienced farmer was 9.9 to 11.3 acres in western Germany and 47.4 to 68.1 acres in eastern Germany. (This was the estimate of Germany’s outstanding agricultural expert, Professor Max Sering, in his standard work published in 1932.)

Besides, the income of the small German peasants was largely derived from the sale of dairy products, poultry and eggs to the urban industrial population. The elimination of this market would make it impossible for small farmers to specialize in the production for which they are best suited. They would have to produce more grain and potatoes, and could make a living thereby only if they had more, not less, land to cultivate. The greater the industrial hinterland, the less land the small peasant needs to make a living; and the smaller the industrial population, the more land he needs.

Mr. Morgenthau prefers Germans as peasants because as a class the German peasant "took the Nazi virus later and in a somewhat milder form" than the rest of the population. Actually, it was the other way about: the overwhelming majority of the industrial working class provided the most stubborn and consistent opposition to the Nazis, while most of the peasants did in fact vote for Hitler. This is demonstrated by the 1932-33 election results.

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One might continue for pages to list Mr. Morgenthau’s errors and miscalculations. But in the last analysis "supporting data" have little to do with his thesis. Its conception and application are determined by political factors. Indeed Mr. Morgenthau has altered his original plan so fast that he has had, apparently, no time to revise his statistical data. He has given up his original idea of flooding the Ruhr mines—a step that would have been one of the greatest of disasters for Europe. Instead, he now suggests that the entire German population of the Ruhr area be dumped into the interior of rump Germany. He makes this proposal without pausing to consider the economic and social effects of the deportation of another several million Germans from their traditional homelands.

Physically, it is possible to destroy the German industrial economy, to prevent or curb industrial reconstruction for peacetime purposes and thus to transform the heart of Europe into an industrially barren area. Similarly, it would have been possible to send several million Jews to Kenya—to die there, for despite the testimony of Nazi "experts," most of the deportees would have starved or otherwise perished. Mr. Morgenthau’s de-industrialization plan, if carried out, would wipe out the economic basis for the existence of some 25 to 30 million Germans.

Henry Morgenthau may seriously fail to recognize the similarity his "solution" has to Nazi technique. Such a "solution" would boomerang in the form of intensified racial and national hatreds and in a social crisis that would spread from Germany to the entire Continent. If Central Europe and Italy were before the war the breeding ground of fascism, all Europe will become its breeding ground after the Morgenthau proposals are put into effect. That anti-Semitism would then flourish fourfold goes without saying.

Let us Jews above all be given pause by this delenda est. Perhaps better than any others, we know that an eye for an eye has never solved anything. And from history we have also learned that poverty and frustration and denial of human dignity, not inborn evil, make up the soil that nurtures the hatred of man against man.