WWII Allies Chose Not to Annihilate Germany — Now It Has Self-Destructed

In the final year leading up to the conclusion of World War II, US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau proposed a grim strategy aimed at punishing postwar Germany.

Following the series of conflicts between 1870-1871 known as the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II — together with the ineffective Versailles Treaty of 1919 — the Allies sought to ensure that Germany could never again become a militaristic threat capable of invading its neighbors.

When the controversial Morgenthau Plan leaked to the media in September 1944, it initially received wide acclaim. Its intent was to make Germany incapable of initiating another major conflict in Europe.

Morgenthau envisioned a punitive peace resembling that inflicted on Carthage, aimed at ensuring a long-term deindustrialized, disarmed, and agrarian Germany.

Postwar Germany would have reverted to a state reminiscent of the primitive frontier described by the first-century historian Tacitus in his work “Germania.”

The plan mandated that all of Germany’s industrial facilities and equipment be dismantled within six months following its surrender.

The Ruhr Valley, known as Europe’s industrial backbone, was to be irrevocably incapacitated, stripped of energy resources, raw materials, and necessary infrastructure.

Post-conflict, the plan stipulated nearly complete disarmament of Germany. The nation’s formidable military forces were to be rendered nonexistent.

It also proposed significant reduction in the size of Germany, with nations like the Soviet Union, Poland, and France receiving large portions of the former Third Reich.

Germany’s future security would depend solely on the power and benevolence of the United States and its allies.

Upon learning of the plan, Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels used it to incite panic, declaring that Germans faced certain doom if they lost the war, even targeting growing dissent within the Nazi ranks.

Many Americans were horrified by the plan as well.

General George Marshall, then Army Chief of Staff, cautioned that simply discussing the plan had rallied German troops to continue fighting fiercely, thus increasing American casualties as they approached Germany.

Former President Herbert Hoover denounced the plan as inhumane, expressing concern about potential mass starvation among the German populace if they were relegated to a premodern agrarian lifestyle.

However, once the Allies occupied a devastated Germany, witnessing the extensive destruction caused by relentless bombing and urban combat, and realizing the unyielding ambitions of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, the Truman administration withdrew support for the Morgenthau Plan.

A tragic postscript to the failed Morgenthau Plan lies in contemporary Germany’s self-imposed struggles, echoing many of Morgenthau’s original ideas.

The nation’s green energy initiatives have led to the closure of numerous nuclear, coal, and gas power plants.

Irregular solar and wind energy sources have caused power costs to soar to four times higher than the average in the United States.

Once-dominant automotive giants like Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes are now losing customers and profits, struggling with their own government’s green energy mandates that threaten their global competitiveness.

The German economy actually contracted in 2023, and a weakened Ruhr Valley can no longer rescue the nation from the impact of its own utopian policies.

The German military is nearly disbanded and lacks thousands of recruits.

Furthermore, German industries are unable to produce sufficient ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft to equip even their reduced military forces.

Just a few hundred miles away in Ukraine, the conflict has resulted in the deaths, injuries, or disappearances of over a million Ukrainians and Russians during one of the most devastating battles in Europe since Stalingrad.

Yet, the once thriving German nation now finds itself incapable of meaningfully supporting Ukraine against an aggressive Russian adversary, lacking the manpower, munitions, and resources.

Over a million immigrants have entered Germany illegally, predominantly from the Middle East.

Many of these individuals show hostility towards European culture and values, as evidenced by recent acts of terrorism. A fifth of Germany’s population was not born there.

The declining German population is becoming increasingly frustrated, polarized, and despondent, with a fertility rate of just 1.4%, one of the lowest in the Western world.

A tragic irony prevails.

After World War II, the Truman administration dismissed the concept of a pastoral, deindustrialized, and vulnerable Germany as a cruel prescription that would lead to poverty, hunger, and depopulation.

Yet today, the German populace has effectively chosen their own version of Morgenthau’s vision — willingly reducing working hours, limiting energy and fuel availability, and grappling with the challenges posed by millions of illegal immigrants and unsecured borders.

Germans now confront the reality of lacking an adequate military to secure their borders without the support of a United States-led NATO.

Eighty years ago, the former conquerors of Germany rejected the notion of thorough devastation as excessively harsh.

Yet now, Germany is voluntarily embracing a path of pastoralism, disarmament, deindustrialization — and self-destruction.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.