Defending the Defenseless

Americans Who Opposed the Mistreatment of Germans following World War II

Kerry R. Bolton

Despite the Germanophobia that was drummed up even prior to the USA’s 1941 entry into the war against Germany, the immediate aftermath saw a significant reaction of Americans to war crimes and post-war genocidal policies that were being inflicted on Germany. Several salient factors for this include: (1) the large component of the American population that is of German descent, (2) the “isolationist” tradition of American foreign policy upheld in the slogan and the pre-war mass movement of “America First,” that resisted the campaign to push the USA into the war, (3) the affront to traditional honor and justice such actions and policies represented to many American military leaders and jurists of what might be termed the “old school,” and (4) the realization that a strong, rather than a permanently impoverished and castrated, Germany was needed as an ally in the post-war world.

The USA had pursued a course of vengeance and pastoralization of conquered Germany via the Morgenthau Plan named after the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr. The measures drafted by the Treasury Department, under the direction of Dr. Harry Dexter White (nee Weiss) aimed to reduce the German population by a policy of starvation, reminiscent of Lazar Kaganovich’s contrived famine widely held to have caused the deaths of up to seven million Ukrainians and to have broken the kulak class of successful peasantry. That White was later exposed as a Soviet agent might suggest another motive for the Morgenthau Plan as pursuing quite another aim to that intended by Morgenthau et al who thought only in terms of Old Testament-type vengeance and total annihilation. Might the aim of White and other Soviet agents within U.S. Treasury have been to use the Morgenthau Plan dialectically, to push the Germans into the embrace of the USSR, whose policy, despite the mass rapes committed by soldiers of the Red Army, after the war became far more conciliatory towards Germans than France, Britain and the USA?[1]

https://inconvenienthistory.com/7/1/3359