Unconditional Surrender: The Policy That Prolonged World War II
Page 3
The result was the Morgenthau Report, prepared by a Treasury Department team. It proposed to divide Germany into four parts - long a Vansittart recommendation. It also recommended destroying all the industry in the Ruhr and Saar basins, turning central Europe and the German people into agriculturists. “I don’t care what happens to the population,” Morgenthau told his staff. Roosevelt gave the proposal his heartfelt approval.
The president was so enthusiastic, he invited Morgenthau to accompany him to a conference with Churchill in Quebec on September 14, 1944. When the Treasury secretary outlined his program to Churchill at a state dinner, the prime minister was aghast. Churchill said he agreed with the British statesman and orator, Edmund Burke, that you cannot indict an entire nation. At his most vehement, Churchill said Morgenthau’s plan would be like chaining England to a dead body.
Roosevelt watched with icy amusement, knowing that the next day Churchill had to negotiate with Morgenthau about how much Lend-Lease program aid the bankrupt British government could expect from America after the Germans surrendered. Morgenthau dangled $3 billion in front of the prime minister, but Roosevelt made it very clear that the money would not be forthcoming until Churchill agreed to “cooperate” on the secretary’s plan for postwar Germany. Swallowing his previous protestations, the mortified Churchill initialed the Morgenthau plan.
Back in Washington, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of State Cordell Hull launched an all-out assault against Morgenthau’s brainchild. Stimson pointed out that it violated the Atlantic Charter, which promised equal opportunity for the pursuit of happiness to both victors and vanquished. He claimed it would create 40 million superfluous Germans, 19 million in the Ruhr alone. Roosevelt remained adamant - until a very shrewd infighter leaked the essence of the plan to columnist Drew Pearson. Within the week, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other papers had dug out the whole story. From Congress and editorial pages all over the country, a firestorm of disapproval engulfed the White House. In Germany, Goebbels seized on the plan as final proof that the United States was determined to destroy Germany.
The propaganda disaster coincided with the collapse of optimistic hopes that the German army would crumble after the fall of Paris. But the Wehrmacht smashed an Allied attempt to slash into the Reich from the north at Arnhem. The Republican candidate for president, Thomas E. Dewey, joined the chorus of disapproval, accusing Roosevelt of inspiring the Germans to resist to the last man.
Roosevelt responded by demonstrating why he deserved the nickname “juggler.” He summoned Stimson to the White House and told him he agreed with him completely. He never had the slightest intention of implementing the Morgenthau Report. The Treasury Secretary and his friends had, he solemnly declared, “pulled a boner.” A few weeks later, Roosevelt tried to create a tabula rasa by telling Cordell Hull he was opposed to making any postwar plans for “a country we do not yet occupy.”
While this charade was playing out in Washington, some 500 leaders of the German resistance were being tortured by the gestapo and tried before Nazi judges in a so-called People’s Court, packed with party members who jeered and hooted at them. Field marshals, generals, colonels, and former officials of the Foreign Office and Abwehr were forced to wear clothing either ridiculously large or small to make them look as much like buffoons as possible. Yet they managed to defend themselves with calm dignity, boldly testifying that they had tried to overthrow Hitler because Nazism filled them with moral and spiritual revulsion.
Not a word of sympathy or regret for these men was uttered by Churchill, Roosevelt, or any of their spokesmen. Instead, the Anglo-Americans showered Germany with mocking leaflets, sneering that the conspiracy was a sure sign of imminent collapse.
On the battlefield, however, the combination of unconditional surrender and the Morgenthau Report guaranteed a fierce stand by the Wehrmacht. In November 1944, the Germans inflicted a strategic defeat on the immense American army that tried to reach the Rhine, fighting them to a standstill in the Hürtgen Forest and the countryside around Aachen. On November 22, a worried Eisenhower cabled the Joint Chiefs urging “that we should redouble our efforts to find a solution to the problem of reducing the German will to resist.” The chiefs turned to Roosevelt, who stubbornly refused to say a word. But he asked Churchill to broadcast a redefinition of unconditional surrender, inviting the Germans to join in “this great effort for decency and peace among human beings.”
Churchill replied that his war cabinet disapproved of the idea, because it would “confess our errors.” With more than a touch of sarcasm, Churchill added: “The General Grant attitude ‘to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer’ appears one to which I see no alternative. In the meantime I shall remain set in unconditional surrender, which is where you put me.”
On December 21, 1944, the Wehrmacht stunned the British and Americans by assembling 250,000 men and 1,000 tanks and smashing out of the Belgian forest of the Ardennes in an all-or-nothing attempt to seize the port of Antwerp and strand the Allied army in the field without food or gasoline. The fighting and dying in the mud and snow at Bastogne, and other more obscure crossroads in the ensuing Battle of the Bulge, became a saga of American courage. But in the light of what we now know about unconditional surrender, we are forced to wonder if it was necessary.
After the breakout from Normandy and the capture of Paris, Germany’s position was strategically hopeless, and every field-grade officer in the German army - and not a few of the enlisted men - knew it. Their continued desperate resistance, which cost the Americans 418,791 dead and wounded, and the British and Canadians another 107,000, was the bitter fruit of unconditional surrender. These figures do not include air force losses or casualties in other theaters, such as Italy. If we take in Russian and German losses, including German civilian casualties from Allied bombing, the total number of dead and wounded approaches 2 million. If we add to this toll the number of Jews who were killed in the last nine months of the war, the figure can probably be doubled. “Unconditional surrender” was indeed a slogan written in blood.
The Wages of Sin Become Clear
Combining luck and dash, the Americans finally crossed the Rhine on March 7, 1945, by seizing the Ludendorff Bridge near the town of Remagen. Thereafter, the German army’s collapse accelerated as utter hopelessness overwhelmed the ranks. While armored columns trapped 400,000 Germans in the Ruhr Pocket and other tank task forces raced east and south, Admiral Canaris and Colonel Oster were moved to a prison camp in Bavaria. On April 9, with American tanks less than 50 miles away, they were taken from their cells and hanged. During the previous night, Canaris tapped out a farewell message to a Danish secret agent in the next cell: “I die for my country and with a clear conscience.”
On April 11, an American armored task force of the Third Army captured the village of Ohrdruf. Outside it was a complex of buildings surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Inside, Americans gaped in disbelief at the ragged skeletons stumbling toward them. In the buildings, bodies of those who had starved to death were stacked like cordwood. The outside world had discovered the first German concentration camp. On the same day, other units of the Third Army reached Buchenwald and tankers of the Ninth Army discovered Nordhausen. The next day an appalled Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf and ordered every American unit within travelling distance to be taken to see the horror. As he left the camp, he turned to a sentry and said: “Still having trouble hating them?”
Eisenhower’s words provide a capsule explanation of why the tragedy of America’s failure to negotiate with the German resistance to Hitler has largely faded from memory. The concentration camps seemed to validate the policy of unconditional surrender. Fifty years later, it has become apparent that at least the last nine months of horror in Ohrdruf and the other camps might have been prevented had hatred not been the arbiter of Anglo-American diplomacy throughout the war.
In the United States, an exhausted Franklin D. Roosevelt retreated to Warm Springs
, Georgia, in a desperate attempt to regain his faltering health. There is no evidence that he heard the news of the discovery of Ohrdruf, Nordhausen, and Buchenwald. At around noon on that same April 12, while sitting for a portrait, he died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
How would FDR have reacted to the concentration camps? From his past performance, it seems almost certain he would have seized the moment to revive the Morgenthau plan and renew his punitive campaign against the country he hated. On the night before he died, he had a final conversation with Henry Morgenthau, Jr., in which the Treasury secretary delivered another lecture on the dangers of a soft peace for Germany. “Henry,” Roosevelt said, “I am with you one hundred percent.”
Events soon demonstrated the fatuity of Roosevelt’s and Morgenthau’s ideas about how to deal with Germany. As Stimson and others pointed out at the time, Germany was the economic heart of Europe - and the pair’s blind desire to eviscerate it would have crippled the Continent’s prosperity forever. This fact, plus the looming menace of Stalinist communism, rendered the policy null and void virtually from the day Roosevelt died.
Franklin Roosevelt’s great confrere, Winston Churchill, soon abandoned Vansittarism and included West Germany in his campaign to rally the free world against communist hegemony. He also tried to make some amends for the policy of unconditional surrender and his failure to recognize the German resistance movement. In 1947, in a speech to Parliament, Churchill described Canaris and his fellow conspirators as men who “belonged to the noblest and greatest [of resistance movements] that have ever arisen in the history of all peoples.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
New York Times bestselling author Thomas Fleming is one of the most distinguished and productive historians and novelists of our time. He has written 20 nonfiction books that have won prizes and praise from critics and fellow historians, many with a special focus on the American Revolution. He has also written 23 historical novels, many of them bestsellers.
COPYRIGHT
Published by New Word City, Inc., 2011
www.NewWordCity.com
© Thomas Fleming
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-61230-198-3
Ebook Conversion: Reality Premedia Services Pvt. Ltd., Pune, India.
Table of Contents
UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER: THE POLICY THAT PROLONGED WORLD WAR II
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT