Vengeance v. Vision

YEARS OF WAR, 1941-1945; FROM THE MORGENTHAU DIARIES by John Morton Blum. 526 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $10.

As World War II drew to a close in Europe, men of vengeance and men of vision contemplated the future of Germany. There were those, like Winston Churchill, who saw both the threat of Soviet expansion into war-wasted Western Europe and the need for a revived and economically viable Germany to stand as a buffer before the Commu nist advance. And there were people like Ernest Hemingway, who recommended that all Nazis be castrated.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau was more or less on Hemingway's side. He proposed that Germany be broken up into autonomous agrarian states, that the Ruhr and Saar industrial complex be dismantled and carted away to Allied countries after its mines were flooded and dynamited, and that all German men between the ages of 20 and 40 be transported to Central Africa to work as slave laborers on a mammoth "international TVA."

The Real Rot. Though the "Morgenthau Plan" brought him his greatest notoriety, Henry Morgenthau Jr. was an epicenter of argument long before the German controversy arose. A wealthy Jewish apple farmer from New York's sylvan Dutchess County, he was among the first of Franklin Roosevelt's braintrusters, having gone to Washington in 1933 to administer the wrenching fiscal reforms of the New Deal. Those beginnings and the battles during which Morgenthau frequently and deliberately drew the fire of outraged bankers and businessmen to save

F.D.R.'s political prestige were finely traced in Yale Historian John Morton Blum's first two volumes, Years of Crisis and Years of Urgency, derived from Morgenthau's copious diaries.

By Dec. 7, 1941, Morgenthau was one of the President's closest confidants and most loyal disciples. Crusty and at times a bit pompous, he was a master of intra-Cabinet maneuver and often stole the march on his fellow secretaries in influencing the President's decisions. It was he, more than any other Administration figure, who drafted the Allied economic battle plan for World War II and brought America's fiscal physique back to fighting trim.

In August 1944, Morgenthau visited the European battlefront. In Whitehall and in Dwight Eisenhower's SHAEF headquarters, he discovered with "misgivings" and "sharp disagreement" that plans were afoot to administer a conquered Germany not as a madhouse full of psychopathic killers but as a defeated nation in need of rebuilding. Like many other Americans, Morgenthau believed that only by destroying Germany's ability to wage war, through elimination of its industry, could the first steps toward "re-educating" the German people begin. The Nazis, he believed, were only surface villains (for them, Morgenthau preferred firing squads to war-crimes trials); the real rot was in the German soul. "Somebody's got to take the lead about let's be tough to the Germans," he told Assistant Secretary of War John J. Mc-Cloy on his return to Washington.

Bucolic Virtues. Morgenthau labeled as a fallacy the argument of War Secretary Henry L. Stimson and such State Department planners as Dean Acheson that Europe's economic health depended on German industrial production. By closing down the Ruhr and Saar, he argued, the Allies could revive the flagging industry of France, Belgium and Britain. As for the millions of Germans who would be left unemployed by such moves, Morgenthau said: "Sure, it is a terrific problem. Let the Germans solve it. Why the hell should I worry about what happens to their people?" As a farmer, Morgenthau firmly believed in the bucolic virtues as renovators of the human spirit; hence, a Germany of hops growers would be a Germany of peaceful human beings.

Morgenthau's plan, extreme as it was, forced other Administration thinkers-including a reluctant and obviously ailing F.D.R.--to give serious thought to the shape of postwar Germany. At the Quebec Conference in September 1944, Morgenthau got F.D.R. to win concessions from Churchill on a harsher German policy. Then the politics of the 1944 presidential campaign entered the equation.

Stigma of Extremism. Word of Morgenthau's Draconian design leaked to the press. Goebbels began exhorting the Reich to fight even harder in the face of defeat, since Germans had nothing to lose by death; Republican Presidential Candidate Thomas E. Dewey claimed that Morgenthau's plan had given Hitler as much of a boost as "ten fresh German divisions." Roosevelt, who at one point had mused that it might be good to return Germany to the homespun-wool economy of Dutchess County in 1810, backed warily away from both the plan and its author. F.D.R. nonetheless adhered to his policy of "unconditional surrender," which pleased Morgenthau mightily. But the stigma of extremism still surrounded him when Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 (though on the evening before F.D.R.'s death, Morgenthau dined with him at Warm Springs and won approval for a postwar book on the plan). Before the summer was out, he had resigned from Truman's Cabinet.

The years since have, of course, proved Churchill right. Morgenthau had predicted that unless his harsh demands were met, Germany would make another war within ten years after the surrender. When this failed to happen and West Germany became a prized and democratic member of the Western Alliance, the old hawk must have been puzzled--and probably unconvinced.

He died last February at 75, without having conceded his error of judgment.

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