Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Less than a year before the end of World War II, then U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau drew up a nightmarish plan to punish postwar Germany.
After the serial 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II—along with the failed Versailles peace treaty of 1919—the Allies in World War II wanted to ensure there would never again be an aggressive Germany powerful enough to invade its neighbors.
When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the press in September 1944, at first it was widely praised. After all, it would supposedly render Germany incapable of ever starting another world war in Europe.
Morgenthau certainly envisioned a Carthaginian peace, designed to ensure a permanently deindustrialized, unarmed, and pastoral Germany.
Postwar Germany would have resembled something akin to the ancient, pre-civilized frontier that the first-century AD historian Tacitus wrote about in his Germania.
The plan would have ensured that within six months of Germany’s surrender, all of its industrial plants and equipment were to be dismantled.
The Ruhr, the renowned center of European industrial strength, was to be permanently neutered, starved of its energy, raw materials, and infrastructure.
After the war, the plan demanded virtual complete disarmament of Germany. Its once-feared armed forces were to be rendered nonexistent.
There were also promised massive reductions in Germany’s borders. Various countries, such as the Soviet Union, Poland, and France, were to be given large slices of the old Third Reich.
Future German security would hinge only on the power and goodwill of the victorious United States and its allies.
When the dying Nazi Party got wind of the plan, Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had a field day. He screamed to Germans that they were all doomed to oblivion if they lost the war, even growing opponents of the Nazi Party.
Even many Americans were aghast at the plan.
Gen. George Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, warned that its mere mention had galvanized German troops to fight to the end, increasing American casualties as they closed in on the German homeland.
Ex-president Herbert Hoover blasted the plan as inhumane. He feared mass starvation of the German people if they were reduced to a premodern, rural peasantry.
But once the victorious allies occupied a devastated Germany, witnessed its moonscape ruined by massive bombing and house-to-house fighting, and discovered that their “ally” Russia’s Joseph Stalin was ruthless and hellbent on turning all of Europe communist, the Truman administration backed off the plan.
There is a tragic footnote to the aborted horrors of the Morgenthau Plan. Currently, Germany is doing to itself almost everything Morgenthau once dreamed of.
Its green delusions have shut down far too many of its nuclear, coal, and gas electrical generation plants.
Erratic solar and wind “sustainable energy” means that power costs are four times higher than on average in the United States.
Once-dominant European giants Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes are now bleeding customers and profits. Their own government’s green and electric vehicle mandates ensure they will become globally uncompetitive.
The German economy actually shrank in 2023. And the diminished Ruhr can no longer save the German economy from its own utopian politicians.
The German military is all but disarmed and short thousands of recruits.
German industries do not produce enough ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft to equip even its diminished army, navy, and air force.
Just a few hundred miles from Germany in Ukraine, more than a million Ukrainians and Russians are dead, wounded, or missing—in the costliest European battle since the horrors of Stalingrad.
Yet the once postwar German dynamo nation now lacks the manpower, munitions, and money to aid Ukraine in any meaningful way against an ascendant Russian invader.
More than 1 million immigrants have entered the country illegally, the vast majority of them from the Middle East. Many of them are hostile to European values and culture, as recent terrorist killings have shown. One-fifth of the population was not born in Germany.
The shrinking German people are growing angry, divided, and depressed. Their 1.4 percent fertility rate is one of the lowest in the Western world.
A tragic irony now abounds.
After World War II, the Truman administration rejected the notion of a pastoral, deindustrialized, and insecure Germany as a cruel prescription for poverty, hunger, and depopulation.
But now the German people themselves voted for their own updated version of Morgenthau’s plan—as they willingly reduced factory hours, curtailed power and fuel supplies, and struggled with millions of illegal aliens and porous borders.
Germans accept that they have no military to speak of that could protect their insecure borders—without a United States-led NATO.
Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected wrecking the defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing—and destroying—itself.
And the United States is following the same route.
You have got that right!!!!
Americans voted for a savior who may be America’s last chance to thrive again. Homan and the rest of helpers are as ready as they can be to jump into the ring and start swinging. Trump gave Hopey Changey a new meaning. As of this writing, 18 days. I wonder if any other president represented rectification like this one. If only the people tasked with MAGA listened to VDH! If only they will follow his advice… Who here disagrees with that?
Today, I read about the House Bill – The Dignity Act – that will provide a path to citizenship for many of those who entered the country illegally. The purpose seems to be to provide cheap labor to big business including agriculture. With this, difficult to believe the Republicans are serious about controlling our borders. I don’t doubt Homan’s willingness to do the job, but I question whether the will exists to allow him to do so.
iF ONLY YOU WERE RIGHT. It seems to me that the present administration is not going to make us any better.
It is definitely time for a drastic change.
Less willing, more lead. The questions, are by who and why?
The majority of white people in the United States are actually Germans
Majority may not be Germans but half of my ancestors and half of my wife’s were Germans who came over in the 1700s. Our states are PA and VA
Did the USA just avoid going down the same path of Germany and the EU overall with the reelection of DJT?
Time will tell if we can successfully reverse that path and restore American greatness.
Germany and other EU countries may have a much harder time returning to a ‘citizen/country first policy’!
The now [P]EU is . . DONE. GOOD RIDDANCE. Go Vlad! What the USA once was, the “Rus” is becoming – debt-free, productive and Christian. If this drafted ‘Nam VFW and former world vagabond was even 20 years younger, would be there schmoozing w/ some ladies while enjoying home-made spicy Thai stir fry.
Jimmy Carter finally died this week, and the accolades are no different than those phony missives penned for demented Joey. For me, reading this essay, and considering the tales of two ‘farmers’, Dr Hanson and President Carter it is clear just who is better.
Professor Hanson has a focus on classical civilizations and continually makes them relevant for understanding today’s challenges. As he described, Germany is overrun with outsiders who adhere to their violent cultural structure while woke educators continually reject the study of western civilization and replace it with a rejection of those values with a framing of history as a class, racial nd gender conflict.
Sadly, Germany is not an outlier, but the canary in the tunnel.
Loved this lesson – Please, Sir, I want some more! Thank you for this serving of delicious nourishment for the mind. It fuels the spirit.
In university I read ” in 1848 German history reached a turning point but failed to turn”. I always interpreted this to mean that unlike most of the rest of Western Europe the political events of the 1840s did not result in the foundations of modern liberal democratic institutions. Instead Germany chose to strengthen the authoritarian state. This lead to the sonderweg theory of German history that to me as only been an excuse for a nation prone to default to ” blood and iron” solutions to most problems. German national suicide, that began with Frau Merkel opening the borders and we now see in this article is merely the logical conclusion of a nation still consumed with guilt and cultural arrogance acting out another Wagnerian Gotterdammerung of their own making.
Germanys national suicide began in 1945 when the country got Anglo-Saxonised. The problem is Anglo-Saxonism the (next to bolshevism) most destructive ideology in the history of mankind. Unfortunately the Germans, instead making the biggest sacrifices imaginable, were unable in both world wars to destroy these sinister ideologies.
I fear the lack of our K thru 12 students receiving even a small amount of historical education is setting the breeding ground for the same results in the U. S. as Germany has inflicted on itself.
It places an amazingly important demand on the new Administration to reverse the Obama lead movement to the same impact/results realized in Germany today.
The left will not concede and will setup roadblocks everywhere!
Nice! Götterdämmerung is the choice word here for a nearly atheistic nation! But the 1848 rejection of liberal reform was not unique to Germany: it was initiated by an aging von Metternich and the Austro-Hungarians, along with the French and Germans. The Sonderweg dilemma was basically solved with NATO’s formation, allowing the Germans and all Western Europeans to pursue utopian fantasies devoid of reality, until now. It’s heartbreaking to watch.
Divine retribution.
The location of the country of Germany is a pivotal point for northern Europe. The ex-Soviet satellites, such as Poland and Hungary, cannot stop Russia by themselves. So, the Germans needs to be strong, not a bunch of maudlin weaklings who are whimpering from their guilt of WWII. Hitler was a very evil guy. But, in many respects, Stalin was the eviler one. The world has been in a prolonged economic dry spell. And the Ukraine-Russia could be the spark that ignites global conflagration. Moreover, immigration from the Middle East into Germany during the past two decades has become a cancer in the heart of Europe. Unless the Germans start exporting most of their Middle Eastern immigrants, they will not be able to sustain their First World society much longer.
Well said Mr Getz. However seems Germany is full of “maudlin weaklings” anymore & suffers from the same miasma afflicting the rest of Western Europe: self-loathing. + ever since 1945 the West has been shoving WWII & the Holocaust in their face every five minutes so it shouldn’t be a surprise.
Just gut instinct talking here but as a lifelong Military Historian I’ve studied these European conflicts from many angles; the German Army of 1940 was the finest fighting force the world has ever seen. They crushed France (then the largest army in Europe) in six weeks, kicked Great Britain out of Europe four times (Dunkirk, Norway, Greece, & Dieppe {in 1942), inflicted 3.5 million casualties on The Red Army in as many months, & by Spring of 1942 had advance units in Astrakhan which is on the Caspian Sea. That’s the virtual gateway to Asia. Where the gut instinct comes in is this: the Western Allies were so humiliated by the prowess of German arms the determination was made (hence the Morgenthau Plan) to crush German/Prussian spirit once & for all & make sure it was never to rise again.
Friend of mine – German Navy Veteran – laments the state & mindset of his country, referring to modern German men as “eunuchs”.
In reference to “the Germans exporting most of their Middle Eastern immigrants, they will not be able to sustain their First World society much longer.”. I believe the USA should do the same with their illegal immigrants.
It’ll take a Great Repatriation Crusade for Europe to recover from the mess created by the EU
With their current attitude, I have no hope that will happen.
Brilliant, insightful and very frightening article. Germany has been the economic powerhouse of the European Union. If Dr Hanson’s dire predictions come true it’s hard not to conclude that the total collapse of the EU will quickly follow.
An excellent analysis of how history repeats itself. The parallels with what is happening in Europe today are clear, and stark. Swap out Berlin for Moscow and the situation is almost identical. Will there be a Morgenthau plan for Russia? Can the west concede the inevitability of the Morgenthau vision manifesting one way or the other, and correct (rather than repeat) the errors of the past? Why not help Russia to abandon its aggressive ways and help it to rebuild itself into a civilized nation, the way Ukraine did even after it was unilaterally disarmed by the west? Only don’t make the mistake again of gifting the nukes to a historic enemy of the nation you are disarming.
Born in germany during Post war years, left for US 1970. . Dr. Hansen as usual your clear and comprehensive statements and analysis to bring history into our modern view , confirms it was the best decision of my life. I cannot be more grateful to this Country and for people like yourself. Margit
Born in germany during Post war years, left for US 1970. . Dr. Hansen as usual your clear and comprehensive statements and analysis to bring history into our modern view , confirms it was the best decision of my life. I cannot be more grateful to this Country and for people like yourself.
As a former German, post WW2, and immigrant your comments and analysis are spot on and confirm my gratitude to this country. Gratitude to all who made the next years under DJT possible and pulled us from the abyss.
Hanson gets one thing wrong, the people aren’t voting for this.
True and false at the same time. Just like in the USA the voters want everything but expect it to be delivered by magic. They openly invite their destroyer. I shudder at the thought that they deserve everything they asked for and l fear that they will get it.
Who do those Germans think they are? Californians?
In watching events in the US over time, it became more and more obvious that, who need to actually bomb a place out of existence, if you play the long con, and get a country to use its weakness, guilt, against itself. Make it feel it is evil for surviving, innovating, using God given resources of the earth. When a country “votes” to destroy its own dams that power massive cities, destroy industry, tell its constituents to turn down their heat, but you can walk around time square any night of the week and see that the democrats run cities are not living by what they preach. The idealization of the green movement is so insidious that is has taken over and blocked the common sense structure of the brain. How many people have noticed that the weather maps have a majority display of temperatures in the feared color of red? And the ideal temperature zone in blues and greens is very small- who sets the standard for those colors, and when did it change from being a number to a map overlay of global warming colors? Living in WA state where democrats have destroyed the state that was once beautiful, and a venture in to Seattle revealed the massive infestation of the graffiti lords. It has been like watching an infection spread over the past 5 years. Gov. Inslee has been one of the worst. As he and the coastal politicians lock arms together to help destroy the west coast. Who needs infiltrate the country when these sanctuary states vote to bring in an enemy of unknown proportion and provide services that weaken the pocketbooks of those who work hard to keep the area running. During COVID lock downs of years, foreign speaking people were hired while Americans were paid to stay home. Even if you tried to get a job, if you weren’t vaccinated you were discounted from employment, as non-English speaking people were hired. Companies willfully destroying themselves and their profits to go with DEI, environmental, and being pressured by SEC to have DEI aim their board, no to mention what has happened throughout the public schools during this time to brainwash kids over the years to believe all this stuff. Making it a circular effect. Educated the masses to feel guilt, to want to kill themselves above seeking solutions to improve. Make a society weak so as to not feel guilt from being strong.
Somewhat ironic that 2 native Germans of the WWII era is causing, funding and profiteering so much from the grief being experienced in this World at this time; Soros and Schwab. Add in the manic ideology of Obama and the mindless obedience of Biden for bombing the pipeline and we do have all ingredients to a World Depression. Just 2 billionaires funding 2 insane politicians!
Dr. Hanson,
Very probing article topic with the most biting irony, I wonder if you can elucidate a motive. The Morgenthau Plan was proposed as a just sentence against the aggression of the Nazi War machine that plundered, murdered and destroyed pre-WWII Europe. What is the motivation underpinning Germanys self-imposition of their own modern-day Morgenthau Plan? What did they do wrong that justifies the punishment? Is this merely the work of the collective guilt of an industrially successful country now willing to commit fratricide as some sort of sick attempt at reparation against how it might have contributed to “climate change”? It befuddles.
I don’t think it is guilt and self-punishment. They, like California, are simply stupid enough to elect Leftists to positions of power in significant numbers to make them irremovable. The Leftists then gleefully destroy all that is good and subsidize and encourage all that is destructive.
What they did wrong is self introduce the woke mind virus.
Now the termites are eating their brains to the point where they can’t see their way out.
Linda like hearing of the saving of the (non threatened gulls) Santa Cruz pier.
Don’t have to worry now. There’s no country to save.
Could it be Merkel is a communist? She promoted the Leninist idea of revolutionary defeatism–weaken the country to prepare it for revolution. And add Schwab and Soros (Hungarian by birth) to the list.
As someone who grew up in post war Germany, it is not a surprise. The incessant propaganda and guilt trip that was imposed by the victors upon the German population is still ongoing unabated and shows results. As the designated British atrocity propaganda chief Sefton Delmer said after the war about ending the hostile lies that are part of war:
“No, now we shall start all the more! We shall continue this atrocity propaganda, we shall intensify it, until nobody shall accept a good word from the Germans anymore, until all the sympathy you had in other countries shall be destroyed, and until the Germans themselves shall be so confused that they do not know anymore what they are doing”.
The sad thing is that that model is now being employed against all Western Christian nations.
No harm in Germany not having a strong military. In any case their interests lie more with Russia than with Ukraine. Europe could make a comeback with Germany as its driver, but that would require a reorganization of the EU, an EU 2.0 to get away from the stifling organization it is. The US is faced with the strong competition of a group based on Russia China India. Looking at a map one would say that an even stronger competition would come from Europe Russia China India working together and that means the US will do all in its power to keep Europe weak.
IMO, Peter Zeihan mapped out pretty well where things are going. China is on the road to collapse and WarLordism for the 28th time in its long and chaotic history. Long-standing rivalries between China and India, between Russia and China will inevitably reassert themselves as the POSTWAR WORLD ORDER that we built to confront the Soviet Empire withers away, due to America’s lack of interest in playing Atlas, supporting the whole effing World on its shoulders and playing World Cop, getting involved in OTHER PEOPLE’S wars. WE the People (the Deplorables, the MAGA folks, the America Firsters, the Tea Party folks, the ones who put Trump back in the White House) couldn’t care less about a weak Europe, a strong Europe, a United Europe, a divided Europe or any other iteration of “A (fill in the blank) Europe”…for real, seriously. We’re sick to death of the Olde World and its endless wars across Europe, the M.E., Africa and Asia, which will only increase as the mad scramble for control of resources begins in the wake of a collapsed World Order. It is likely much of Europe will submit to Russia/Ukraine as the resource “piggybank”, while a “Latin League”(Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium) might develop and Scandinavia & Coastal/Island Europe looks elsewhere for resources. Turkey will look East to The Stans to revive an Empire of The Turkmen. The M.E. will be a source of war as usual. We are laser-focused on the North American Continent, the Five Eyes (Six counting Japan), and a
Oops. Ran out of room. Oh well. You get my drift.
Bob, it appears that the professor limits our input to 1500 characters.
Possible solutions:
1. Go to wordcounter.net and check your input first.
2. Post a second (or third) response and just keep going.
3. Start your own blog and type as long as you want.
4. Type a long response in a text editor then paste it into an AI app and ask it to limit it to 1500 characters but don’t leave anything important out!
5. Type less.
6. By the way, i catch your drift!
West Germany and East Germany were formed in 1949 and the Marshall plan was introduced in 1948. The East Germans were excluded because they were under Soviet rule, this created a large gap between the two countries, the East had little industry and minimal infrastructure, the Russians instituted a policy of total domination limiting economic development. By 1989 East Germany disintegrated and in 1990 West and East Germany united in a fairly rapid process. I would say this is not just a reunification but the birth of a new country. So what happened afterwards? Money and resources were redirected to the former East, the new German military had little purpose and received little resources, national identity changed from west vs east to an undefined one, then came the EU to bring it all together under a dominant German economy, some jokingly called it the 4th Reich, but something happened. Instead of feeling proud the Germans began to feel ashamed of their success, so Frau Merkel would give the people something to be proud of, diversity through mass migration. Then the Green Party made gains through political partnerships and got the chance to execute their (ideological) plan, the deindustrialization of Germany in the name of climate change. I’m in Germany right now, I’ve never seen such Zukunftsangst “future fear”. Snap elections are set for Feb 23rd, but the options are like choosing either a poison or a pistol, the status quo will not change, they need a disrupter.
We may have barely saved ourselves, and the Founding Fathers and heroes of the Enlightenment may be the light of centuries that helps us save Europe. Trump’s reach in helping to congeal the already embryonic European embrace of neo-classical western ideas and policies in opposition to the Marxist/corporatist self-destruction can create the world-wide movement toward individualist capitalist reason-based revolution. Let’s not forget the giant Milei in Argentina and Bukele in El Salvador. Milei in particular is the example, and if we can coalesce global thought around freedom, enterprise, individual responsibility in pockets that can expand, we can defeat the demonic globalists represented by WEF, Soros, Bilderberg, Rockefeller and the execrable monster Bill Gates.
Bravo Moleculist
A very valuable analogy. Ever since President Obama led the world lurching leftward, nationstates have been in decline. The strengthening of local control, such as in law and order, respected boarders, justice that punishes high crimes and misdemeanors, and so forth, it all means renewed self-respect. Thank you for shining the light, VDH, showing the way.
“RESPECTED BOARDERS?…ONLY IF THE RENT IS PAID ON TIME!
I’ve been to Germany, what is ironic is the Muslim male influx (hell bent on sex) marry the “homely fraus” that the modern German men aren’t interested in. Because the Muslim religion is passed by the paternal lines this increases the “new” muslim birthrate way faster than the christian native way. “Whoa Nelli.”
They say Trump dodged a bullet. I think it’s us, the American people who were lucky. I shudder to surmise what we’d be thinking if Kamala had won.
Thanks, VDH for being willing to share your erudition with us. You’re a breath of fresh air!
Many have tried to get the US to do the same. Thankfully, we have some clear thinking people who are ready to right our course. Thank you for the history lesson.
Patton said we should have bombed Germany back to the stone age, then marched on to Russia.
He was so right.
Too bad nobody listened to him.
Brilliant. I haven’t read a perspective like this. Wrong headed grand ideas merge into a cascade of more of the same but from different directions and drivers. All resulting in destruction of society, wealth and life. Until another cycle begins.
Common sense.
You have it or you don’t. It is a practical way of understanding the world around you. After, over possibly a lifetime, you have observed what works and what does not, you tend to make decisions, possibly unconsciously, about the behavioral patterns you see everywhere. You watch a person or a company or a nation and say to yourself: That ain’t gonna’ work because it makes no sense.
Like a country that purposefully limits its available resources for no good reason. That is not going to turn out well in the end. You can feel it. That’s what Germany did with energy. We all knew that was a bad idea. No common sense.
Or a nation that has unrestricted borders. Germany did that, too. So did we. We all knew that would not turn out well. Common sense tells us that.
Government overly restricting business. Just a bad idea.
Are we finally returning to common sense? Germany apparently is not.
Germany will continue to fail harder until they acquire and activate, as a nation, common sense.
Willfully pastoralizing? I think it is worse than that. Hasn’t Germany, like many other European countries, been working against farming for years now?
What a stark contrast between today’s Germany, as described by Professor Hanson, and Poland. The resurgent Polish nation is more prepared to defend itself than ever before.
After being previously annihilated by Prussia, Austria and Russia and then mauled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II, they have shown astonishing resilience. Could this stubborn will to survive as a people be due to their deeply held Catholic faith?
I am a retired US Army artillery officer. I served in Germany in the 1980s when their military was leagues above what it is now. At times, my artillery battalion conduct live fire training with our German partnership battalion. They used US-made howitzers and we even supplied them with ammunition. One of the German officers told me that they loved to come train with us because just one of their firing batteries shot more rounds in one trip with us than his whole battalion fired in a year on their own.
I wrote in 2008 that the US should disengage from NATO, say that even stronger now. Our affiliation with Europe, and the reason we shed so much blood there, was not simply to defend dirt. It was to defend and preserve a cultural heritage the was the wellspring of human flourishing of the modern era. That the Europeans sometimes seemed hellbent on killing one another in carload lots did not negate the fundamental virtues of the Western heritage of faith and reason.
Yet that is precisely what most European nations are intentionally abandoning. Hans-Georg Maaßen was Germany’s top domestic intelligence chief from 2012 to 2018. He says, “The Europeans will succumb to Islam” and that “the end result will be the gradual destruction of our European cultures.” More here: https://sensingonline.blogspot.com/2008/10/what-has-nato-ever-done-for-us.html
It’s alarming watching Europe fall to the hordes of Muslim zealots. Reverse Colonialism or the second millennial Crusades determined to subjugate non-believers? It casts the Chinese actions against the Muslim Uighurs in a different light.
There are more than 2,770 mosques in the USA. In 2020 only 1.3% of Americans were Muslim. How much has that grown in the past 4 years? How many of Biden’s invitees are jihadists awaiting orders?
Is Trump & MAGA enough to prevent America from folding like Europe?
The deep-State/global elites will not allow it; they still control almost all institutions and can expand the war to many more fronts.
No mention of Nordstream???