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What became known as the Morgenthau Plan was actually the brainchild of Harry Dexter White, the anglicized name of a Jewish Lithuanian who worked as a science advisor in the Roosevelt administration. The policy underwent several iterations, but as ultimately formulated it called for permanent effacement of Germany.

What survived of industry was to be dismantled and sold for scrap. All educational institutions of higher learning were to closed for the foreseeable future. Germany was to be turned into a literal cow pasture. Germans were to be conscripted for "forced labor outside Germany".

None of this was a metaphor. It was taken seriously enough to be opposed by the State Department. Morgenthau was furious and ultimately succeeded in getting Roosevelt and Churchill to approve the plan at their Quebec Conference in late 1944.

Herbert Hoover, who was appointed by Truman to oversee humanitarian relief in Germany after the war, argued that Germany could not actually be reduced to a pastoral state without exterminating or deporting 25 million Germans. (John Dietrich. (2002) The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy.)

It would appear than the Morgenthau faction had no problem with that. Allied occupation of Germany was hardly benign. It is estimated (and again we are left with polemics and estimates) that a million Germans died in POW or reeducation camps of typhus and malnutrition. Germans in general were left to fend for themselves as best they could in the rubble. Another million died of exposure and starvation in the terrible winter of 1945-1946.

By 1947 conditions in Germany were worse than they had been in 1945 or 1946 and a U.S. congressional report stated that if conditions were allowed to continue they would result in the “liquidation” of Germans. (John Dietrich. op. cit.)

It is an interesting question how much Morgenthau or White knew of the actual conditions of Nazi occupation and genocide. As of 1944, much of the details we take for fact were unknown or known only uncertainly; but there is a striking resemblance between Morgenthau's plan and Himmler's plans for post-war Russia.

It was alleged, after the war that White was in fact a Soviet mole. A Congressional inquiry was initiated but White died of a heart attack shortly before it began. Perhaps Putin will open the achives.

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