Morgenthau Plan

1. Lead

The proposal

The Morgenthau Plan was a proposal, drawn up in 1944 by the United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., for what should be done with Germany after the Second World War. Its central idea was simple and drastic: Germany should be stripped of its heavy industry, its mines and factories dismantled or destroyed, and the country reduced to a state that was, in the words of the plan’s supporters, “primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character”. A Germany that could not make steel, chemicals or machine tools, the argument ran, could never again make tanks, aircraft and guns — and could never again start a world war.

Why it still matters

The plan was never adopted. It was discussed at the highest level, briefly endorsed in a memorandum signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944, and then quietly abandoned as the practical and moral problems of carrying it out became clear. Yet the Morgenthau Plan matters far beyond the months in which it was seriously considered. It was the sharpest expression of one answer to the question that haunted the Allies in 1944 and 1945 — how to make sure Germany could never again threaten Europe — and the debate it provoked helped to produce the opposite answer: the Marshall Plan, the rebuilding of West Germany, and the Cold War division of Europe. Its influence also lived on, in softened form, in the early occupation policy set out in Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 (JCS 1067) of 1945, and in the dismantling of German industry that took place in the first years after the war.

2. Key Facts

Proposed by	Henry Morgenthau Jr., United States Secretary of the Treasury
Document	“Suggested Post-Surrender Program for Germany”, memorandum of 1944
Date	Drafted in 1944; discussed at the Second Quebec Conference, 12–16 September 1944
Core proposal	Demilitarise Germany, dismantle heavy industry, convert Germany into a primarily agricultural and pastoral country
Territorial proposal	Partition Germany into two states (North and South Germany), internationalise the Ruhr and Saar, transfer East Prussia and parts of Silesia to Poland and the Soviet Union
Outcome	Never adopted as policy; influence faded after 1945, and JCS 1067 was replaced by JCS 1779 in July 1947
Successor policy	The Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program, from 1947) — rebuilding, not punishment

3. Background

A question with a bitter history

By the summer of 1944, the outcome of the war in Europe was no longer in serious doubt. The Allies had landed in Normandy on D-Day — or, more precisely, the landings of 6 June 1944 that opened the second front in France — and Soviet armies were driving westwards across Eastern Europe. The question facing the Allied governments was no longer whether Germany would be defeated, but what should be done with Germany afterwards. It was a question with a long and bitter history behind it. After the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles had imposed reparations and territorial losses on Germany, and many people in Britain, France and the United States believed that settlement had been both too harsh to be accepted by Germans and too lenient to prevent a second war. The rise of Adolf Hitler, German rearmament in the 1930s, and the catastrophe of the Second World War seemed to many to prove that the Versailles settlement had failed. The lesson drawn by some was that Germany must be treated more gently; the lesson drawn by others was that it must be treated far more harshly.

A Treasury Secretary intervenes

Within the American government, the responsibility for planning the occupation of Germany belonged, in the first instance, to the State Department under Secretary of State Cordell Hull and to the War Department under Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. In the summer of 1944, the War Department produced a handbook for the military government of Germany that took a relatively moderate line: it envisaged a rapid restoration of normal life, the revival of the German economy, and a Germany that would, in time, take its place again as a normal European state. When Henry Morgenthau Jr. saw the handbook, he was appalled. Morgenthau, who had been Secretary of the Treasury since 1934 and was one of President Roosevelt’s closest advisers, believed that a Germany allowed to rebuild its industry would, sooner or later, rebuild its army as well. He set his Treasury staff to work on an alternative — a programme that would make a third German war physically impossible by removing the industrial base on which modern war depends.

The memorandum

Morgenthau’s memorandum, headed “Suggested Post-Surrender Program for Germany”, was completed in the summer of 1944. It was not the work of a crank or an outsider: Morgenthau was a cabinet minister, and his principal collaborator, Harry Dexter White, was a senior Treasury official who would later become a key figure in the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The plan was circulated within the administration and debated fiercely. Secretary of War Stimson opposed it strongly. Secretary of State Hull opposed it. General George Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, is reported to have told Morgenthau that the plan would strengthen German resistance, because German soldiers who believed they had nothing to lose would fight harder. But Morgenthau had the ear of the President, and in September 1944 he travelled with Roosevelt to the Second Quebec Conference, where the plan was put before Churchill.

4. Opposing Forces

Two rival visions

The debate over the Morgenthau Plan was not a battle between armies but a struggle between rival visions inside the Allied governments, and it is best understood as a contest of two camps. On one side stood Morgenthau and his Treasury circle, supported at crucial moments by President Roosevelt himself, who shared Morgenthau’s conviction that Germany must be treated harshly and who was personally sympathetic to the idea of a pastoral Germany. On the other side stood almost the entire rest of the American administration — the State Department, the War Department, and the military leadership — together with most of the British government, including Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who worked to have the plan set aside in London.

	Supporters of a harsh settlement	Supporters of reconstruction
United States	Henry Morgenthau Jr. (Treasury); Harry Dexter White; President Roosevelt at times	Cordell Hull (State); Henry L. Stimson (War); Gen. George Marshall
Britain	Winston Churchill (briefly, at Quebec, September 1944)	Anthony Eden (Foreign Secretary); most of the Foreign Office and the Cabinet
Argument	Only the removal of industry can guarantee Germany never rearms; the German people must bear the consequences of the war they started	A ruined, starving Germany would be a burden on the occupiers, a breeding ground for extremism, and a vacuum the Soviet Union could exploit
Preferred outcome	Pastoral Germany, partitioned and demilitarised	A stable, productive Germany integrated into a recovering Europe

Moscow’s own plans

The Soviet Union, the third of the Big Three, was not a party to the Morgenthau debate in the same way. Stalin’s government had its own plans for Germany, centred on reparations — the removal of German industrial plant to the Soviet Union as compensation for the enormous destruction the German invasion had caused — and on a Germany that would be weak and, if possible, friendly to Moscow. Some Soviet demands overlapped with Morgenthau’s proposals, notably the dismantling of industry, but for different reasons and with different ends in view. The Soviet Union took reparations in kind on a large scale from its own occupation zone, and the dismantling of factories in eastern Germany continued into the late 1940s.

A gift to Nazi propaganda

There was also a third force in the debate, and it was the German people themselves — or rather, the German government’s use of the plan. When the Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the American press in September 1944, the Nazi government seized on it as propaganda. German newspapers and radio told the German people that the Allies intended to starve them and destroy their country, and that they therefore had nothing to lose by fighting on. Whether the plan actually prolonged the war is a matter of historical debate, but General Marshall and others at the time believed that it stiffened German resistance in the last months of the war, and the episode is still cited as a cautionary example of how a leaked policy proposal can have unintended consequences on the battlefield.

5. The Battle

Drafting the plan

The history of the Morgenthau Plan is a history of memoranda, conferences and reversals, and it falls into four phases. The first phase was its drafting in the summer of 1944. Morgenthau’s memorandum proposed a set of measures that, taken together, would have transformed Germany beyond recognition. Germany was to be completely demilitarised: its armed forces disbanded, its weapons destroyed, and its population disarmed. All war-related industries — the production of arms, ammunition, aircraft, ships and military vehicles — were to be eliminated, together with the heavy industries that supported them: iron and steel, chemicals, and the manufacture of machine tools. The great industrial regions of the Ruhr and the Saar were to be placed under international control, so that their coal and steel could not be used by a future German government. Germany was to be partitioned into two separate states, North Germany and South Germany, and the territory of East Prussia, together with parts of Silesia, was to be transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union. The country that remained would be, in the plan’s own phrase, “primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character”.

Quebec and the backlash

The Quebec memorandum

The second phase was the Quebec Conference of September 1944. Roosevelt and Churchill met at Quebec City from 12 to 16 September, and Morgenthau was present. Churchill was at first reluctant — he is reported to have said that he did not want to see a Germany reduced to pastoralism, and he worried about the effect on Britain, which needed German coal and a functioning German economy — but he eventually initialled a memorandum based on Morgenthau’s proposal. The memorandum provided for “eliminating the warmaking industries in the Ruhr and the Saar” and “looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character”. It no longer included the partition of Germany into several independent states, which had been part of the original draft. Roosevelt also initialled it. For a few days, the Morgenthau Plan appeared to have the support of both the American President and the British Prime Minister.

The leak and the backlash

The third phase was the backlash. On 21 September 1944, The New York Times and other American newspapers reported the plan, and the reaction was swift and hostile. The American public, and many members of Congress, were shocked by the idea of deliberately impoverishing a whole nation. Stimson and Hull, who had opposed the plan from the start, used the public outcry to argue that the plan should be abandoned. Churchill, under pressure from Eden and from his own Cabinet, drew back from the Quebec memorandum. Roosevelt himself, when Stimson confronted him about the memorandum in October 1944, is reported to have expressed surprise that he had initialled it, saying that he had “no idea” how he could have done so. Historians have debated whether Roosevelt genuinely forgot, or whether he was retreating from a position he no longer wished to defend; either way, the plan had lost its presidential backing.

A slow death in the occupation

The fourth phase was its long, slow death in the occupation. When Germany surrendered in May 1945, the Morgenthau Plan was not the policy of the occupation, but its shadow remained. On 10 May 1945, President Harry Truman approved JCS 1067, the directive to the American commander in Germany, which ordered the occupation forces to “take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany” and not to take steps “designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy”. JCS 1067 was not the Morgenthau Plan — it did not order the dismantling of all German industry — but it reflected the same punitive spirit, and for two years it governed American policy in Germany. In practice, it proved unworkable: a Germany that could not feed itself became a burden on the occupying powers, who had to pay for food imports, and the dismantling of factories, together with the shortage of coal and transport, deepened the misery of the German population in the bitter winters of 1945–46 and 1946–47. In March 1947, former President Herbert Hoover, after a tour of Germany, reported that the idea of reducing Germany to a pastoral state was an illusion, and that it could not be done “unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it”. His investigation concluded that the plan was unworkable and would result in up to 25 million Germans dying from starvation if fully implemented — a figure that is an estimate, and a contested one, but one that captured the scale of the problem. In July 1947, JCS 1067 was replaced by JCS 1779, which stressed that an “orderly and prosperous Europe” required a “stable and productive Germany”. The Morgenthau Plan was dead. Within a year, the Marshall Plan was under way.

6. Turning Point

The leak

The turning point in the history of the Morgenthau Plan came not in a conference room but in a newspaper. The leak of the plan to the American press on 21 September 1944, and the public outcry that followed, broke the coalition that had sustained it. Before the leak, the plan had the quiet support of the President and the initials of two heads of government on a memorandum. After the leak, it had neither. Roosevelt distanced himself, Churchill drew back, and the officials who had opposed the plan from the start — Stimson, Hull and Marshall — were able to argue, with public opinion behind them, that the plan was both impractical and unworthy of the United States.

The winter of 1945–46

There was a second turning point, slower and less visible, in the winter of 1945–46, when the reality of occupation made the plan’s impracticality impossible to ignore. The American and British occupation authorities found themselves responsible for feeding a population of tens of millions in a country whose cities were in ruins, whose transport system had collapsed, and whose farms could not produce enough food. The cost of feeding Germany fell on the American and British taxpayers, and the dismantling of German factories, far from paying for the occupation, removed the very capacity that might have allowed Germany to feed itself. The moral argument also shifted: as the full scale of the Holocaust and of Nazi crimes became known, many in the West concluded that the German people should be judged as individuals, not punished as a nation — and that a policy of deliberate impoverishment would punish the victims of Nazism as well as its supporters. By the time Hoover reported in March 1947, the argument was over in all but name. The formal replacement of JCS 1067 by JCS 1779 in July 1947 was the administrative confirmation of a decision that had already been made on the ground.

7. Casualties and Losses

A plan never carried out

The Morgenthau Plan was never implemented, so it caused no casualties directly, and there is no casualty table for it in the sense that there is for a battle. But the debate over the plan is inseparable from a question of human cost, because the plan’s critics argued — and its defenders denied — that it would have caused mass starvation if it had been carried out. The figure most often cited in that debate comes from Herbert Hoover’s investigation of 1947, which concluded that the plan was unworkable and would result in up to 25 million Germans dying from starvation. That figure should be treated with care: it was an estimate, based on the food production of a deindustrialised Germany and on the population that such a Germany could support, and it was produced in a political argument, by a former President who opposed the plan. It is not a measured death toll, because the deaths never happened. What it does show is the scale of the human stakes that the critics believed were involved, and why the plan came to be seen, even by many who had wanted Germany punished, as a proposal that could not be carried out without catastrophe.

The cost of the occupation

The human cost that did occur was the cost of the occupation policy that followed, and of the conditions in Germany in 1945–47. In the winter of 1945–46, food rations in the British and American zones fell to around 1,000 calories a day or less in some areas, and hunger and disease were widespread. Estimates of the number of Germans who died in the immediate post-war years from hunger, cold and disease vary widely, and historians disagree about the figures, in part because the records of the period are incomplete and in part because it is difficult to separate deaths caused by the war itself from deaths caused by the conditions that followed it. No reliable single figure exists, and this article does not invent one. What is certain is that the first two winters after the war were among the hardest in modern German history, and that the experience of those winters was one of the reasons why American and British policy shifted, in 1947, from punishment to reconstruction.

8. Map and Geography

The Ruhr and the Saar

The Morgenthau Plan was a plan about geography as much as about economics, and its territorial proposals can be read on a map of Germany. The industrial heart of the plan was the Ruhr, the coal and steel region in western Germany along the River Ruhr, and the Saar, the smaller coal and steel region on the French border. These were the regions that had powered German rearmament, and the plan proposed to place them under international control, removing them permanently from German sovereignty. The Ruhr, with its mines around Essen, Dortmund and Duisburg and its steelworks along the Rhine, was the single most important industrial region in Europe; to internationalise it was to remove the engine of the German economy.

Partition on paper

The plan also proposed the partition of Germany into two states. North Germany would have consisted of Prussia, Saxony and Thuringia — the Protestant north and centre, including Berlin — while South Germany would have consisted of Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden, the Catholic south. The two states would have been separate sovereign countries, with no common government and no common army. In the east, East Prussia, the historic heartland of Prussian militarism, would have been transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union, and parts of Silesia, another industrial region, would have gone to Poland. The Germany that remained would have been smaller, poorer and divided — a country of farms and small towns, without the coal, steel and industry that had made it a great power.

The map that actually emerged

It is worth noting how different this map is from the map that actually emerged after the war. Germany was indeed divided, but not into North and South: it was divided into East and West, along the line where the Soviet armies met the Western Allies in 1945, a division that became the Iron Curtain and the Cold War frontier of Europe. The Ruhr and the Saar were not internationalised permanently: the Saar was under French administration for a time and returned to West Germany in 1957, and the Ruhr remained German, its coal and steel eventually pooled with France’s in the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951 — the first step towards the European Union. East Prussia was indeed transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union, and millions of Germans were expelled from the eastern territories, one of the largest forced movements of people in European history. The map of post-war Germany was shaped by the war’s ending, not by Morgenthau’s plan, but the plan’s geography — the Ruhr, the Saar, the partition, the east — remained the geography of the debate for years afterwards.

9. Outcome and Legacy of the Morgenthau Plan

A catalyst for the opposite policy

The Morgenthau Plan failed as a policy, but it succeeded, in a way its author did not intend, as a catalyst. The debate it provoked forced the American and British governments to decide, explicitly, what kind of Germany they wanted — and the decision they reached, after two years of occupation, was the opposite of Morgenthau’s. The Marshall Plan, announced in June 1947 and in operation from 1948, offered American aid to rebuild the economies of Western Europe, including West Germany. The European Recovery Program was, in its philosophy, the anti-Morgenthau Plan: it assumed that a prosperous Germany was not a threat to Europe but a precondition for European recovery, and that the best guarantee against another German war was to bind Germany into a network of economic and political ties with its neighbours. The European Coal and Steel Community of 1951, which pooled French and German coal and steel under a common authority, was the institutional expression of the same idea: the industries that had made war possible would be shared, not destroyed.

The occupation and the Cold War

The plan’s legacy is also visible in the occupation itself. The dismantling of German factories, which continued in the British and American zones into the late 1940s and on a much larger scale in the Soviet zone, was in part a legacy of the Morgenthau debate, even though it was carried out as reparations rather than as a deliberate policy of pastoralisation. The Berlin Blockade of 1948–49, and the division of Germany into two states in 1949, were the products of the Cold War, not of the Morgenthau Plan — but the Cold War itself was shaped by the question the plan had raised, namely whether Germany should be punished or rebuilt, and the Western answer, by 1949, was firmly reconstruction.

How historians judge it

Historians today are divided about the Morgenthau Plan, and the division is itself instructive. Some argue that the plan was a serious and understandable response to the enormity of Nazi crimes, and that its critics have judged it too harshly with the benefit of hindsight. Others argue that it was a vindictive and impractical proposal, based on a misunderstanding of how modern economies work, and that its only real effect was to give Nazi propaganda a gift and to delay the reconstruction of Europe. What is not in dispute is that the plan was never implemented, that Germany was not turned into a pastoral state, and that the policy that replaced it — reconstruction, integration and, eventually, reconciliation — produced a Germany that has been, for more than seventy years, a peaceful and democratic member of the European community. The Morgenthau Plan remains, in the end, a reminder of how close the Allies came to choosing a different future for Germany, and of how much depended on the choice they made.

10. Commanders

The authors of the plan

Henry Morgenthau Jr. (United States). Secretary of the Treasury from 1934 to 1945, and the author of the plan that bears his name. Morgenthau was a farmer and a close friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed him to the Treasury after the death of his predecessor. He was not a foreign-policy specialist, and his intervention in the planning for post-war Germany was unusual for a Treasury Secretary. He pursued the plan with great determination through 1944 and into 1945, and he resigned from the Treasury in July 1945 after disagreements with President Truman. He published his case for the plan in the book Germany Is Our Problem (1945).

Franklin D. Roosevelt (United States). President of the United States from 1933 until his death in April 1945. Roosevelt was sympathetic to Morgenthau’s harsh view of Germany, and he initialled the Quebec memorandum of September 1944. His attitude towards the plan remains a subject of historical debate: he appears to have supported it at some moments and to have forgotten or abandoned it at others. His death in April 1945 removed the plan’s most powerful supporter in Washington.

The British response

Winston Churchill (Britain). Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Churchill initialled the Quebec memorandum in September 1944, apparently in part out of friendship for Morgenthau, who was regarded in London as one of Britain’s best friends in the Roosevelt administration. Churchill soon drew back from the plan under pressure from his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and from his Cabinet, and Britain did not pursue the Morgenthau approach.

Henry L. Stimson (United States). Secretary of War from 1940 to 1945. Stimson was the plan’s most effective opponent inside the American government. He argued that the plan was impractical, that it would make the occupation unworkable, and that it would strengthen German resistance. His memorandum of September 1944, and his confrontation with Roosevelt in October of that year, were important moments in the plan’s decline.

The opponents and the economist

Cordell Hull (United States). Secretary of State from 1933 to 1944. Hull, whose department was formally responsible for planning the post-war settlement, opposed the Morgenthau Plan and favoured a Germany that would be rebuilt and reintegrated into the world economy. His alternative approach, though he retired in late 1944, represented the view that eventually prevailed.

Harry Dexter White (United States). Senior Treasury official and Morgenthau’s principal collaborator on the plan. White, an economist, helped to draft the memorandum and to argue its case within the administration. He later played a central role in the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, which created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — institutions that embodied the opposite philosophy to the Morgenthau Plan, that of international economic cooperation rather than national punishment.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Morgenthau Plan?
A 1944 American proposal, drawn up by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., to demilitarise Germany, dismantle its heavy industry, and turn it into a primarily agricultural and pastoral country so that it could never again wage a modern war.

Was the Morgenthau Plan ever implemented?
No. It was discussed at the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944 and briefly endorsed in a memorandum, but it was never adopted as Allied policy. Germany was not turned into a pastoral state.

Why was the Morgenthau Plan rejected?
Because it was impractical — a deindustrialised Germany could not feed itself and would become a burden on the occupiers — because it was opposed by most of the American and British governments, and because public opinion turned against it after it was leaked to the press in September 1944.

What replaced the Morgenthau Plan?
In the short term, the occupation directive JCS 1067 (1945), which was itself replaced by JCS 1779 in July 1947. In the longer term, the Marshall Plan and the policy of rebuilding West Germany and integrating it into Western Europe.

Did the Morgenthau Plan prolong the war?
It is debated. The Nazi government used the leaked plan as propaganda, telling Germans that the Allies intended to destroy their country. General Marshall and others believed this stiffened German resistance, but historians disagree about how much effect it actually had.

What does “pastoral” mean in the Morgenthau Plan?
It means a country based mainly on farming and animal husbandry, without significant heavy industry — the opposite of an industrial power. The Quebec memorandum used the phrase “primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character”.

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Sources

1. Wikipedia, “Morgenthau Plan” — the memorandum, the Quebec Conference, JCS 1067 and JCS 1779, and Hoover’s investigation.
2. Henry Morgenthau Jr., Germany Is Our Problem (Harper, 1945) — Morgenthau’s own case for the plan.
3. John Morton Blum, Roosevelt and Morgenthau (Houghton Mifflin, 1970) — the relationship between Roosevelt and Morgenthau and the debate inside the administration.
4. Encyclopædia Britannica, “Morgenthau Plan” — summary of the proposal and its rejection.
5. US National Archives, Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 (1945) and Directive 1779 (1947) — the occupation directives that followed the debate.
6. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum — the original “Suggested Post-Surrender Program for Germany” memorandum (1944).

Further reading

• Warren F. Kimball, Swords or Ploughshares? The Morgenthau Plan for Defeated Germany, 1943–1946 (Lippincott, 1976).
• Michael R. Beschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941–1945 (Simon & Schuster, 2002).