| abstract
| - The Morgenthau Plan was a plan for the occupation of Germany after the Second World War that advocated harsh measures intended to remove Germany's ability to wage war ever again. In the original proposal this was to be achieved in three main steps.
* Germany was to be partitioned into two independent states.
* Germany's main centers of mining and industry, including the Saar area, the Ruhr and Upper Silesia were to be Internationalized or annexed by neighboring nations.
* All heavy industry was to be dismantled or otherwise destroyed. The plan was proposed by and subsequently named after Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. At the Second Quebec Conference on September 16, 1944, U.S. President Roosevelt and Morgenthau persuaded the initially very reluctant British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to agree to the plan, likely using a $6 billion Lend Lease agreement to do so. Churchill chose however to narrow the scope of Morgenthau's proposal by drafting a new version of the memorandum, which ended up being the version signed by the two statesmen. The gist of the signed memorandum was "This programme for eliminating the war-making industries in the Ruhr and in the Saar is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character." News of the existence of the plan was leaked to the press [1]. President Roosevelt's response to press inquiries was to deny the press reports.[2]. In wartime Germany, Goebbels was able to use the plan to bolster the German resistance on the Western front. In occupied Germany, the Morgenthau plan lived on in the U.S. occupation directive JCS 1067 and in the Allied "industrial disarmament" plans, designed to reduce German economic might and to destroy Germany's capability to wage war by complete or partial de-industrialisation and restrictions imposed on utilization of remaining production capacity. By 1950, after the virtual completion of the by then much watered-out "level of industry" plans, equipment had been removed from 706 manufacturing plants in the west and steel production capacity had been reduced by 6,700,000 tons. In early 1946 U.S. President Harry S. Truman finally bowed to pressure from Senators, Congress and public to allow foreign relief organizations to enter Germany in order to review the food situation. In mid-1946 non-German relief organizations were finally permitted to help starving German children. The U.S. government formally abandoned the Morgenthau plan as promoted occupation-policy in September 1946 with Secretaty of State James F. Byrnes' speech Restatement of Policy on Germany. In July 1947 with the advent of the initial planning for the Marshall plan designed to help the now deteriorating European economy recover, the restrictions placed on yearly German Steel production were lessened. Permitted Steel production quotas were raised from 25% of pre-war capacity to 50% of pre-war capacity. The U.S. occupation directive JCS 1067, whose economic section had prohibited "steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany [or] designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy", was then also replaced by the new U.S. occupation directive JCS 1779 which instead stressed that "An orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany." In early 1947 four million German soldiers were still being used as forced labor in the UK, France, and the Soviet Union. In 1951 West Germany agreed to join the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) the following year. This meant that some of the economic restrictions on production capacity and on actual production that were imposed by the International Authority for the Ruhr were lifted, and that its role was taken over by the ECSC. In contemporary Germany, extreme right-wing circles present it as a Jewish plan for enslaving Germany.
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