Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Germany – Occupation Zones, 1945
- Introduction: Private Polowsky's Oath
- 1 Plans
- 2 Making Peace
- 3 The Limits of Reform: The U.S. Zone
- 4 A Fragile Friendship
- 5 The Russian Challenge
- 6 Bizonal Beginnings
- 7 The Doctors Deliberate
- 8 Marshall's Medicine
- 9 A Separate State
- 10 Cold War Germany
- 11 Winning
- Conclusion: The American Decision to Divide Germany
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Plans
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Germany – Occupation Zones, 1945
- Introduction: Private Polowsky's Oath
- 1 Plans
- 2 Making Peace
- 3 The Limits of Reform: The U.S. Zone
- 4 A Fragile Friendship
- 5 The Russian Challenge
- 6 Bizonal Beginnings
- 7 The Doctors Deliberate
- 8 Marshall's Medicine
- 9 A Separate State
- 10 Cold War Germany
- 11 Winning
- Conclusion: The American Decision to Divide Germany
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The question is not whether we want Germans to suffer for their sins. Many of us would like to see them suffer the tortures they have inflicted on others. The only question is whether over the years a group of seventy million educated, efficient and imaginative people can be kept within bounds on such a low level of subsistence. … A subordinate question is whether even if you could do this it is good for the rest of the world either economically or spiritually.
(Henry L. Stimson, September 1944)Hopkins : My God, he [Stimson] was terrible.
Morgenthau : All you've got to do is let kindness and Christianity work on the Germans. …
Hopkins : But fundamentally I think it hurts him to think of the nonuse of property. … He's grown up in that school so long that property, God, becomes so sacred.
(From Morgenthau Diaries, September 1944)When they imagined the postwar world, officials in the Roosevelt administration worried most about Germany. Germany had been the aggressor in two World Wars, and had already demonstrated a capacity to rise from defeat to become the dominant power in Europe.
In theory, the Soviet Union could be a greater menace if it utilized its military might in the service of its Marxist ideology. Yet during the period when American and Soviet forces were allied against Hitler, this prospect had little reality. Even the diminished band of Soviet-haters in the State Department fretted over Russian subversion rather than armed attack.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Drawing the LineThe American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–1949, pp. 14 - 70Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996