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From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 9, 3 March 1945, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The plans for Germany agreed upon by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin might be summarized briefly as follows: The bloodiest and most destructive war in history is to be consummated in the cruellest and most destructive “peace” ever imposed by conquerors upon the conquered. It is the deliberate resolve of the Crimea conferees that “Germany shall never rise again.” To this end Germany’s territories are to be dismembered and her industries crushed. Her people are to remain enslaved under the despotic rule of Allied military authorities. According to a UP dispatch, Feb. 8, some Washington officials are talking of “occupation in terms of ‘until 2000 AD’ – a matter of 50 to 55 years.
A further inkling of the savage treatment in store for the German people was given, by an official spokesman of the American Seventh Army. N.Y. Times, Feb. 17, quotes this brass hat as disclaiming all Allied interest “in the people of Germany as a nation,” and asserting that no effort whatever would be made “to restore German industry.” Moreover, “no food will be brought into the country .... until their own supplies sink below the level at which a race can exist.”
The same official then goes on to explain: “The German diet may be allowed to fall below a level of 1,350 calories a person daily before we do anything about it.” The minimum daily requirements of an adult are estimated at 3,000 calories. A diet “below 1,350 calories” is tantamount to slow death by starvation. Cannibals appear like humanitarians alongside these “democratic" imperialist ghouls.
What are the economic consequences of all these hellish plans for Europe? The key to Europe’s recovery is the great industrial apparatus of Germany and above all, the greatest productive force in Europe, namely: the German working class. Failing these, there is no way out of devastation and hunger for the peoples of Europe. Germany’s doom is their doom.
The bulk of Europe’s heavy industry is concentrated in Germany whose steel industry, machine tool and electrical plants, locomotive shops and shipbuilding yards are the largest on the continent. N.Y. Times acknowledges that out of Germany comes 60 percent of Europe’s coal, 50 percent of its pig iron and steel, and “even larger proportions of aluminum, electrical machinery and machine tools.” How can European industry possibly revive without these?
This chief organ of U.S. imperialism further acknowledges that the plans of the “Big Three” necessarily mean “an economic imbalance in Europe.” That is to say, every blow to German industry is at the same time a blow to the economic life of Europe as a whole. What the N.Y. Times omits to say is that the permanent “economic imbalance of Europe” is one of the principal planks in Wall Street’s program of world domination. To rule the world, Wall Street and all its agencies must keep Europe from ever rising again as a powerful rival. So long as Germany remains crushed, Europe is rendered impotent.
The so-called Morgenthau plan – apparently adopted at Yalta – to turn Germany into an agricultural country is only a cynical cover for this bestial program of “peacetime” destruction. In the first place German agriculture is one of the most artificial branches of European economy. The ground cultivated is not naturally fertile and requires much artificial fertilizer. As Business Week states editorially in its Feb. 17 issue: “Germany’s agriculture has always been high cost, able to exist only by favor of very high protective tariffs. An agricultural Germany would find it almost impossible to trade its farm products for manufactures.” Germany has had to import the bulk of its food supplies and of industrial raw materials.
Moreover, as Business Week likewise points out, the projected partition of Germany “not only would weaken Germany but further unbalance it – cutting off almost one-third of its 1937 feed output, and over 30 percent of its coal-steel as against only one- sixth of its population. The remaining Germany of fabricating industries – machinery, chemicals, textiles – would then almost completely lack raw materials and markets.”
Finally, agriculture could never support Germany’s present population. Thus the destruction of Germany’s industrial, power entails the destruction of a large section of her population, above all, of her working class.
The three gravediggers of civilization, who once again met in secrecy, are conspiring first and foremost against the working class of Germany. This is their main enemy whom they want to atomize, to starve into submission, to drown in oceans of blood. For they know that once the mighty German proletariat rises, the insurgent masses of France, Italy, Greece, Belgium, Holland and the rest of tortured, agonized Europe will move to fuse ranks in the joint struggle for the Socialist United States of Europe.
Stalin knows that the Socialist uprising of the German proletariat will act instantly to revive the traditions and program of the October 1917 Revolution and cause the Soviet masses to resume the Leninist road from which they have so long been diverted by the usurpers and betrayers in the Kremlin.
To prevent the peoples of Europe from finding their salvation along the road of Socialism, the victory-flushed Anglo-American imperialists in alliance with the Kremlin must aim their most savage blows at the German workers. This is the real meaning of their program for Germany.
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