The Morgenthau Plan actually influenced the content of the holocaust myth. This article explains how and why, and gives 6 examples.

At the end of WWII in Europe, the Allied Psychological Warfare Department was given the task of changing two German viewpoints believed to be in the way of post-war peace:

A) Many Germans still liked Hitler and Nazism.
B) The Germans didn't like the idea of their country being converted into an agricultural country via deindustrialization as set forth in the Morgenthau Plan. The German public widely knew about the plan because the Nazi government, before its collapse, had publicized it.

So Psychological Warfare changed its name to Information Control and pushed the holocaust myth with a "factory of death" twist as a way to take on these two problems. The personal message to an individual German went something like this:

"Hitler did a terrible thing you didn't know about, but you should have known about it. If you'd only opened your eyes it was obvious and now you should feel ashamed. Hitler used German industry to kill the Jews and others, as factories can be easily converted to evil purposes." (1)

Information Control's "factory of death" conception of the holocaust also resonated well with the narrative of communism defeating Nazism. Communists saw Nazism as capitalism on steroids, and the communist ideal of a worker's paradise contrasted nicely with a factory of death. (2)

Most people believe that the Morgenthau Plan was a flukey idea that was never implemented because it was too harsh and extreme. But in fact a watered down and disguised version of the Morgenthau Plan was put into effect in April 1945 as "Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067" (JCS 1067) which American military governors were obligated to follow starting with Eisenhower, and which the American public initially didn't know about because it was secret. It had many features designed to keep the German people in a suffering state. Besides limiting factory production and in some cases ordering the dismantling of factories which had not been bombed, it "cut from underneath" the economic and financial underpinnings needed for large-scale rebuilding projects. (10)

But as the Cold War came into existence, the Morgenthau Plan eventually lost out to an opposing philosophy represented by the Marshall Plan of 1947: 13 billion in aid for rebuilding Western Europe's war-torn industry and economy, in part to help as a bulwark against communism. West Germany, though not the primary beneficiary, was included. It was a policy change that went from being ordered not to help the West German economy, to actively trying to help it. But it didn't happen until two miserable post-war years for the Germans during which time the Nuremberg Trials happened, and Information Control ran all media in West Germany. A point for this article is that the holocaust myth was consolidated under the Morgenthau Plan period, not the Marshall Plan period. A time when Information Control worked "industrial horror" into the myth as a way to have the Germans not be hostile to deindustrialization. The legacy is that there are still weird features of the holocaust myth that come from this.

Here are 6 examples of the Morgenthau Plan in the holocaust myth:

Example 1: Discovering a Factory of Death

Nazi Death Factory Shocks Germans on a Forced Tour. New York Times Front Page, April 18, 1945, by Gene Currivan.


The problem is that in standard holocaust history today, there is nothing "factory of death" about Buchenwald. It isn't considered part of the genocide against the Jews. For one because it was comprised of mainly ethnic Germans: German communists and German criminals. The day-to-day operations of the camp were run by the inmates themselves, not the German SS--a situation that could be seen as "progressive camp administration." The alleged gruesome raw material from this factory of death: a supposed human skin lampshade, was a Psychological Warfare ploy, and a problem for that ploy is that the woman supposedly responsible for it, Ilse Koch, hadn't been at the camp for years.(3) And from a holocaust literacy angle, the camp was located in Germany, whereas the standard holocaust story is that the Jewish genocidal killing operation happened at camps in Poland. It's not a camp thought of today as part of the holocaust, and yet the New York Times, due to Psych Warfare's influence, is telling America that it's a factory of death. This article (the first 1945 front page NYT article on a concentration camp) contained passages like this:

"In the crematory itself were two batteries of three ovens, each prominently marked with the makers' name--J. A. Topf & Sohne, Erfurt. This concern customarily manufactued baking ovens. These ovens were of extremely modern design and heated by coke."

Example 2: Why Germany can't have factories: because a baking oven manufacturer can turn into a cremation oven manufacturer.

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Above: 10-second excerpt from the movie "Nazi Concentration Camps" Shown at the Nuremberg Trial on Nov. 29, 1945.(16)

It is the disturbing notion that a company that helps the German Hausfrau bake Apfelstrudel can, with a little modification, help the SS at Auschwitz. The problem is it isn't true. The history of the company Topf and Sons has been extensively researched and they never made baking ovens or any kitchen or household products. The Buchenwald Memorial has an online exhibit on the company, Topf and Sons. In a timeline there, we read:

1914: The company employs a workforce of more than five hundred. It establishes a small department for the construction of incineration ovens for crematoria and becomes the market leader in this field in the 1920s.(4)

The Topf and Sons online exhibit mentions the company making other products, but nothing used in the kitchen and no baking ovens. It's just a clever contrast to support the Morgenthau Plan, made-up by someone in Psychological Warfare.

Example 3: Instructing cameramen to film factory nameplates on incinerators and gas chambers to show a factory connection to the holocaust.

Kay Gladstone works in the Film Archive of the British Imperial War Museum in London. She is the Acquisition and Documentation Officer. In her essay about Allied films made for the postwar German audience she writes,

"Cameramen were specially asked to photograph any material which would show the connection between German industry and the concentration camps --for example name plates on incinerators and gas chambers -- and which firms built the camps."(5)

A cameraman filmed the nameplate on the incinerator; then Psychological Warfare made up the "baking oven to cremation oven lie" to show a connection. (6)

Example 4: Not your run-of-the-mill mill. Film titles: Death Mills and Nazi Murder Mills.

Universal Newsreel Film Still

Information Control Film Still

How could two disparate movie producers have such similar titles? One is made by the US government in Germany and the other by Universal Studios in Hollywood. Probably for the same reason that the New York Times ran a front page article beginning with "Nazi Death Factory." Because the Information Control Department is influencing everybody. And as much as Information Control would like to demonstrate a tie-in to German industry, their logic is flawed: It takes a degree of "holocaust literacy" to grasp the problem: Even according to the standard holocaust story, the holocaust happened in the East. In areas taken by the USSR at the end of the war. Yet these films don't cover that, and instead are about areas taken by the US and Britain. In other words, these films explain the holocaust with footage from the West eventhough it didn't happen there. Strange.

Example 5: Human fertilizer production, mentioned in the movie "Death Mills"

Warning: dead bodies are shown in the following video:

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Above: 1-minute clip from the film Death Mills (Todesmuehlen.) An Information Control film made for the German audience. (17) The narrator says

They (the Germans) tell you now they meant no evil. That they knew nothing of what was going on, or could do nothing even if they knew. The farmers received tons of human ash as fertilizer, but apparently never suspected it came from human beings.

Presumably, human fertilizer would be the kind of grist that a "death mill" makes, but it's just another Psychological Warfare made-up story. There's nothing to support it. Would ash even be considered fertilizer? Would it really contain something farmers needed in soil? Did they transport this valuable ash back to Germany since the "death camps" were in the East surrounded by Polish fields? Appealing to holocaust literacy, is the fact that holocaust scholars don't mention human fertilizer. For instance Raul Hilberg, in his 3 volume book, The Destruction of the European Jews (1984) never mentions fertilizer. The 299 page book "Auschwitz A New History" by Laurence Rees (2005) never mentions fertilizer.

However "human ash as fertilizer' did make it into a very weighty document written by judges and respected around the world: the Nuremberg Trial Judgement. It's in the same sentence as another human by-product myth:

After cremation the ashes were used for fertilizer, and in some instances attempts were made to utilise the fat from the bodies of the victims in the commercial manufacture of soap. (7)

But fertilizer only appears in the judgement and nowhere in the 10-month trial transcript. Bringing up the question of where the judge got his information.

The Blur
This covert psychological operation meant to effect the attitude of the German masses found its way to the American masses and the judicial process. Something that shows this gestalt is a table with sentences from the front page New York Times story from example #1, and the script of a government-made movie shown at the Nuremberg Trial. Compare sentences:

New York Times Front Page 4/18/1945	Film Shown at the Nuremberg Trial on 11/29/1945
"These ovens were of extremely modern design and heated by coke"	"The ovens of extremely modern design and heated by coke"
"This concern customarily manufactured baking ovens"	"were made by a concern which customarily manufactures baking ovens."
"at first as if this show had been staged for their benefit."	"at first the Germans act as though this were something being staged for their benefit."
"One of the first things that the German civilian visitors saw as they passed through the gates and into the interior of the camp was a display of 'parchment.'"	One of the first things that the German civilians see as they reach the interior of the camp is the parchment display.

I've covered this elsewhere, (8) but a quick explanation of the above plagiarism is that Psychological Warfare had a script on the day they shot the Buchenwald forced tour, but didn't know at the moment that days later a camp in much worse condition than Buchenwald would be found, Belsen. This likely derailed a larger Buchenwald film plan, because propaganda production shifted from Buchenwald to Belsen. However a piece of that Buchenwald script made it into the film "Nazi Concentration Camps" shown at the Nuremberg Trial.

On the day of the filming, and before Belsen had been discovered, the script was fed to the New York Times reporter. The reporter (Gene Currivan) perhaps had some disinformation-conduit relationship with Psychological Warfare. A New York Times Index survey of other wartime articles he wrote have a war morale propaganda feel. (18) Currivan, from Brooklyn, New York, later went on to cover the growing Jewish/Arab conflict and Israeli Independence for the New York Times. He was likely Jewish though one couldn't tell from his name.

The above plagiarism comparison shows the three groups being misled: 1) the Germans who are on the forced tour being filmed, so other Germans can then watch them in the movie theater. 2) The Americans reading the New York Times article, and 3) The Nuremberg Judges watching the film Nazi Concentration Camps.

Example 6: Legacy: The Morgenthau Plan in the holocaust myth 30 years later. World at War, Episode 20.

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"World at War" was the most widely viewed television program ever about World War II. The series was this author's introduction to World War II as a child. This excerpt can be explained as a disinformation vestige from Information Control's strategy of instilling psychological guilt to convince the Germans to acquiesce to de-industrialization back in 1945 and '46. 30 years later it becomes "history" for the masses in the countries whose government put out the disinformation campaigns! And as diabolical as "industrial killing machine" sounds (eloquently spoken by narrator Laurence Oliver) we again appeal to holocaust literacy: if one looks at the standard story of, for instance, the second biggest alleged death camp, Treblinka, there's nothing "new industrial capacity" about it. Just the opposite: Engine exhaust from a captured Soviet tank pumps exhaust into 6-10 bedroom-sized rooms to asphyxiate Jews. (We can facetiously presume that not using a brand new German engine was a thrifty move to save money and resources.) But a major problem with this killing machine is that the SS couldn't always get the engine to start! (11) The dead bodies were then dragged (by taking ahold of their feet) to the pits. Wheels hadn't worked out for them (12). And all this was secret due to the, um, "tree branch fence." What's "new industrial capacity" about that? It's one part jerry-rig and one part cave man.

CONCLUSION

The "factory of death" characterization of the holocaust myth comes from Allied Information Control softening up the Germans to go along with the Morgenthau Plan. But from the get-go, the manipulation of the German masses went hand in hand with misinforming the American masses. Misinforming the Germans (dishonest and unethical as it is) had a logic one can understand: a noble cause for staving off a future war by psychologically creating an anti-Nazi German population who would have no industrial ability to convert to wartime production even if they wanted to. But it was hard to have a similarly justifiable logic for misinforming the American public: An overseas covert operation interfering with its own government's political and judicial process, without fear of retribution due its secret status.

The American manipulation may have been (for one) because many Americans didn't support the Morgenthau Plan. As an example, Republican Presidential candidate Thomas Dewey ended his 1944 campaign season in a large Madison Square Garden event, occurring days before the Presidential election. In Dewey's speech, his main point was criticizing Morgenthau and his "private plan for disposing with the German people after the war." The article stated "The crowd booed lustily when Governor Dewey mentioned the Secretary of the Treasury's attendance at the Quebec Conference." (13) Prominent members of Roosevelt's administration, like Secretary of War Henry Stimson, also opposed the Morgenthau Plan. Information Control is thus putting the possibility of Americans feeling sympathy for the Germans, and thus a rejection of Morgenthau's plan, in check. A sympathy that would only have increased as Soviet soldiers began the biggest mass rape in human history. The holocaust myth was presented to Americans right around the time of the mass rape, and when photos of devastated German cities were being shown to the American public through Life Magazine. This covert disinformation staved-off American sympathy, so as not to derail the Morgenthau Plan, while putting a good guys/bad guys spin on World War II, and obscuring the results: almost half a million American soldiers dead, and half of Europe under Josef Stalin, including Poland, whose autonomy had been the reason for the war starting.

Treasury Secretary Morgenthau's unprecedented involvement in foreign policy had more to do with revenge on the Germans and with Zionism, than it did with future world peace.(14) Ulterior motives masquerading as moral high ground. Just as a "factory of death" had its gruesome by-products, so also did Information Control's disinformation program: the moral justification for the creation of Israel; revenge on the Germans; and the concept that a war can be "good." (15)

Denierbud
December 2, 2010

END

NOTES

1. This is the gist of the film "Death Mills" made by Information Control for the West German population.

The book "The Hitler Virus" written by Peter Wyden who is Jewish (and his son happens to be the current U.S. Senator from Oregon) discusses his time in Psychological Warfare and the Morgenthau Plan, though the book has inaccuracies. Wyden, for instance, portrays the Morgenthau Plan as fraught with higher-up disagreements "If my colleagues and I in psychological warfare had known about the chaos among the cooks in our policy kitchen, our morale would have suffered."(p. 54) But Wyden isn't aware of Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067, which was a mandate to Eisenhower to run West Germany and had the Morgenthau Plan embedded in it, in disguised form. Thus the Morgenthau Plan was in effect, unknown to Wyden. Wyden may have been in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) rather than Psychological Warfare, since his name doesn't turn up on a roster of Psychological Warfare personnel, as found in the book Sykewar by Daniel Lerner, and indeed at the time he wrote the book, it may have been illegal for a former OSS member to write a book about time in the OSS. The two organizations overlapped a lot. See:

The Hitler Virus by Peter Wyden. Arcade Publishing, copyright 2001. pgs. 53-57

2. Much of the writing of the Morgenthau Plan is attributed to the the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Harry Dexter White. He turned out to be a secret Soviet agent. It's shocking that there could be a Soviet agent that high-up in government. And it's amusing that his name seems to purposely project an image of something other than who he is. "Harry Dexter White" sounds white anglo saxon protestant East Coast establishment; yet the name was given to him by his Lithuanian Jewish parents who had only been in the USA for 7 years at the time of his birth.

3. See my video "Buchenwald: A Dumb Dumb Portrayal of Evil" episode 5 called "The Ilse Koch anachronistic problem" at
http://www.holocaustdenialvideos.com/buchenwald/videos/5.wmv
Windows Media Player is needed on your computer.

For general problems with the Buchenwald story see the whole video:
http://www.holocaustdenialvideos.com/buchenwald/

and my Buchenwald flyer:
http://www.holocaustdenialvideos.com/flyers/

4. See Topf and Sons online exhibit, sponsored by the Buchenwald Memorial:

The Company
http://www.topfundsoehne.de/media_en/en_ct_normalesunternehmen_firma.php?subnav=firma

The products:
http://www.topfundsoehne.de/media_en/en_ct_normalesunternehmen_produkte.php?subnav=produkte

Both of the pages above are found in this frame:
http://www.topfundsoehne.de/cms-www/index.php?id=117&l=1

5. Holocaust and the Moving Image. Edited by Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman. Wallflower Press. 2005.

Chapter 4 is an essay by Kay Gladstone entitled "Separate intentions: the Allied screening of concentration camp documentaries in defeated Germany in 1945-46: Death Mills and Memory of the Camps. pg. 54.
Here is the larger paragraph of the the Kay Gladstone excerpt:
"(Sydney) Bernstein quickly prepared detailed instructions for the Allied cameramen on 'Material Needed for Proposed Motion Picture on German Atrocities', covering the victims and perpetrators of atrocities, their testimony, conditions in the camps and the reactions exhibited by German civilians when confronted by the evidence. He defined the psychological warfare purposes of the version intended for German audiences as 'a) by showing the German people specific crimes committed by the Nazis in their name, to arouse them against the National Socialist Party and to cause them to oppose its attempts to organise terrorist or guerrilla activity under Allied occupation; b) by reminding the German people of their past acquiescence in the perpetration of such crimes, to make them aware that they cannot escape responsibility for them, and thus to promote German acceptance of the justice of Allied occupation measures.' The document continued that it was 'essential that the film should be factual and documented to the nth degree...It will have to be assumed ... that in several years time the Nazis will either try to disprove the evidence or suggest that only a minority was responsible.' Cameramen were specially asked to photograph any material which would show the connection between German industry and the concentration camps - for example name plates on incinerators and gas chambers -- and which firms built the camps." pg. 53-54.

6. See my video "Buchenwald. A Dumb Dumb Portrayal of Evil" episode 21 "A Scriptwriter's Great Idea: Baking Ovens To Cremation Ovens."
http://www.holocaustdenialvideos.com/buchenwald/videos/21.wmv
Windows Media Player is needed on your computer to view.

7. Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals. Judgement: War Crimes Against Humanity.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judwarcr.asp

8. See my video "Buchenwald." Episode 19 "Proof That Psyche Warfare Worked With The New York Times To Promote The Holocaust Myth":

http://www.holocaustdenialvideos.com/buchenwald/videos/19.wmv

Documentation that the people who worked on this film presented themselves as basic Navy personnel, but were really OSS agents can be found in footnote 10 of my Buchenwald flyer, found here:
http://www.holocaustdenialvideos.com/bsources.html#ttten

9. World At War, Genocide Episode (episode 20), Minute 25. Premiered on television in 1974. Narrator is Laurence Olivier. "In the occupied East, new camps were specially built. And old ones equipped with new industrial capacity. They were to be machines to kill human beings by the million, utilize the by-products, dispose of the waste."

10. Morgenthau got the gist of his plan inserted in a Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive, called JCS 1067 in April 1945, which was secret, and which Dwight D. Eisenhower was then obligated to follow. But there was no conflict there: Eisenhower was making his own big deal about Ohrdruf being a major indicator of the holocaust, though that camp doesn't figure into holocaust literacy nowadays. JCS 1067 was then replaced in 1947 by JCS 1779, the Marshall Plan. The contrast can be seen in two excerpts:

JCS 1067 "...you will take no steps (a) looking toward the economic
rehabilitation of Germany, or (b) designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy."

JCS 1779 "an orderly and prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany."

JCS 1067 can be read by clicking on the link below. While reading it notice the cleverness of how it keeps referring to "paragraph 4." A paragraph which advocates German suffering via economic chaos while also calling for "industrial disarmament." Then notice the clever subtle wording, aimed at revenge, by referencing "paragraph 4" as this document does, 25 times.

http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/ga3-450426.pdf

11. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. By Yitzhak Arad. Indiana University Press, 1987. Page 100. "The frequent engine breakdowns caused disturbances and delays in the entire extermination process."

12. Ibid. page 87 "The hand-pushed trolley used to transfer the corpses to the pits would often derail and overturn, and it finally was decided to dispense with it altogether. Instead, the prisoners dragged the bodies by their feet to the ditches."

13."ROOSEVELT ERRORS PROLONG THE WAR, DEWEY SAYS HERE" New York Times, November 5, 1944 By Alexander Feinberg, pg. 1
The article states that the secretary of State and Secretary of War, Cordell Hull and Henry Stimson, were against the Morgenthau Plan. Dewey sarcastically pointed out that neither went with Roosevelt to the Quebec Conference. Roosevelt instead was accompanied by Morgenthau. Dewey sarcastically comments that Roosevelt took with him "that master of military strategy and foreign affairs." In a previous speech Dewey had said of Morgenthau "whose qualifications as an expert on military and international affairs are still a closely guarded military secret." See "The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany" by Michael R. Beschloss. Simon and Schuster. 2002. Page 160.

14. One goal of the Morgenthau Plan in its disguised form of JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) 1067, was to keep Germany in economic chaos. For instance in Part II, section 16 we read:

"Except as may be necessary to carry out these objectives, you will take no steps (a) looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany, or (b) designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy."

http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/ga3-450426.pdf

In an interview with one of Morgenthau's top people, Bernard Bernstein, Bernstein tells us how Morgenthau tried to indirectly get funds for the Jewish-owned bank in Palestine, the Anglo-Palestine bank, in 1940. The interview also shows a connection to Louis Brandeis, a prominent American Zionist. Bernstein also quotes the book "Present at the Creation" by Dean Acheson page 22, to make the point that Morgenthau hired Treasury people who had a pro-war with Germany foreign policy as their primary interest:

"Henry Morgenthau was the most dynamic character in Washington; he had passion. His description of the kind of man he wanted hired was: 'Does he want to lick this fellow Hitler . . ., that is what I want to know . . . Does [he] hate Hitler's guts.' Henry did."

See
Oral History Interview with Bernard Bernstein by Richard D. McKinzie New York, New York, July 23, 1975 at the Truman Library website:
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/bernsten.htm

15. As in Jewish historian Studs Terkel's book on World War II, called "The Good War."

16. The movie Nazi Concentration Camps can be viewed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Website, in the Steven Spielberg archive here.

17. The film Death Mills can be found at Youtube broken into two parts, part 1, and part 2.

18. Two examples from Gene Currivan, who travelled with General Patton's 3rd Army:

Irish Yank Uses a Little Yiddish And Leads Germans to Death Trap. NYT 1/8/1945

U.S. NON-COM KILLS 82 NAZIS IN 8 DAYS; NYT 1/11/1945