David Irving recalls something of the history of this book:

 

AS PART of his program to republish in facsimile a series of historic books, publisher Wieland Soyka of Bremen, Germany, -- now Wieland Körner -- approached me in the 1980s to release the dossier of documents I had assembled on the infamous Morgenthau Plan for my biography on Winston Churchill, who with Roosevelt became one of its signatories. The resulting book Der Morgenthau Plan was published in Germany in 1986.

Its origin lay in the dusky basement of Nuffield College, Oxford. I was writing The Mare's Nest, and I had been reading in Roy Harrod's wonderful book The Prof, about Lord Cherwell. As I have already described in the history of the book The Mare's Nest:

I had read Roy Harrod's The Prof, a biography of the late Lord Cherwell (right, one of the few figures I most hope to meet in the afterlife: a fascinating character in Churchill's entourage), and I asked Nuffield College, at Oxford University, if I could use the Prof.'s papers.

The Librarian seemed to have been unfamiliar with their content; he gave me the key to the basement room and steel cupboards, with the memorable words: "We close at five." The cupboards were filled with top secret Cabinet records, Defence Committee minutes, correspondence with Churchill, and Lord Cherwell's own dossiers on TUBE ALLOYS (Britain's wartime Manhattan atomic project) and the infamous Morgenthau Plan.

Fearing at every moment the tread of the horrified archivist's feet on the stairs, I dictated over a quarter of a million words from those top-secret records onto a tape recorder over the next few days. British archives were in those days still in the grip of the Fifty-Year Rule (a rule that I heartily endorsed, provided I could find ways of wangling round it).

In Cherwell's file on The Morgenthau Plan I found not only a thirty-odd page carbon copy of the original document, labelled the Treasury Plan, drafted by Morgenthau (left), of which this volume contains a 36 page translation into German, but a little letter he had written to Lord Cherwell in November 1944 commending the finished product to the Prof., and asking him to bring it to the prime minister's attention.

By that time however, the Plan had become a juicy morsel in the Nazi propaganda campaign against the Allied troops invading Germany, and in the words of Franklin D Roosevelt's opponent in the November 1944 presidential election, Thomas Dewey, it had "cost the lives of two divisions" of GIs, as the Germans now defended their country even more tenaciously than before.

Say publicly it isn't true Henry, pleaded Morgenthau in a telephone call to Henry Stimson (right) that November, 1944; and Stimson replied evasively, he could not get involved right now, Henry, he had his hands full at that moment excising everything from his diaries that might incriminate Roosevelt over Pearl Harbor. Morgenthau noted that remark too, and that pencil memo is among the facsimiles reproduced here, as is Anthony Eden's scribbled comment on November 19, 1944 that the Plan was typical of these "ex-Germans" (i.e., Jews) who "seem to wish to wash away their ancestry in a bath of hate" (PRO file FO.371/391228).

I posted the original English Introduction to the published edition several years ago on this website in text form. At the suggestion of my hardworking US colleague Linda Nelson, who has prepared the volume for the Internet, we now post the non-facsimile parts of the German edition in full.

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THE original Faksimile Verlag edition has long gone out of print, and the dossier of 106 documents which it reproduces on 157 of its pages was part of my archive seized by the British official Trustee in May 2002. We shall nevertheless eventually post the whole facsimile section as a large pdf file. The parts posted in this 50-page PDF file -- all in German -- include:

• Cover
• Introduction by David Irving [also: English]
• Cast of characters
• Multi-part background essay
• About the author (at the back)

These sections are currently omitted:

• German translation of the Morgenthau Plan, 36 pages
• Photo section
• Document section, 106 documents on 157 pages
• Quellen

These parts will be prepared in many months' time and posted here. The missing parts have their own cover pages, so it should be clear to readers that those parts are incomplete.

This page uploaded Monday, February 2, 2004