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The Morgenthau Plan was a plan for the occupation of Germany after the Second World War that advocated harsh measures that would permanently destroy Germany as a major power. It was named after American Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr..
The plan (originally proposed in late 1944) was a proposal for the management of defeated Germany after World War II. Morgenthau proposed the splitting of Germany into two separate states: a northern and a southern state. The whole of western Germany, except the south, would be made into a international zone which would have included areas on the coast of the Baltic Sea and the financially important regions along the Rhine and Ruhr rivers.
Enormous reparations were to be collected, also through forced labor. Factories and mines were to be dismantled. Germany was to be fully disarmed and turned into a agrarian state for the following 20 years. In short, Germany's industrial power was to be fully destroyed in order to make any aggressive action from Germany impossible in the near future.
Morgenthau's plan included many of the measures already proposed for dealing with Germany after the war, and some argue Morgenthau made his plan only as a basis for discussions. At a British-American conference of May 15, 1944, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt accepted a not so drastic version of the Morgenthau plan. The American and British foreign ministers were against the whole idea. The American Secretary of War said that the plan was a "crime against civilization". As Germany was a net food importer in peacetime, it has been estimated that the imposition of the plan may have led to deaths by famine of as many as 10 million Germans.
Once the plan went public in September, 1944, much protest and disagreement arose. As of the end of September, the plan was set aside without any official discussion by the advisory boards. However, it was not unnoticed by Hitler's propaganda machine, and probably only inspired more desperate resistance by German forces against the Allied onslaught until the very end of the war.
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