18

“It Would Be Undesirable if This Became Publicly Known”

The political conflict among the Allies over how to deal with accused quislings and war criminals such as Miklós Horthy, SS General Wolff and his aides, and others with similar war records propelled the UNWCC into an important new role as what amounted to an international grand jury on war crimes. Because bringing most war criminals to justice was ostensibly an international, inter-Allied matter—as distinct from an issue on which the U.S. or Britain could rule without consultation—the UNWCC became the proper forum to make a prima facie determination whether any particular defendant was being charged with war crimes appropriately. As will be seen, this new authority spurred U.S. State Department and British Foreign Office efforts to shut down the commission and seal its records so that they might never be seen again.

The UNWCC’s task since its beginning had been registration of the criminal complaints filed by a dozen Allied countries. The commission naturally made a determination when processing a registration whether the complaining government had made a prima facie case against the defendant. Though not particularly controversial at first, these determinations took on new significance as cooperation among the Allies over transfer of prisoners began to break down. After the UNWCC accepted the registration, the U.S. and Britain found it quite difficult to argue credibly that the defendant was a “political” rather than “criminal” suspect, as they had in some of the Yugoslav cases. That meant their efforts to bury cases or to refuse to turn over suspects became considerably more troublesome.1 If the UNWCC did not find a prima facie case, of course, the country holding such prisoners was within its rights to refuse to turn them over or to release them.

The UNWCC’s work thus became more urgent than ever. True, the Big Four Allied governments agreed to handle the crucial International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg through a new committee set up among themselves rather than through the UNWCC—an important blow to the authority of the commission. But the judgment of the two dozen prominent Nazi leaders at Nuremberg served to drive home with new force how manifold and complex Nazi crimes had been. Tens of thousands of criminals and collaborators remained scattered across Europe, some of them in positions of authority in postwar governments.

The UNWCC’s work in this sensitive and symbolically potent area of East-West relations gave the commission a prospective power far beyond anything that the State Department or Foreign Office had ever envisioned. Worse yet, as Green Hackworth of the State Department saw things, the smaller Allied states were relatively strong in the UNWCC, and included aggressively anti-Nazi delegations from the Czechs, Yugoslavs, French, and the London Poles. Though the U.S. and United Kingdom dominated key UNWCC committees, their authority was by no means absolute.

The State Department and Foreign Office moved to shut down the UNWCC as quickly as they could, given the political realities of 1945. Their first step was to choke the commission by systematically denying it funds and personnel.²

The U.S. had replaced Pell early in 1945 with Colonel Joseph V. Hodgson and a legal assistant, Navy Captain John Wolff. That summer, working nearly alone, Hodgson and Wolff shared nominal responsibility for scores of demanding assignments, such as reviewing UNWCC war crimes case registrations, developing consolidated case lists of war crimes suspects and witnesses, facilitating the international evidence-sharing necessary for successful prosecutions, doing legal research in a dozen different countries and languages, attending endless meetings and making regular reports to Washington, drafting international agreements on the transfer of war crimes suspects, and keeping up with all the aspects of international liaison among the Allies on war crimes issues. Some of these jobs were being simultaneously pursued by rival committees in the U.S. War and State departments and by Justice Jackson’s prosecution staff at the International Military Tribunal. That left Hodgson and Wolff with yet another assignment: attempting to straighten out the bureaucratic infighting and confusion created by the overlapping spheres of authority.

John Wolff collapsed from overwork shortly after the Nuremberg tribunal convened that fall, according to State Department records.3 Hodgson pleaded with State for at least two new assistants to handle just the correspondence from U.S. war crimes staffs at Nuremberg, Wiesbaden, and Washington, but there is no record that help arrived.⁴ A few weeks later, Hodgson resigned. Wolff, then still convalescing, replaced his former chief and carried the U.S. administrative burden at the UNWCC single-handedly.⁵

Hodgson’s resignation precipitated a renewed effort at State to dissolve the UNWCC altogether. Green Hackworth, still on the job, approached H. Freeman Matthews, State’s senior specialist on Europe who was at that time representing the department in inter-agency meetings with the War Department and the White House, and convinced Matthews to move against the War Crimes Commission as soon as possible. Hackworth “wishes to have the Commission discontinued and desires to use the question of appointing a successor to Col. Hodgson as the occasion to bring this about,” Matthews noted during the first weeks of 1946.⁶

This strategy had evidently already been informally discussed by key officers at State, for it received prompt support from the department’s leading European and legal affairs specialists. “In view of the troublesome Yugoslav activity, [State] is inclined to favor the prompt dissolution of the United Nations War Crimes Commission,” said James Riddleberger, the department’s expert on Germany. Unfortunately, “it would be very undesirable if it were to become publicly known that this Government took the initiative in bringing about the dissolution.” Therefore, he continued, Hackworth proposed to “informally and discreetly approach the British in order to ascertain their views.… Such approaches could be made in such a way that any eventual publicity would not be likely to be damaging.”7

Riddleberger, Hackworth, and Matthews set up an ad hoc committee to delicately close the doors of the UNWCC without being held accountable for having done so. Hackworth delegated his assistants for war crimes issues, Katharine Fite and Albert Garret-son, both of whom had been active in the firing of Herbert Pell, to head the new group.

Fite was the State Department’s chief liaison with the UNWCC, responsible for guiding the U.S. representative’s votes on the commission. She meanwhile carried the burden of explaining the least popular aspects of State’s legal policy to Congress, the media, and the public. Fite and Garretson also served as State’s representatives on a half dozen other interagency committees dealing with war crimes policy issues, including those drafting policy for the War Department and for the U.S. occupation government in Germany. Fite and Garretson were responsible for drafting and implementing high policy, not for determining it, and were in that sense junior players. Nevertheless, their work on these coordinating committees illustrates the means by which Hackworth and his staff undermined the UNWCC and extended his influence into related issues such as the denazification and decartelization policies for Germany.

To outsiders, Washington seemed strongly committed to open-handed cooperation with the Allies in war crimes prosecutions and to a thoroughgoing reform of German society. In reality, though, opponents of these policies occupied many key posts at the State Department, the White House, in the U.S. occupation government in Germany, and in U.S. financial circles interested in foreign affairs and foreign trade. The influence of the advocates of rebuilding Germany as a bulwark against the USSR was well established, and on the rise.

Paradoxically, the challenge of prosecuting even major Nazi criminals grew more complex as evidence of the scope and character of Nazi crimes came to light. The International Tribunal at Nuremberg adopted the substance of a U.S. proposal for a joint prosecution of the SS, Nazi party leaders, and a handful of similar groups as “criminal conspiracies” responsible for crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.⁸

The occupation government’s Control Council law No. 10 applied the conspiracy theory to hundreds of thousands of individual cases. This law specified that any person who “held a high political, civil or military position in Germany or one of its Allies, cobelligerents or satellites or held a high position in the financial, industrial or economic life of any such country” was deemed to have committed a crime against peace, namely, planning and executing an aggressive war in violation of treaties.9 Membership in an organization such as the SS became sufficient cause for arrest. Law No. 10 did not require that all persons declared criminal be prosecuted; it simply gave the commanders of the occupation forces authority to investigate what individuals may have done during the war and, if appropriate, to bring charges against them.

But this solution raised almost as many questions as it answered. First, it was by now clear that thousands of suspects shared direct responsibility for some atrocities. Contemporary estimates concluded that there were about 250,000 to 300,000 members of the SS (this includes the militarized Waffen-SS units), 70,000 full-time Nazi party executives, 15,000 in the party intelligence service Sicherheitsdienst (SD), 15,000 in the Gestapo, and as many as 1.5 to 2 million in various brownshirt paramilitary and militia units. Even considering that these numbers might be inflated and the categories overlap with one another, it seemed in late 1945 as though “not less than 2 million persons in all of Germany (and probably not less than 500,000 persons in the U.S. Zone) will be war criminals under the Control Council Law.”¹⁰

The U.S. apparatus for war crimes trials in Germany “obviously cannot prosecute anywhere near this number of cases,” a U.S. Denazification Policy Board concluded in December 1945. “No matter how summary the proceedings, it will be necessary to determine the degree of culpability of the accused, the existence of mitigating circumstances, and other factors affecting the punishment to be imposed.” The presumption of criminality in the cases of the Gestapo, SS, and SD was so strong that in many cases “relatively quick determinations” would be possible, the board said. But the role of other Nazis varied so widely that even summary justice would take time. And the complexities of the cases of collaborators from foreign countries, or of those who “held a high position in the financial, industrial or economic life” of Axis puppet states were more complicated still.¹¹ The main U.S. war crimes prosecution group would be able to handle at most “a few hundreds or thousands of cases,” the board contended.

The joint occupation government in Germany temporarily interned about 1.1 million Nazi officials, major businessmen, and former government administrators under various provisions of JCS 1067 and the Potsdam agreements during the summer and fall of 1945, according to U.S. statistics. Some 78 percent of those cases—868, 566 people—had been processed by Allied officials by December 1945. Of those, half had been acquitted, in effect, with findings that they had not substantially participated in Nazi activity. About 20 percent of the accused were found to have been so deeply implicated in Nazi crimes or in the maintenance of Nazi power that they were banned from the postwar German government and from prominent positions in the private sector. The remainder of the accused faced sanctions that varied with the circumstances of the individual’s case.12

Most of the German civilians still interned during the winter of 1945 were persons against whom reasonable suspicion of serious criminal activity existed. There were 117,512 German internees that December; of these, more than 38,000 had been executive-level Nazi party officials; 9,222 had been members of the Gestapo, SD, or other German police and intelligence organizations; and about 5,000 more had been senior members of various Nazi paramilitary groups.¹³

The speed of the “official” denazification thus far had been achieved by identifying categories of suspects—Nazi party officials, government officials above a certain professional grade, Gestapo officers, and so on—whom the Allies regarded as prima facie threats to the occupation government. Contrary to the later myths about denazification, these categories were usually relatively clear and limited to elite sectors of the German population, who were assumed to have had most influence during Hitler’s rule and, hence, the greatest responsibility for Nazi activities.¹⁴ The paperwork for persons in each category was then processed through a string of administrative steps that were similar in most respects to the procedures used in almost any government office. The difference, of course, was that this time the bureaucratic product was not distribution of social security benefits or unemployment insurance. It was, instead, the first step in the allocation of legal and political responsibility for mass murder.

Critics could see that these techniques often captured small-fry while permitting major criminals to escape. Not surprisingly, those who had been most powerful in wartime Germany usually had the most resources to evade the system.

Business leaders seemed to be particularly immune. “The present procedure fails in practice to reach a substantial number of persons who supported or assisted the Nazis, both in their rise to power and in carrying out their programs,” the confidential study of the Denazification Policy Board reported. “This is probably especially true of business leaders,” who did not necessarily join the party but whose “influence may have been much greater than that of party members.”15 Owners of businesses that played a major role in the regime often escaped responsibility, the board concluded, because regulations in the U.S. zone made it quite complicated to seize a business from its ostensible owner.

Meanwhile, the U.S. occupation government’s reliance on conventional bureaucratic techniques tended to catch many so-called “little Nazis,” whom the board did not regard as “really active supporters of the Nazi regime.” Such cases would in time be processed and often dismissed, but in the meantime these suspects required endless labor-hours to investigate and administer, and their internment fed German discontent with the occupation government.

“The net effect of these inadequacies is to bear more heavily on the ‘small Nazi’ and to leave loop-holes for influential supporters. As a result, our actions often seem arbitrary and capricious to the Germans and tend to alienate even those who favor denazification,” the board concluded. “In large measure, these defects arise from our reliance on mandatory categories. Yet, as outsiders to the community, we can not arrive at sound judgments in individual cases, and need some rule of thumb as a substitute.”¹⁶

Similarly, the U.S. occupation government’s effort to block the bank accounts of Nazi-era political and business leaders bogged down by the autumn of 1945. The program was supposed to prevent Nazi officials or profiteers from laundering stolen money or smuggling it out of the country. In reality, however, “there has been a general breakdown in the effectiveness of Law 52 [which blocked the bank accounts] in the entire zone,” the financial branch’s field investigations chief, Louis Madison, reported. “The breakdown is characterized by a failure on the part of the responsible American and German agencies to block the accounts of Nazis, and by violations of the law by German individuals and banks.” Madison’s study reviewed 200 cases chosen at random in the U.S. zone of Germany; of those, only 32 (16 percent) had been handled successfully. Even when an account was blocked as required by law, German banks simply ignored the order. Further, the shortage of U.S. investigations personnel and the labyrinthine bureaucracy that administered the program guaranteed that the little progress could be made without a thorough-going organizational reform.17

By December 1945, the publicly mandated denazification program sharply collided with the unofficial (but actual) political and economic objectives of the U.S. occupation government. That month, the U.S. Denazification Policy Board confidentially recommended that existing policies and practices be shifted to better fit the “longer term” goals of the occupation. Publicly, the orientation of the denazification program was to remain the same as it had been under JCS 1067. “Every person who exercised leadership and power in support of the Nazi regime should be deprived of influence or power,” the board recommended, “whether or not he was formally affiliated with the Party or any other Nazi organization.” At the same time, however, the board introduced a new consideration that would fundamentally alter the program in the U.S. zone of Germany: “Denazification … should not be carried so far as to prevent the building of a stable democratic society in Germany … we must avoid the creation of a huge mass of outcasts who will provide fertile soil for agitators and a source of social instability.”¹⁸

This turned an important corner. Up to then, the continuation of Nazi influence within German social structures—business, education, the arts, etc.—had been seen as the most dangerous source of potential instability in Germany. But at least as early as December 1945, the opposite formulation came to the fore, even in official documents. Now, it was the denazification effort that was seen as the source of disaffection.

Opposition within the U.S. to denazification and decartelization in Germany was led almost exclusively by the corporate and foreign policy elite that had been most active in U.S.-German financial relations during the 1920s and 1930s. The disproportionate political leverage of this group, its ability to shape media coverage of foreign policy issues, to influence government policy, and eventually to shift public opinion was dramatically manifested in the realignment of U.S. policy concerning denazification and decartelization in the brief period between 1945 and 1947.

One of this group’s most effective lobbying tactics was sponsorship of junkets to Europe by American politicians and businessmen, financed by U.S. multinationals, to “study the problem of German recovery.” Draper paid close attention to these visits, staging elaborate briefings intended to shape public opinion at home concerning the professed realities of business in Europe. These events were almost ceremonial: The attendees and the briefers had selected one another largely through their existing social networks based in powerful U.S. companies with investments in Europe. The men on both sides of Draper’s briefing table were receptive to his message and usually knew pretty well what it would be.

A stream of U.S. experts visited the headquarters of the Economics Division during the first two years after the war, and Draper provided them with privileged access to the inside thinking on U.S. policy concerning German business. “The reports of these visitors echoed the conclusion that German recovery demanded greatly increased emphasis on heavy industries,” decartelization chief James S. Martin (a Draper rival) remembered later. “In their reports the visitors frequently referred to the ‘proven impossibility’ of something that no one had yet tried to do [i.e., actually break up German banking and industrial oligopolies]. With equal frequency they reported the ‘mounting chaos’ that was supposed to have resulted from the ruthless ‘Morgenthau Plan of deindustrialization.’” Similar problems were alleged to have been caused by drastic reforms that had not actually been carried out. “It became customary to refer to the urgent necessity for ‘reversing the former policy of destroying German industries,’” Martin wrote, and of reversing a decartelization policy that in fact had not yet been implemented.19

A popular example of Martin’s point can be found in Lewis H. Brown’s A Report on Germany, a 1947 bestseller that had substantial influence in Washington at the time and remains quoted to this day.²⁰ Brown was chairman of the Johns-Manville Corporation, a major military contractor and international mining company that held a near-monopoly on the U.S. market for asbestos. The company has frequently been accused in U.S. courts of corporate crimes, including antitrust violations.²¹

Brown toured Germany during 1946 and 1947 and returned to the U.S. with detailed arguments against economic reform in Germany that had been prepared mainly by Draper’s staff. Brown’s preconceptions clearly shaped the conclusions he drew from the visits. He wrote quite frankly that he approached Germany “from the standpoint of an industrialist’s attempt to analyze the problem of a bankrupt company [seeking] to determine the simple common-sense fundamentals necessary to get the wheels of production turning.”22

His acknowledgments of the experts he consulted concerning Germany read like the guest list of a dinner sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations: AT&T’s Frederick Devereux, Sullivan & Cromwell’s John Foster Dulles, former president Herbert Hoover (who had been enlisted by Truman to cement Republican party support for his administration’s emerging policy on Germany), General Lucius Clay, William Draper, Sears, Roebuck president A. S. Barrows (who was then serving as U.S. Comptroller in Germany), British and Swiss banking and industry officials, and twenty-five unnamed German industrialists. In more than five pages of Brown’s detailed acknowledgments of those he interviewed, there appears no speaker for German labor, no small businessman of any nationality, no female, none of the then-well-known public advocates of denazification and decartelization of German industry (including those still in government posts inside Germany), no Social Democrats, and no known veterans of European Resistance movements of any political persuasion.²³

Brown’s argument was simple and in some ways convincing. He said that the Morgenthau Plan had shaped JCS 1067—as was true enough—and that JCS 1067 was a disaster. The economic and denazification commitments that the U.S. made at Potsdam should be unilaterally disavowed as quickly as possible, Brown contended. The U.S. should block further German reparations to the USSR, because German uncertainty over which equipment might be shipped to the Soviets had “helped destroy the incentive to put plants in Germany back into operation.” The postwar punishment of Nazis by France and the USSR had been indiscriminate and brutal, Brown said. The U.S. and British system of trying accused criminals before courts and administrative commissions was better, he argued, but “many of the industrial and technical leaders of the economic life of Germany, who had climbed on the Nazi bandwagon much as people climb on any new and apparently successful bandwagon, were permitted to do only common labor pending the years required to go through the denazification courts.” The Potsdam agreements had “deprived the economic machine of Germany of the very leadership necessary for its revival … [and was now] fatally slowing down the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the industrial machine of Germany and Western Europe.”²⁴

Brown said he expected no support for his proposals from “the enemies of the American Way of Life.” But “from our friends who abhor all forms of totalitarianism … I hope for tolerance and ultimate understanding of the imperative need for getting together on a plan of action under which we may minimize the [Soviet] threat to Western civilization …”25

Brown’s lobbying trips to Germany were underwritten mainly by General Electric’s chairman Philip D. Reed, who was one of the single most influential U.S. corporate leaders on postwar U.S.-German issues. In addition to his role in Brown’s project, Reed and the business organizations he led organized a series of similar conferences in 1946 and 1947. Typical U.S. delegations included the chairman of the executive committee of the National Association of Manufacturers, the chairman of the (U.S.) National Foreign Trade Council, and senior executives of the National City Bank of New York and the Chase Bank, among others. On some occasions, Reed traveled as a representative of General Electric; on others, he came as head of the U.S. delegation to the International Chamber of Commerce; or as the personal envoy of Secretary of Commerce Averell Harriman.²⁶

Like Brown’s book, Reed’s report to Harriman lambasted the denazification and decartelization policy the U.S. had approved at Potsdam as the work of FDR-era “extremists” (Reed’s term) at the Department of Justice. The U.S. policy was harmful and unnecessary, he said, and was interfering with Germany’s economic recovery.²⁷

Reed’s company was not an entirely disinterested party. General Electric was among the most important U.S. investors in Germany, owning about 25 percent of its German counterpart, the electrical giant AEG, plus factories and dozens of smaller interests.²⁸ At the time Reed was lobbying the U.S. government against antitrust policy in Germany, GE was facing no fewer than thirteen criminal antitrust prosecutions in U.S. courts for price fixing, gouging consumers and the U.S. government through its monopoly on electrical equipment manufacturing, conspiracy, Sherman Act violations, and similar corporate crimes. (GE settled most of these cases out of court in 1949, then went on to a series of remarkably similar abuses that in time led to still another round of criminal convictions for senior General Electric executives about a decade later.)²⁹

As Morgenthau, Pell, James S. Martin, and other reformers saw things, the arguments of General Electric and Johns-Manville had become the dominant point of view in Western policy circles and in the media. They had become “standard fare” in U.S. newspapers within a year after the occupation began, Martin commented,30 even though in reality only two steps had been undertaken to implement U.S. antitrust efforts in Germany by the time Brown’s denunciation of the program appeared: the seizure of plants and assets of IG Farben; and the appointment of a trustee to administer coal wholesaling firms in the U.S. zone.

The Allies and the Germans both knew that German manufacturing, including war production, had survived the war surprisingly intact, despite the massive Allied bombing campaign. Senator Kilgore publicized a congressional study based mainly on U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey data that concluded that Germany’s production of armored cars, fighter bombers, and several categories of strategic supplies had actually increased under U.S. and British bombing, in some cases expanding eightfold over 1942 production figures. True, the air attacks had crippled the German transportation network and oil production during the final months of the war—a telling blow. But that damage was repaired relatively easily once the fighting stopped. From the point of view of production, at least, Germany was already “better prepared for war than it was at the end of World War I,” Kilgore contended.³¹

Kilgore stressed that a distinct drift toward postwar accommodation with German business had already set in. “There is a natural inclination on the part of many of our [U.S.] administrators to take over in order to get things running again, and there is a natural inclination on the part of many Germans to lie back and let them do it.… [In] the desire for efficiency our military administrators may keep in positions of power the Nazi plant managers,” Kilgore said. “In Italy, I heard certain American Army officers deplore the fact that Italian partisans had killed many of the Fascist plant managers, which made more difficult the reorganization of Italian productive capacity. In Germany there has been no such [partisan] revolt. The Nazi industrial hierarchy remains intact.”³²

The reports of Brown and Reed were in reality briefs for the European Recovery Program—the Marshall Plan. They illustrate the extent to which that enormously popular and respected program became entangled with the revival of German businessmen who had participated in Nazi crimes. Particularly important in this effort was the “Committee for the Marshall Plan,” founded in September 1947. It labeled itself a citizens’ organization but was in reality funded and administered by the same economic and foreign policy elite that has been discussed thus far. Its initial sponsors included Averell Harriman and Robert Lovett (who will be remembered from the Brown Brothers, Harriman bank). Allen Dulles, Dean Acheson, Winthrop Aldrich (chairman of the Chase Bank), Philip Reed (of GE), and others of similar stature, most of whom had been active in U.S.-German finance since the 1920s. Labor was represented by hard-line anti-Communists active in the CIA-sponsored penetration of European trade unions, such as James Carey and David Dubinsky.33

This Marshall Plan lobby operated as a “distinguished propaganda committee,” as AT&T executive Arthur Page described it.³⁴ Its goal was never described as the revitalization of the German business elite but, rather, as “saving Europe” and “providing American jobs” through implementation of the Marshall Plan. But whatever one may think of the plan, the restoration of much of the prewar German corporate elite was an integral part of the package.

General Clay used the case of Deutsche Bank director Hermann Abs to explain this concept. “We were never able to make Hermann Abs the financial minister [of Germany] as we would have,” Clay remembered in the same interview quoted earlier, because of the German and American public’s refusal to accept a man who had been so deeply compromised during the Hitler years. But not to worry, Clay continued. “We were able to finally put him in charge of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was somewhat outside of government,” and which was instrumental in distribution of Marshall Plan funds for Germany.³⁵

Sponsors of the Committee for the Marshall Plan were simultaneously at the cutting edge of renewed efforts to invest in German industry. “If you have been trying unsuccessfully to get to Germany to reestablish prewar business contacts, don’t be discouraged,” Business Week told its readers early in 1947. “You can expect [a] program for reviving business in western Germany to be pushed by all U.S. factions … Republican backing was assured when John Foster Dulles, Republican spokesman, recently called for the revival of business in Germany and western Europe whatever the price. German goods are already trickling into the U.S. market. Anticipating some consumer resistance [in the U.S.], Military Government authorities have shrewdly met customs requirements by marking them: ‘Made in Germany, U.S. Zone.’ … Before large-scale arrivals of German goods begin, Washington is likely to release a press barrage explaining that German exports help pay [U.S.] occupation costs in Germany.”36

Shortly after its founding, the Committee for the Marshall Plan placed full-page advertisements in the most influential U.S. newspapers; sent thousands of personally addressed telegrams signed by the former secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, to businessmen asking for their donations and political support; and made a mass mailing to hundreds of thousands of U.S. “opinion leaders” in the upper strata of business, media, labor, and social organizations. The group chartered Marshall Plan clubs in a dozen cities, opened business offices in New York and Washington, and initiated a series of heavily publicized meetings between President Truman and business leaders designed to convey the impression of broad popular support for the Marshall Plan. As Congressman Charles Plumley (a Republican from Vermont) put it, “There has never been so much propaganda in the whole history of the nation as there has been for the Marshall Plan.” The campaign created an “overwhelming conviction among the American people and among members of Congress that we must have the Marshall Plan right now,” he continued.³⁷

The claim of “overwhelming support” was, in fact, overblown. Public opinion polls of the period indicate that about 65 percent of the U.S. population either opposed the Marshall Plan or did not know what it was.³⁸ Even so, the Marshall Plan passed the Congress by a large margin. The plan’s sponsors used the relatively broad, popular support for doing something constructive about Europe as a means of putting through the distinctly unpopular idea of reestablishing the German economic elite.

These factors—insiders’ opposition to reform, the passive resistance of German business, Allied suppression of indigenous Antifa radicals, the sheer magnitude of the task of denazification, the self-mobilization of U.S. and international business elites, and an often paranoid geopolitical competition with the USSR—combined with other factors to stall denazification and reform of the German business structure by the summer of 1945. Within three years they had shut it down altogether.