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PROPAGANDA COUP, FOR THE WRONG SIDE
By Bill Fawcett
How many thousands of lives was an unthinking comment worth?
The Casablanca Conference was a meeting between US president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill in Casablanca. It took place for ten days, beginning on January 14, 1943. Stalin had been invited, but stayed in Moscow because the Red Army was engaged in a series of offensives. The location was symbolic. The city had been held only two months before by the Afrika Korps and was freed after the American Operation Torch landings in North Africa. The purpose of the meeting was to craft long-range plans against the Nazis. At this point, they still controlled most of Europe and were still allied with Italy. So it was not as if the Allies were looking for the war to end anytime soon. Most of the ten days were spent in planning. Churchill and Roosevelt got along well and, when it was over, both gave speeches that appeared in all the world’s newspapers.
President Roosevelt gave a powerful speech and in it he demanded the “unconditional surrender” of Germany. This had neither been discussed nor planned by the two leaders. It likely came as a surprise to Churchill. When the American press caught the phrase, it headlined every newspaper: “Roosevelt Demands Unconditional Surrender.”
By 1943, things were not going well on the Eastern Front. That offensive Stalin had stayed to supervise would drive the Wehrmacht out of Russia and Ukraine. Morale among civilians and soldiers was failing. But with this slip of the tongue, Roosevelt did more to harden German resistance than anything Goebbels had ever said. To the Germans, still remembering how the nation was embarrassed and economically destroyed by the Treaty of Versailles after WWI, unconditional surrender meant complete devastation or even the end of their relatively new nation. (Germany had not been unified until 1871.) Immediately the Nazi propaganda machine took this demand and told the German people they would all be enslaved or even forced to labor in Russia. Stalin made no secret of his plans to avenge Russian losses on Germany. As it advanced, the Soviet army engaged in rape, destruction, and pillaging, without limit. Also, the carpet bombing, by the USAF, of German cities was intended to break the will of the Germans, with indiscriminate bombing causing massive civilian casualties. This showed there were few limits on what the Allies would do to the German population. So the Germans were already afraid of what might come and had no reason to doubt that the worst would happen.
Others tried to take back the phrase. But the damage was done. Not only did it ensure that the German people had no alternative to fighting to the last, but it also solidified Hitler’s position, just as the bad news from the Eastern Front was spreading. This was followed by the release, but not adoption, of the Morgenthau Plan created by the American secretary of the treasury, according to which, after the war, the Allies would destroy all of Germany’s heavy industry and turn the entire nation into a land of farmers. Millions would have starved, but since nearly a million Germans had been killed by the carpet bombing, they had no reason to doubt that the Americans meant what they said. After being told by President Roosevelt that their only choice was unconditional surrender, all Germans felt they had no choice but to resist. There was no alternative.
Had Roosevelt not made this speech and thereby handed Goebbels the means to solidify the German people’s resistance, the last days of the war might have come sooner and been less bloody. Hitler’s power might have been curtailed after news of the many Eastern Front defeats spread. That would have allowed for open support for those who wanted to work out a deal, or even an honorable surrender, in 1944. The war could have ended earlier, with tens of thousands of lives saved, and the fanatical resistance that continued even as Germany collapsed could have been avoided.