UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER: THE POLICY THAT PROLONGED WORLD WAR II

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UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER: THE POLICY THAT PROLONGED WORLD WAR II

From January 14 to January 24, 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met and argued amiably - and compromised even more amiably - in the sunny resort of Anfa, a collection of luxurious villas surrounding a three-story hotel some three miles south of Casablanca. Nearby, their staffs argued much less amiably and, in some cases, declined to compromise. Finally, reporters gathered in the courtyard of Roosevelt’s villa to hear the two leaders sum up the historic Moroccan conclave.

FDR sat with his lifeless legs jauntily crossed, wearing a light gray suit and dark tie. Churchill was replete with homburg, cigar, and a dark blue suit and vest that seemed more suitable for the House of Commons than for a backdrop of waving palm trees and tropical sunshine. Beaming, FDR declared that the two allies had reached “complete agreement” on the future conduct of the war.

He and the prime minister, Roosevelt continued, had also hammered out a policy that would guarantee both victory and a peaceful world for generations to come. “Some of you Britishers know the old story - we had a general named U.S. Grant,” Roosevelt said. “His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant, but in my and the Prime Minister’s early days, he was called ‘Unconditional Surrender Grant.’ The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan.”

Winston Churchill manfully chimed in with a hearty endorsement of their “unconquerable will” to pursue victory until they obtained “the unconditional surrender of the criminal forces that have plunged the world into storm and ruin.” It may well have been Churchill’s finest hour as a political performer. Inwardly, he was dumbfounded by the announcement - and dismayed by its probable impact on the conduct and outcome of the war.

Among the prime minister’s British colleagues, dismay and alarm ran even deeper. The chief of British intelligence, General Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, considered unconditional surrender disastrous not only to certain secret operations already in progress, but because it would make the Germans fight “with the despairing ferocity of cornered rats.” Air Marshal Sir John Slessor maintained to the end of his life that, were it not for the policy, air power alone could have ended the war. Lord Hankey, one of Churchill’s diplomatic advisors, was so perturbed he went back to England and researched 15 British wars back to 1600. In only one, the Boer War, had the idea of unconditional surrender even been considered - and it was hastily dropped when the Boers announced they would fight until doomsday.

The feeling of dismay was shared by not a few Americans in the ranks of VIPs standing behind the two leaders. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, thought unconditional surrender was idiotic - it could do nothing but cost American lives. Later, he said: “If you were given two choices, one to mount a scaffold, the other to charge 20 bayonets, you might as well charge 20 bayonets.” General Albert Wedemeyer, who was the architect of the strategy for D-Day, was even more appalled. He decried the idea from the moment he heard it. It would, he said, “weld all the Germans together.” He had spent two years in Germany attending the Berlin War College and knew firsthand the deep divisions between Adolf Hitler and the German General Staff. Deliberately excluded from the conference by the president was another vehement opponent, the U.S. Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. Determined as usual to invent his own foreign policy, Roosevelt had brought no high level American diplomats with him to Casablanca.

In Berlin, the news of unconditional surrender sent Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, into euphoria. He called Roosevelt’s announcement “world historical tomfoolery of the first order.” To one of his colleagues, he admitted: “I should never have been able to think up so rousing a slogan. If our western enemies tell us, we won’t deal with you, our only aim is to destroy you, how can any German, whether he likes it or not, do anything but fight on with all his strength?”

Elsewhere in the German capital, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the silver-haired chief of the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, turned to one of his deputies and said with a sigh: “The students of history will not need to trouble their heads with this war, as they did with the last one, over who was guilty of starting it. The case is however different when we consider the guilt for prolonging the war. I believe that the other side has now disarmed us of the last weapon with which we could have ended it.”

Of all these reactions to Roosevelt’s Casablanca declaration, Canaris’ was by far the most important. With his unillusioned grasp of men and politics, the Abwehr chief saw that unless the president could be persuaded to alter the policy of unconditional surrender, the plot that the admiral and other Germans had been painstakingly concocting to depose Hitler and negotiate peace was doomed to failure.

Traitors in Hitler’s Empire

Since the beginning of the war, Menzies and Canaris, two seeming opponents to the art and science of black warfare, had been in shadowy touch through emissaries who shuttled from Berlin and London to the borders of the Nazi empire. In 1940, the Abwehr leaked Hitler’s planned assault on Holland, Belgium, and France. The British and French dismissed it as a ruse and discovered too late that it was excruciatingly authentic. While Admiral Canaris went briskly about the business of intelligence, running spy networks throughout Europe, evidence accumulated suggesting the astonishing possibility that the head of the Abwehr was a secret enemy of the Nazi regime.

Around Canaris was grouped a loose confederation of Hitler opponents in the German Foreign Office, the army, and the political world. They included Ulrich von Hassell, a career diplomat whose diaries are a main source of information about the resistance, General Ludwig Beck, former chief of the general staff, who resigned in protest when Hitler seized Prague in 1939 in violation of the Munich agreement, and Count Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the general who had defeated France in 1871 and made Germany a world power. Another important figure was Karl Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, who had been dismissed from his post by the Nazis for refusing to remove a monument to the great German-Jewish composer, Felix Mendelssohn.

The key figure was Beck, who was still deeply admired by many generals on active duty. Through him, the conspirators hoped to persuade the army to stage a coup d’état to remove and, if necessary, kill Hitler. Menzies’ awareness of the existence of this conspiracy was almost certainly the reason for his interference in a plot to kidnap Admiral Canaris only a few weeks before the Casablanca Conference. When an Allied invasion fleet began landing 200,000 men on the African coast on November 8, 1942, the Abwehr director rushed to Algeciras on the Spanish coast to galvanize the horde of agents working out of the German consulate in Tangier. The British intelligence chief in nearby Gibraltar decided to seize him - until a message arrived from Menzies: “Leave our man alone.”

Not long after, Menzies received a message from Canaris asking if they could meet secretly somewhere in Portugal or Spain. Visions of an ultimate intelligence triumph thrilled Menzies: He and Canaris could negotiate a peace that would save millions of lives. But when the Secret Intelligence Service chief asked his superiors in the British Foreign Office for permission to meet the admiral, he was curtly refused - the ostensible reason being a fear of offending the Russians. The explanation would have made Canaris smile: The Russians had been trying to conclude a separate peace with Hitler virtually from the moment he attacked them.

Throughout World War II, the Foreign Office was the chief source of German hatred in the British government. Much of the virulence can be traced to one man, Lord Robert Vansittart, the permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1938, when Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden moved him to the more resounding but less powerful title of chief diplomatic advisor. Like his friend Winston Churchill, Vansittart had warned England against German aggression from the day Hitler seized power. But “Van,” as his friends called him, combined his prophecies with a hatred that made the Ku Klux Klan’s antipathy for blacks, Jews, and Catholics seem bland.

In 1940, Vansittart wrote a fellow diplomat: “Eighty percent of the German race are the political and moral scum of the earth.” Needless to say, he was a passionate supporter of unconditional surrender. In his spirit and that of Casablanca, the Foreign Office issued a blanket order to its representatives to henceforth ignore peace proposals from any and all Germans.

Admiral Canaris was not particularly surprised by this démarche. He had an intimate knowledge of the hatred World War I had engendered between the two countries. He had run German intelligence in Spain in the early years of that war and was so successful, according to one story, the infuriated British tried to assassinate him. From the start of the conspiracy against Hitler, Canaris had placed his chief hope in a negotiation with the Americans - one of several reasons why Roosevelt’s unconditional surrender policy dismayed him.

Even more dismaying was the timing. Unconditional surrender was announced on the day the Russians split in half the German army trapped in the Stalingrad pocket, making its destruction inevitable. For two years the conspirators had been waiting for a defeat of this magnitude, which would force the general staff to admit the war was lost - and thus agree to support a coup d’état. At the very moment when this precarious hope seemed to be coming true, Roosevelt delivered it a terrible blow.

For a professional soldier, unconditional surrender is a term that reeks of contempt and dishonor. Since the beginning of conflicts between civilized states, most wars have been concluded by negotiation in which the victors tacitly admit that the losers have the right to make some claims to decent treatment for having fought courageously.

Before Casablanca, Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, commander of the Berlin garrison, had told Canaris that he loathed Hitler and was ready to do everything in his power to overthrow him. After Casablanca, Witzleben said: “Now, no honorable man can lead the German people into such a situation.” General Heinz Guderian, the inventor of panzer warfare, declined to participate in the plot for the same reason when he was approached by Colonel Hans Oster, Canaris’ second in command. Colonel General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the German army, said at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials that unconditional surrender had been a crucial element in his refusal to join the conspiracy.

“A Deal With the Devil”

Why had Roosevelt chosen this moment to announce the policy? Where had it come from? In his seemingly ingenuous way, FDR later claimed that the phrase had just “popped into my mind” at the press conference. The president sometimes liked to picture himself as a rather frivolous character, a “juggler” who did not let his left hand know what his right hand was doing. But the meaning and intent of the unconditional surrender policy was anything but frivolous, and its origin was not in the least accidental.

The term had first appeared in the documents of the American government in the spring of 1942, when the State Department set up a committee to discuss postwar aims. Its chairman was Norman H. Davis, former advisor to Woodrow Wilson and a frequent collaborator with FDR on foreign policy matters. There is little doubt that FDR told Davis he wanted the policy the committee recommended, unconditional surrender, and determined to pursue it very early in the war. The president foreshadowed the policy in his annual message to Congress on January 6, 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, when he declared: “There has never been - there can never be - successful compromise between good and evil. Only total victory can reward the champions of tolerance, and decency, and faith.”

At a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on January 7, 1943, Roosevelt told General George Marshall he intended to propose unconditional surrender to Churchill as a way of reassuring Josef Stalin that the British and Americans would not make a premature peace - even though they were still a long way from launching the second front that Moscow repeatedly and impatiently demanded.

A more immediate reason for the announcement was the uproar created by the U.S. Army-State Department deal with the Nazi collaborator, Admiral Jean Darlan, to end French resistance to the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa. Liberal columnists, such as Drew Pearson and Walter Lippmann decried it as a “deal with the devil,” a reaction that took Roosevelt by surprise. Within the administration, liberal friends, such as Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., told Roosevelt the moral integrity of the United States had been impugned, and Morgenthau demanded Eisenhower’s head. The impact of this outcry on Roosevelt was profound.

Those two factors - anxiety over reassuring Stalin and the desire to expunge the stain of Darlan - explain to a large extent Roosevelt’s timing of the unconditional surrender policy but not the underlying long-range intention. That requires a look backward to Roosevelt’s experience in World War I, when he watched brutal clashes over peacemaking with Germany destroy the presidency and health of Woodrow Wilson, a leader he had served as assistant secretary of the Navy and whom he deeply admired. His prior experience left Roosevelt with an intense animus - hatred would be a more operative word - for Germany.

As for the “unconditional surrender” slogan itself, FDR never revealed its real source because it came from a president whose influence he did his utmost to conceal - Theodore Roosevelt. At the close of World War I, Teddy had differed violently with Wilson when he offered the reeling Germans an armistice and peace on the basis of his idealistic Fourteen Points. The Republican Roosevelt had insisted that nothing less than the unconditional surrender of the German army would guarantee the peace - an idea that the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, General John J. Pershing, also endorsed.

Hitler’s repudiation of the war-guilt clause in the Treaty of Versailles and his reckless aggressions had convinced Roosevelt that Cousin Teddy and Pershing were correct, and FDR was determined to apply this lesson of history to the war he was running. Playwright Robert Sherwood, who worked closely with Roosevelt and his chief advisor, Harry Hopkins, as a speechwriter and confidant, concluded that unconditional surrender was “very deeply deliberated . . . a true statement of Roosevelt’s policy.”

Apparently, Roosevelt discussed unconditional surrender with Churchill some five days before he announced it at Casablanca. While he did not object to the idea, the British prime minister seems to have had grave reservations about making it a public slogan to which they would be tied for the rest of the war. It was Roosevelt’s announcement that left Churchill “dumbfounded,” one Casablanca participant later told Cordell Hull.

As a student of the past on a level Roosevelt never approached, Churchill knew the danger of applying lessons from history to statecraft. The lessons were too often irrelevant to the realities of a new time and a very different situation. Seldom has this counsel been more true than in the case of Nazi Germany and the German opposition to Hitler. Roosevelt’s commitment to unconditional surrender led him to disregard the existence of these courageous men and women, who risked their lives and reputations to redeem their country from one of the most evil regimes in world history.

FDR Turns a Deaf Ear

In the succeeding year, Canaris and the men around him tried desperately to communicate with Roosevelt. They used all sorts of emissaries, beginning with Louis Lochner, a former AP correspondent in Berlin, who rushed to the White House the moment he was repatriated from Germany in June of 1942. Lochner was curtly informed that the president had “no interest whatsoever” in his information. In Istanbul, Helmuth von Moltke talked to the U.S. naval attaché, George Earle, a Balkan expert who wanted to rescue Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. He persuaded William Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), to come to the Turkish capital to hear an offer to fly a German general staff member to London to arrange a peaceful surrender of the western front if unconditional surrender were modified. Donovan rushed to the White House to discover FDR had no desire to negotiate with “these East German Junkers.”

Next, Canaris developed a seemingly more fruitful contact in Berne, Switzerland, where Allen Dulles had become the OSS station chief. Here the messenger was Hans Bernd Gisevius, an Abwehr agent disguised as a German vice consul in Zurich. To bolster his bona fides, Canaris leaked reams of secret information about the German war effort to Dulles, who forwarded it to Washington with strong recommendations to cooperate with the resistance movement, which he code-named “Breakers.” From the White House came only silence. A similar initiative in Stockholm, launched by the German Foreign Office, also came to naught.

As desperation mounted, Canaris himself took to the field in Spain. With the help of the Spanish Foreign Office, a meeting was arranged between Canaris, Menzies, and Donovan at Santander. It was surely one of the strangest and most fateful encounters of the war. Menzies was disobeying the orders of his putative commanders, the Foreign Office bureaucrats, and Donovan was acutely aware by now that Roosevelt was equally hostile to his presence. But Canaris charmed and convinced both men of the logic of his proposal to work out an arrangement whereby the Anglo-Americans would support a coup and peace on the basis of the German borders of 1939 - surrendering all of Hitler’s conquests. A deputy of Canaris who was present at the meeting said it was the most exciting experience of his secret service career.

When the two Allied intelligence chiefs reported to their superiors, however, the reception was, if possible, even more venomously negative. For Canaris, the disappointment was crushing - and it soon became doubly depressing when his enemies in the Nazi hierarchy, who had long suspected the Abwehr of harboring traitors, began to strike at some of his most trusted subordinates.

First, Oster and one of his assistants were caught laundering money to aid escaping Jews. Next, Count Moltke attended a garden party at which a number of indiscreet things were said about the regime. After one more futile trip to Ankara in the last weeks of 1943 to try contacting the American ambassador to Cairo, an old friend, the count, too, was arrested and Canaris’ grip on the Abwehr was threatened by investigators from several branches of the Nazi apparatus.

Intransigence Is Measured in Lives

While the German resistance struggled to win recognition from Roosevelt, his antipathy toward them and the German people was hardening. In May 1943, Churchill came to Washington, D.C., for a conference code-named Trident. Probably reacting to the attempts to reach him through Donovan, Roosevelt told the prime minister he wanted to issue a declaration saying that he would refuse to negotiate with the Nazi regime, the German army high command, or any other group or individual in Germany. Churchill, once more demonstrating his dislike for taking such an intransigent public stand, managed to talk him out of it.

But the prime minister himself was not innocent of calling for total war and total victory in terms that made unconditional surrender seem like a threat of annihilation. In a speech to the House of Commons in September 1943, Churchill distinguished between the treatment he planned to mete out to the Italian and German people. He saw little or no obstacles to the Italians regaining “their rightful place among the free democracies of the modern world.” Not so the Germans.

“Twice within our lifetimes, three times counting that of our fathers, they have plunged the world into their wars of expansion and aggression. They combine in the most deadly manner the qualities of the warrior and the slave. They do not value freedom themselves and the spectacle of it among others is hateful to them.” He went on to denounce Prussia as “the core of the pestilence.” Nazi tyranny and Prussian militarism had to be “rooted out” before Germany could return to the family of nations. This was pure Vansittartism. Lord Robert was saying virtually identical things in the House of Lords.

While this war of vituperation raged, the Americans and the British were encountering rude shocks in the shooting war. In North Africa and Sicily, German tanks repeatedly demonstrated their superiority over American-made armor, and the veteran German infantryman proved an equally formidable foe. Then came the invasion of Italy, in which the policy of unconditional surrender ruined an easy conquest.

Shortly after Sicily fell, King Victor Emmanuel dismissed Benito Mussolini and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio as premier. He immediately opened secret negotiations with American emissaries to get Italy out of the war. Everything seemed to be moving toward a stunning capitulation, which would have opened a huge gap in Hitler’s Festung Europa (Fortress Europe). But Roosevelt insisted the only terms he would accept were unconditional surrender and the removal of the king and the field marshal. Badoglio angrily withdrew from the negotiations and, for over six weeks, the talks were stalled while Eisenhower, Churchill, and others desperately tried to persuade the president to let them cut a deal that would have saved thousands of British and American lives.

By the time Roosevelt relented and permitted the king and Badoglio to remain in power, the Germans had poured 24 divisions into Italy and the Italians had no country to surrender. Canaris, incidentally, did his utmost to bring about a secret surrender, making a personal trip to Italy and reporting back to Berlin that there was nothing to the rumors of Italian treachery. That gesture did much to pull the last props from under his position as the head of the Abwehr.

When the Americans landed at Salerno, they found the Germans and their panzers and .88-millimeter cannon in the hills awaiting them. Only massive bombardments from the escorting fleet and the insertion of the elite 82nd Airborne Division into the collapsing beachhead prevented a debacle. Instead of reaching Rome in a week or two, as optimists had predicted, the British and Americans found themselves up to their axles in mud and confronted by thousands of Germans manning the mountainous Gustav Line 100 miles south of the Eternal City. Unconditional surrender had begun to look like a slogan printed in bright red blood.

Stalin’s Criticism Is Ignored

When Roosevelt finally met Stalin at Teheran in November of 1943, the man for whom the policy had supposedly been tailored bluntly told the president it was a very bad idea. The Russian dictator said he thought its vagueness and implied threat only served to unite the German people. He favored an explicit statement of terms. Churchill, who rarely agreed with Stalin on anything, emphatically endorsed his idea. Neither man succeeded in changing Roosevelt’s mind.

In July 1943, Stalin had demonstrated his idea of how to approach the Germans. A National Committee of Free Germans, high-ranking prisoners taken at Stalingrad, began broadcasting from Moscow, assuring the Germans that the Soviet Union had no desire to destroy them as a people. They only wanted to help them get rid of Hitler. Spontaneously, the Soviet dictator was saying the very thing Canaris and his friends wanted so desperately to hear from Roosevelt.

At Teheran, Stalin revealed his real intentions for Germany. They had little to do with the generous sentiments displayed by the Free Germans committee. The Russian dictator favored dismembering the country into four or five ineffective parts - and shooting 50,000 German army officers. Although the latter recommendation was made in a sardonic, joking tone, Churchill almost exploded, crying that the British people had always been opposed and always would be opposed to mass vengeance.

Roosevelt’s reaction alarmed Churchill even more. The president suggested a compromise - shooting 49,000. This feeble attempt at humor was lost on Churchill. The prime minister knew they were dealing with a man who had massacred more than 15,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest and nearby death sites in 1940. Roosevelt was equally aware of this grisly fact. Churchill had sent him confidential British evaluations of Nazi propaganda about the massacre, which concluded that the Russians were unquestionably guilty.

Assassination Plan Takes Shape

At Teheran, Stalin and Roosevelt forced Churchill to agree to a cross-channel invasion, which was scheduled for May. The invasion now became the focus on both sides of the battle lines. With the Russians advancing relentlessly from the east, Canaris realized the Germans were running out of time. Early in 1944, his Nazi enemies succeeded in ousting him from control of the Abwehr. However, they were unable to make their suspicions of treason into a factual case against him, and Hitler put the admiral in charge of a small agency supervising the civilian war effort. Canaris was able to leave behind numerous subordinates in the Abwehr who were still committed to Hitler’s destruction.

A younger man now assumed the leadership of the conspiracy. Thirty-seven-year-old Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had no connection to the Protestant, East German Junkers and Prussians on whom Churchill, Roosevelt, and Vansittart focused their antipathy. He was a Catholic and a descendant of the nobility of the principality of Württemberg in southern Germany, an area which even Vansittart admitted, in an unguarded moment, had democratic tendencies. Nazism’s vicious deeds had filled Stauffenberg with loathing for Hitler, and the Anglo-American bombing offensive convinced him that it was time to act. “A thousand years of civilization are being destroyed,” he said.

Stauffenberg had no doubts or hesitations about the necessity of killing Hitler - and he was in a position to do it, as well as seizing control of Germany. Badly wounded in Tunisia by an Allied air attack in which he lost an arm, an eye, and all but two fingers on his remaining hand, the colonel had become chief of staff of the Home Army, composed of training units, divisions in rest areas, and convalescents numbering about 600,000 men. They were organized into a formal army to make sure Germany’s millions of slave laborers did not attempt an uprising. Stauffenberg proposed to kill Hitler and use this force to wrest power from the Nazis.

Unknown to the conspirators, they were acquiring allies on the other side. As British and American planners contemplated the harsh realities of attacking the 1.5 million-man German army in France, doubts about the policy of unconditional surrender escalated. It soon became evident that virtually no one in either government supported the policy except Roosevelt and his White House circle.

On March 25, 1944, General Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to the president urging “that a reassessment of the formula of unconditional surrender should be made . . . at a very early date.” The Joint Chiefs proposed a proclamation to assure the Germans that the Allies had no desire to “extinguish the German people or Germany as a nation.”

On April 1, 1944, Roosevelt replied with an outburst that revealed as never before his hatred of Germany. “A somewhat long and painful experience in and out of Germany leads me to believe that German Philosophy (sic) cannot be changed by decree, law or military order. The change must be evolutionary and may take two generations.” In his opinion, the very word Reich had to be scoured from the German soul.

General Marshall was dismayed by FDR’s response. He told General Sir John Dill, the British liaison officer in Washington, that they were “up against an obstinate Dutchman.” In London, Marshall’s protégé and D-Day commander, Dwight Eisenhower, was even more disappointed. Ike decided to try to change the president’s mind on his own. On April 14, Eisenhower met with Edward R. Stettinius, who had recently become undersecretary of state, and asked him to request that Cordell Hull intercede with Roosevelt to give the Germans a “white alley” - a path down which they could surrender with honor.

Eisenhower was drawing on his experience in Italy, reasoning that if the Allies had gone along with installing an Italian field marshal as premier, what was wrong with the same approach for Germany? In his cable to Hull, Stettinius, obviously quoting Eisenhower, said the United States should try to encourage the emergence of a German Badoglio. The cable also suggested that, after the beachhead was established in France, Eisenhower should call on the German commander in the west to surrender.

The White House response to this extraordinary message was another bout of silence. Eisenhower was encouraged and ordered the preparation of a proclamation that, under the influence of his psywar experts, became a warm personal chat with the German soldier, urging him to trust the Allies. A copy of the speech was rushed to the White House - and again the response was silence.

On May 31, Eisenhower’s speech was attacked from an entirely unexpected quarter. Winston Churchill wrote an uncharacteristically violent letter to the supreme commander, accusing him of “begging before we have won the battle.” Never, he claimed, had he ever read anything “less suitable” for soldiers. In light of Churchill’s previous strong reservations about unconditional surrender, his letter was incomprehensible - unless he was doing a favor for his devious American counterpart in Washington, D.C.

A few months earlier, when they had disagreed about the composition of the Italian government, Churchill rather plaintively reminded Roosevelt that he had “loyally tried to support” any statement to which the president was “personally committed.” By now, it was evident that literally nothing in the war was as personally important to Roosevelt as unconditional surrender.

Churchill’s blast finished Eisenhower’s attempt to modify unconditional surrender. He swallowed his doubts and led his army to the beaches of Normandy and beyond as an obedient supporter of the policy. But the German army, after yielding the beachhead, still demonstrated a ferocious readiness to fight in Normandy’s hedgerows, causing other people to have severe doubts.

On July 19, Churchill came under heavy attack in the House of Commons from both Laborites and Conservatives concerned about unconditional surrender. Again and again, members demanded to know why the prime minister’s government refused to state peace terms for Germany. The next day, Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, the voice of Lord Vansittart in the House of Commons, replied by sternly endorsing unconditional surrender and punishment of the entire German nation. “I say Hitler is symptomatic of the entire German mentality,” he declared. “The German people put [him] where he is.”

The Plot Takes Wing - and Crashes

While Eden was proclaiming these hate-filled sentiments, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was on a plane to the Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s East German headquarters near Rastenburg, to confer with the führer about the readiness of the Home Army. In his briefcase he carried two powerful bombs supplied by the Abwehr. By noon, the bombs had exploded and the colonel was on his way back to Berlin, certain that Hitler was dead.

Stauffenberg flashed a coded signal to the capital, where the commander of the Home Army put another code word, Valkyrie, on the army’s teleprinter circuit. This alert was supposed to bring all units rushing to their assigned posts, guns in hand. At the Bendlerblock, the huge German army headquarters on the Bendlerstrasse in Berlin, General Ludwig Beck planned to broadcast a statement to these soldiers, announcing he was their new commander. Stauffenberg was ready to broadcast to the nation the news of Hitler’s death and the formation of a republic with Beck and Goerdeler among the chief figures - and their determination to bring the war to a swift end.

But Hitler, the seat blown out of his trousers, his coat ripped up the back, and both eardrums ruptured had survived the blast. At the last moment, Stauffenberg’s briefcase had been moved by a staff colonel as he leaned over a map to explain a troop movement to Hitler.

In France, the German commander, General Günther von Kluge, had been approached by Beck and promised to join the plot. But when he found out that Hitler had survived, his resolution unraveled. In Berlin, many members of the Home Army - particularly the young commander of a battalion of elite Prussian Guards who had been ordered by Beck to arrest Goebbels - wanted proof that Hitler was dead. At Goebbels’ headquarters, the propaganda chief put through a call to Rastenburg and learned that Hitler was still alive. The commander and other younger officers turned violently against the conspirators. Before the night was over, Beck was dead by his own hand, and Stauffenberg and three others had been executed against the wall of the Bendlerblock.

On the day Stauffenberg triggered his bomb, Roosevelt was en route to Hawaii on a Pacific inspection tour. Churchill was aboard the cruiser Arromanches off Normandy. Both learned of the failed attempt almost immediately. Roosevelt said nothing, and Churchill confined himself to a gloating remark about “a very great disturbance in the German machine.” The only nation that praised the conspirators was the Soviet Union. A member of the Free Germans committee broadcast: “Generals, officers, soldiers! Cease fire at once and turn your arms against Hitler. Do not fail these courageous men!”

Morgenthau’s Scorched-Earth Plan

In Hawaii, on July 29, Roosevelt gave a press conference at which someone asked him whether unconditional surrender also applied to Japan. After answering in the affirmative - making the eventual use of the atomic bomb inevitable - Roosevelt heaped scorn on those who had criticized the policy. He claimed they did not understand his historical comparison. He then proceeded to give a totally erroneous description of Robert E. Lee’s conversation with Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, in which the president maintained that Grant kept saying unconditional surrender while Lee pleaded with him for food for his starving soldiers. When Lee finally accepted unconditional surrender, according to FDR (in fact, the term was never mentioned at Appomattox), Grant gave Lee food and permitted his officers to keep their horses for spring plowing. Roosevelt seemed to be implying that if the Germans surrendered unconditionally, they too could expect decent treatment. This history lesson demonstrated the dangers of awarding a “gentleman’s C” at Harvard.

Roosevelt soon belied his promise of humane treatment to a surrendered Germany. In August 1944, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau visited England and returned to tell Roosevelt that he thought the British were much too benevolent in their postwar plans for Germany. “Give me 30 minutes with Churchill and I can correct this,” Roosevelt told Morgenthau. “We have got to be tough with Germany and I mean the German people, not just the Nazis. You either have to castrate [them] or you have got to treat them . . . so they can’t just go on reproducing people who want to continue . . . [as] in the past.”

Morgenthau added fuel to the presidential ire by showing FDR a copy of a “Handbook of Military Government” prepared by the War Department. Roosevelt denounced it in a fiery letter to Colonel Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, saying it “gives me the impression that Germany is to be restored just as much as the Netherlands and Belgium.” Morgenthau left the White House convinced he had received a mandate to create a better plan to deal with a prostrate Germany.

The result was the Morgenthau Report, prepared by a Treasury Department team. It proposed to divide Germany into four parts - long a Vansittart recommendation. It also recommended destroying all the industry in the Ruhr and Saar basins, turning central Europe and the German people into agriculturists. “I don’t care what happens to the population,” Morgenthau told his staff. Roosevelt gave the proposal his heartfelt approval.

The president was so enthusiastic, he invited Morgenthau to accompany him to a conference with Churchill in Quebec on September 14, 1944. When the Treasury secretary outlined his program to Churchill at a state dinner, the prime minister was aghast. Churchill said he agreed with the British statesman and orator, Edmund Burke, that you cannot indict an entire nation. At his most vehement, Churchill said Morgenthau’s plan would be like chaining England to a dead body.

Roosevelt watched with icy amusement, knowing that the next day Churchill had to negotiate with Morgenthau about how much Lend-Lease program aid the bankrupt British government could expect from America after the Germans surrendered. Morgenthau dangled $3 billion in front of the prime minister, but Roosevelt made it very clear that the money would not be forthcoming until Churchill agreed to “cooperate” on the secretary’s plan for postwar Germany. Swallowing his previous protestations, the mortified Churchill initialed the Morgenthau plan.

Back in Washington, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of State Cordell Hull launched an all-out assault against Morgenthau’s brainchild. Stimson pointed out that it violated the Atlantic Charter, which promised equal opportunity for the pursuit of happiness to both victors and vanquished. He claimed it would create 40 million superfluous Germans, 19 million in the Ruhr alone. Roosevelt remained adamant - until a very shrewd infighter leaked the essence of the plan to columnist Drew Pearson. Within the week, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other papers had dug out the whole story. From Congress and editorial pages all over the country, a firestorm of disapproval engulfed the White House. In Germany, Goebbels seized on the plan as final proof that the United States was determined to destroy Germany.

The propaganda disaster coincided with the collapse of optimistic hopes that the German army would crumble after the fall of Paris. But the Wehrmacht smashed an Allied attempt to slash into the Reich from the north at Arnhem. The Republican candidate for president, Thomas E. Dewey, joined the chorus of disapproval, accusing Roosevelt of inspiring the Germans to resist to the last man.

Roosevelt responded by demonstrating why he deserved the nickname “juggler.” He summoned Stimson to the White House and told him he agreed with him completely. He never had the slightest intention of implementing the Morgenthau Report. The Treasury Secretary and his friends had, he solemnly declared, “pulled a boner.” A few weeks later, Roosevelt tried to create a tabula rasa by telling Cordell Hull he was opposed to making any postwar plans for “a country we do not yet occupy.”

While this charade was playing out in Washington, some 500 leaders of the German resistance were being tortured by the gestapo and tried before Nazi judges in a so-called People’s Court, packed with party members who jeered and hooted at them. Field marshals, generals, colonels, and former officials of the Foreign Office and Abwehr were forced to wear clothing either ridiculously large or small to make them look as much like buffoons as possible. Yet they managed to defend themselves with calm dignity, boldly testifying that they had tried to overthrow Hitler because Nazism filled them with moral and spiritual revulsion.

Not a word of sympathy or regret for these men was uttered by Churchill, Roosevelt, or any of their spokesmen. Instead, the Anglo-Americans showered Germany with mocking leaflets, sneering that the conspiracy was a sure sign of imminent collapse.

On the battlefield, however, the combination of unconditional surrender and the Morgenthau Report guaranteed a fierce stand by the Wehrmacht. In November 1944, the Germans inflicted a strategic defeat on the immense American army that tried to reach the Rhine, fighting them to a standstill in the Hürtgen Forest and the countryside around Aachen. On November 22, a worried Eisenhower cabled the Joint Chiefs urging “that we should redouble our efforts to find a solution to the problem of reducing the German will to resist.” The chiefs turned to Roosevelt, who stubbornly refused to say a word. But he asked Churchill to broadcast a redefinition of unconditional surrender, inviting the Germans to join in “this great effort for decency and peace among human beings.”

Churchill replied that his war cabinet disapproved of the idea, because it would “confess our errors.” With more than a touch of sarcasm, Churchill added: “The General Grant attitude ‘to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer’ appears one to which I see no alternative. In the meantime I shall remain set in unconditional surrender, which is where you put me.”

On December 21, 1944, the Wehrmacht stunned the British and Americans by assembling 250,000 men and 1,000 tanks and smashing out of the Belgian forest of the Ardennes in an all-or-nothing attempt to seize the port of Antwerp and strand the Allied army in the field without food or gasoline. The fighting and dying in the mud and snow at Bastogne, and other more obscure crossroads in the ensuing Battle of the Bulge, became a saga of American courage. But in the light of what we now know about unconditional surrender, we are forced to wonder if it was necessary.

After the breakout from Normandy and the capture of Paris, Germany’s position was strategically hopeless, and every field-grade officer in the German army - and not a few of the enlisted men - knew it. Their continued desperate resistance, which cost the Americans 418,791 dead and wounded, and the British and Canadians another 107,000, was the bitter fruit of unconditional surrender. These figures do not include air force losses or casualties in other theaters, such as Italy. If we take in Russian and German losses, including German civilian casualties from Allied bombing, the total number of dead and wounded approaches 2 million. If we add to this toll the number of Jews who were killed in the last nine months of the war, the figure can probably be doubled. “Unconditional surrender” was indeed a slogan written in blood.

The Wages of Sin Become Clear

Combining luck and dash, the Americans finally crossed the Rhine on March 7, 1945, by seizing the Ludendorff Bridge near the town of Remagen. Thereafter, the German army’s collapse accelerated as utter hopelessness overwhelmed the ranks. While armored columns trapped 400,000 Germans in the Ruhr Pocket and other tank task forces raced east and south, Admiral Canaris and Colonel Oster were moved to a prison camp in Bavaria. On April 9, with American tanks less than 50 miles away, they were taken from their cells and hanged. During the previous night, Canaris tapped out a farewell message to a Danish secret agent in the next cell: “I die for my country and with a clear conscience.”

On April 11, an American armored task force of the Third Army captured the village of Ohrdruf. Outside it was a complex of buildings surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Inside, Americans gaped in disbelief at the ragged skeletons stumbling toward them. In the buildings, bodies of those who had starved to death were stacked like cordwood. The outside world had discovered the first German concentration camp. On the same day, other units of the Third Army reached Buchenwald and tankers of the Ninth Army discovered Nordhausen. The next day an appalled Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf and ordered every American unit within travelling distance to be taken to see the horror. As he left the camp, he turned to a sentry and said: “Still having trouble hating them?”

Eisenhower’s words provide a capsule explanation of why the tragedy of America’s failure to negotiate with the German resistance to Hitler has largely faded from memory. The concentration camps seemed to validate the policy of unconditional surrender. Fifty years later, it has become apparent that at least the last nine months of horror in Ohrdruf and the other camps might have been prevented had hatred not been the arbiter of Anglo-American diplomacy throughout the war.

In the United States, an exhausted Franklin D. Roosevelt retreated to Warm Springs, Georgia, in a desperate attempt to regain his faltering health. There is no evidence that he heard the news of the discovery of Ohrdruf, Nordhausen, and Buchenwald. At around noon on that same April 12, while sitting for a portrait, he died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

How would FDR have reacted to the concentration camps? From his past performance, it seems almost certain he would have seized the moment to revive the Morgenthau plan and renew his punitive campaign against the country he hated. On the night before he died, he had a final conversation with Henry Morgenthau, Jr., in which the Treasury secretary delivered another lecture on the dangers of a soft peace for Germany. “Henry,” Roosevelt said, “I am with you one hundred percent.”

Events soon demonstrated the fatuity of Roosevelt’s and Morgenthau’s ideas about how to deal with Germany. As Stimson and others pointed out at the time, Germany was the economic heart of Europe - and the pair’s blind desire to eviscerate it would have crippled the Continent’s prosperity forever. This fact, plus the looming menace of Stalinist communism, rendered the policy null and void virtually from the day Roosevelt died.

Franklin Roosevelt’s great confrere, Winston Churchill, soon abandoned Vansittarism and included West Germany in his campaign to rally the free world against communist hegemony. He also tried to make some amends for the policy of unconditional surrender and his failure to recognize the German resistance movement. In 1947, in a speech to Parliament, Churchill described Canaris and his fellow conspirators as men who “belonged to the noblest and greatest [of resistance movements] that have ever arisen in the history of all peoples.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

New York Times bestselling author Thomas Fleming is one of the most distinguished and productive historians and novelists of our time. He has written 20 nonfiction books that have won prizes and praise from critics and fellow historians, many with a special focus on the American Revolution. He has also written 23 historical novels, many of them bestsellers.

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Published by New Word City, Inc., 2011

www.NewWordCity.com

© Thomas Fleming

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-61230-198-3

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Table of Contents

UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER: THE POLICY THAT PROLONGED WORLD WAR II

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT