Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

thing, wouldn’t one then sensibly conclude that there simply is no good
reason?
In Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina, Lord Beaconsfield says, ‘When
the british nation goes to war, Madam, it ceases to listen to reason.’
If after three years of killing and being killed in Europe, we still do not
know what we are fighting for, isn’t it about time to come to the only
reasonable conclusion, namely, our boys do not know what they are
fighting for, because there is no reason for their fighting!
Sincerely
Austin J App, Ph.D.
Mr Henry Morgenthau, Jr
Secretary to the Treasury
Washington, D.C.
October 11, 1944
My dear Mr Morgenthau:
* * *
Morgenthau’s Genocidic Plan for Germans
Compared with Spencer’s for the Irish
For the last several weeks I have been in a state of exaltation because of
the perception that, just as in the military phase it was precisely we
Americans who achieved the bombing of Rome, so in the political phase
of the war it would be precisely an American who in the long pages of
history had succeeded in making the most atrocious and barbarous
proposal for the treatment of a vanquished nation.
I was of course thinking of your notorious plan for destroying and keeping
destroyed all the factories and shops of Germany so that eighty million
people could slowly die of undernourishment without our having to waste
poison gas or bullets to kill them off individually. It seemed to me
particularly felicitous that the author of this proposal should be an
American of the Jewish persuasion, which has always been accused of
holding and practicing the barbarism expressed in the words, ‘eye for an
eye and tooth for a tooth.’
But today I am momentarily de-exalted. Today I unexpectedly
remembered the plan of the British poet Edmund Spencer for ‘pacifying
the oppressed and rebellious people’ of Ireland. He proposed that
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