Planning Ahead in Germany¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter from Socialist Appeal, titled “Planning Ahead in Germany,” mounts a polemical assault on the hypocrisy of the Allied powers and the Stalinist bureaucracy in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Its core argument is that the capitalist victors, having denounced Nazi atrocities with righteous fury, are now presiding over a catastrophe in occupied Germany that rivals the crimes of the Hitlerites in its callousness and human cost. The text seizes on a grim report from the News Chronicle of 10 September, which details Allied preparations for the coming winter: not to feed or shelter the German population, but to dig graves in advance for the hundreds of thousands expected to die of starvation and disease. Coffins are to be dispensed with, wood being needed for fuel. The chapter uses this evidence to expose the cynical “planning” of capitalism—a system that can organise mass death with bureaucratic efficiency but cannot provide for the living.
The chapter draws heavily on the historical context of the immediate post-war period, referencing the mass deportations of Germans from Eastern Europe, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, for which it holds the Stalinist bureaucracy directly responsible. It argues that these expulsions, conducted under the slogan of “democracy,” are no more humane than the racialist policies of the Nazis, and that they have added millions of starving, homeless refugees to an already shattered German economy. The text notes that the fiction of a Nazi underground “werewolf” movement has been abandoned for lack of evidence, yet the rhetoric of “re-educating” the German masses persists as a fig leaf for imperialist plunder and dismemberment.
The polemic is directed at multiple targets: the Allied capitalist press and statesmen, whose indignation at fascist crimes is revealed as selective and hypocritical; the Stalinist leadership, complicit in the forced population transfers; and the Labour and trade-union leaderships, whose denunciations of Nazism are not matched by solidarity with German workers. The chapter concludes with a class-struggle appeal: British and American soldiers are already sharing rations with starving German women and children, and the organised working class must demand action to avert the tragedy. Only a socialist Germany within a Socialist United States of Europe, it argues, can break the cycle of national humiliation, revenge, and preparation for new wars that capitalism and Stalinist policy are now sowing.