Toward the end of World War II in Europe, the US government pondered a plan to not only demilitarize but also disintegrate and deindustrialize postwar Germany.

Named after its main proponent, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, the Morgenthau Plan proceeded from the insane assumption that “it is a fallacy that Europe needs a strong industrial Germany.” If it had been implemented, the remains of defeated Germany would have been deliberately turned into a post-industrial wasteland.

But then the Cold War happened, everyone, East and West, wanted their Germans making modern things in factories again, and so it was Marshall Plan in and Morgenthau Plan out. Lucky Germans.

Now the US-Soviet Cold War has been over for a third of a century already. You’d think that for the Germans – finally free of the odd obligation to kill each other on behalf of Washington and Moscow in case of World War Three and (sort of) happily re-united – Morgenthau’s dark fantasies would just be a tale of bad times long gone-by.

But there you would underestimate the often badly overlooked German gift for eccentricity. In reality, post-Cold War Germany’s governments have set out on a resolute course of self-Morgenthauing economic auto-asphyxiation, adapting and obstinately clinging to policies that look as if they had been deliberately devised to deindustrialize and wreck their own country.

How can this be? For starters consider the case of global chemistry giant BASF: “What’s happening to Germany you’ll see first at BASF,” some say. And they have a point. Until recently, the German-headquartered company was considered the “crown jewel” of the country’s industry. Now, Germany is “mired in its longest period of stagnation since the Second World War” – says not Moscow’s RT but London’s FT – and BASF exemplifies much of what went so very, very badly wrong.

Like much of German business in general, the country’s traditionally powerful and vital chemical industry “is stuck in the greatest crisis” since, at least, the early 1990s. Since 2019, German industry as a whole has shed a total of almost a quarter-million jobs.

Regarding BASF – originally founded in 1865 smack in the middle of modern Germany’s Time of Founders (“Gründerzeit”) as the “Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik” – it is true that it is still the largest chemical industry company in the world with subsidiaries in over 80 countries

© RT.com