While I was growing up, I’d sometimes heard those media stories of Nazis making soap and lampshades from Jewish bodies and skin, and had vaguely assumed that they were probably true. But in recent decades, all mainstream Holocaust scholars have admitted they had no reality, merely being grotesque examples of dishonest wartime propaganda, much like Israeli babies beheaded or roasted in ovens.
But although those particular Nazi atrocities had never occurred, they did have deadly real-world consequences. Morgenthau believed they were true and that led him to lend his name and support to the notorious Morgenthau Plan, which was intended to exterminate half of Germany’s surviving population after the end of the war. Although that extreme proposal was later officially repudiated by the American government, it was still substantially implemented in practice, and according to reasonable estimates, perhaps ten million or more German civilians died of hunger or privation during the first few years after the close of hostilities, suffering a fate not entirely dissimilar from what might soon befall the blockaded and embargoed inhabitants of miserable Gaza.
