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Half a century after Nuremberg, it is hard to remember that it was perfectly intellectually acceptable during and after World War II to express doubt–as Arendt did–that Nazi horrors could rightly be lumped under the rubric of municipal law. Morgenthau, in his blazing anger, said, "it’s a question of attacking the German mind." He did not shirk from harsh measures: …[W]hen it gets down to it, it may be a question of taking this whole S.S. group, because you can’t keep the concentration camps forever and deporting them somewhere – out of Germany to some other part of the world. Just taking them bodily. And I wouldn’t be afraid to make the suggestion just as ruthlessly as it is necessary to accomplish the act.… Let somebody else water it down. In another outburst, in a Treasury Department meeting in September 1944, Morgenthau proposed mass deportations of millions of Germans – on the precedent, of all things, of Turkish expulsions of ethnic Greeks while Morgenthau’s father, Henry Morgenthau Sr. (see Constantinople chapter), was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire: I will give you people an example which I lived through in the eyes of my father. One morning the Turks woke up and said, "We don’t want a Greek in Turkey". They didn’t worry about what the Greeks were going to do with them. They moved one million people out.…They said, "We don’t want any more Greeks in Turkey". Now, whether it is one million, ten million, twenty million it still has to be done. A whole population was moved. The people lived. They got rehabilitated in no time. They moved them. If you can move a million, you can move twenty million; and you move twenty million. It is just a question; no one has thought about it. It seems a terrific task; it seems inhuman; it seems cruel. We didn’t ask for this war; we didn’t put millions of people through gas chambers. We didn’t do any of these things. They have asked for it… To
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