It has long been speculated that the author of the “Morgenthau Plan” for the `pastoralization of Germany’ was a communist, one of many in FDR’s administration, and who deliberately leaked this `plan’ to the Nazis to provoke them to fight hard against the Western allies, allowing the Red Army to conquer more of Eastern Europe & Germany.
Otherwise, the theory goes, the Nazis might have made an advantageous truce with the Western powers which would have freed up all their forces on the western front to go and fight the invading Soviets.
My Dad was in Patton’s Third Army & this was the general view of the Morgenthau Plan among the troops.
I happened upon a book that completely explains the Morganthau Plan in my mind. It is the WWI memoirs of Morganthau. He was US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at that time. Humanitarians who could contact him continually pleaded with him to do something to stop the Armenian Genocide, and he had almost no influence although he tried everything, threats, demands, publicizing it. He reports that the Germans knew and it was fine by them.
Then he saw it again twenty years later an order of magnitude larger from the same mindset, and was in a position to stop it for good.