The curtain fell on the Second World War in May 1945, leaving a continent in ashes and a nation utterly broken. The German Reich lay prostrate, its cities reduced to landscapes of rubble and despair. In Berlin alone, 180,000 of 250,000 buildings were destroyed. Across the battered nation, over five million homes were uninhabitable. From the skeletal remains of these ruins, 2.8 million Berliners emerged, eking out a desperate existence from cellar dwellings. This was the prelude to a peace that would prove as destructive as the war itself—a peace aimed not just at a nation, but at its very soul, with the ancient state of Prussia squarely in the crosshairs.
The Post-War Punishment: A Calculated Starvation
The victors’ terms were merciless. Industry that had miraculously survived the bombing campaigns was systematically dismantled and carted away. The German people were forbidden from even attempting to feed themselves; fishing boats were confined to port, the distribution of seed was banned. The official ration set by the Allied authorities was deliberately calibrated below the existential minimum. The result was a horrific man-made famine. Official estimates confirm that approximately three million Germans perished in the immediate post-war period, frozen or starved to death under the watch of their conquerors.
This physical dismantling was accompanied by a territorial amputation of historic proportions. The eastern territories of Germany—the very core provinces of Prussia—were severed and handed over. The outcome was the brutal expulsion of 13 million people from their ancestral homelands, a campaign of ethnic cleansing that claimed an estimated 2.3 million lives through violence, disease, and starvation.
The Intellectual Plunder and the “Re-education” Deception
Beyond the physical theft of industrial plants and private property abroad, the Allies engaged in a massive confiscation of intellectual capital. Research findings and patents from German private firms and individuals were declared war booty. Scientists were relocated to the victors’ nations to exploit their knowledge, gifting American and Soviet research programs billions of dollars worth of investment and decades of advanced development.
The victors’ ‘spiritual dismantling’ was not primarily directed at the defeated ideology of National Socialism. Instead, it possessed a clear and unmistakable antipathy toward Prussia.
Yet, the most insidious act was the program of “re-education.” Contrary to what logic might suggest, this “spiritual dismantling” was not primarily directed at the defeated ideology of National Socialism. Instead, it possessed a clear and unmistakable antipathy toward Prussia. This was a deliberate choice. The Prussian-German Monarchy of the Hohenzollerns had ended in November 1918 with Germany’s defeat in the First World War. There was no direct institutional lineage from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich.
To manufacture a false continuity, Allied propagandists seized upon a historical falsehood originally propagated by Hitler himself: the claim that he stood in the direct succession of Frederick the Great and Bismarck. The Allies, for their own propaganda purposes, eagerly adopted this Nazi fabrication. The irony is profound: the very powers who accused the German people of uncritically adopting Nazi ideas did not hesitate to uncritically adopt a Nazi historical thesis when it suited their narrative. The “Day of Potsdam” in 1933, a staged event for domestic consumption, was thus enshrined as pseudo-historical proof that the German Empire was the direct precursor and cause of Hitler.
The Legal and Historical Absurdity of Blaming Prussia
This manufactured causality collapses under any serious legal or historical scrutiny. German legal tradition, since the time of the Reichsgericht, has adhered to the “adequacy theory” for establishing causation. This theory posits that a chain of causality is broken when extraordinary, unforeseeable events intervene. The causal chain between the Kaiserreich and Hitler was shattered by a series of such cataclysmic events: the First World War, the vindictive Treaty of Versailles, the hyperinflation that wiped out savings, mass unemployment, the humiliation of the German people, and the utter inability of the Weimar-era political parties to forge stable compromises.
Furthermore, the assertion that Prussia was the root of National Socialism is exposed as a political agitation tool by the fact that left-wing and right-wing critics used diametrically opposite arguments to condemn it. Leftist critics blamed the Empire’s lack of liberalization and its “authoritarian” structures. Right-wing critics, like Carl Schmitt, argued the exact opposite: that it was the compromise with liberalism in 1867 that had mortally wounded the monarchical-soldierly spirit of Prussia. Hitler himself rejected the structures of the Empire entirely. The only point of agreement among these factions was their shared animosity toward facts.
Prussia’s Legacy of Law and Order
The historical record must be corrected: under the strict rule of law that defined the Prussian state, there was never any persecution of people based on race or religion. Its proverbial legal security made Germany the most desirable destination for Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. The concept of a “Royal Prussian concentration camp” is a historical absurdity. While group persecution occurred in the histories of the US, England, Russia, and France, it was unimaginable in the Hohenzollern state of Brandenburg-Prussia.
The Final Act: Law No. 46
To crown their policy of anti-Prussian re-education, the victorious powers enacted Control Council Law No. 46 on February 25, 1947, formally decreeing the dissolution of the State of Prussia, which they declared had “from time immemorial been a bearer of militarism and reaction.” A people ground down by hunger and despair met this act of historical ignorance with apathy. The nation that had decisively shaped Germany’s destiny, unified it in 1871, and led it to the highest global ranks in science, education, economy, technology, administration, and social responsibility was erased with the stroke of a pen.
The subsequent decades saw this falsification become entrenched not by state decree, but by the “herd instinct of the multitude,” as Immanuel Kant described it. Historians and journalists, fearful of exclusion from the professional “pack,” fell in line with the politically correct narrative. As the French historian Paul-Pierre Sagave noted with dismay in 1982, while the French still respectfully referred to Frédéric le Grand, his German colleagues had been cowed into using the neutered “Friedrich II.” The spirit of Prussia—a spirit of duty, order, and unparalleled legal integrity—was sacrificed not just by victors’ orders, but by a failure of intellectual courage. Its dissolution remains one of history’s great contradictions, a testament to the power of propaganda to erase truth and reshape the memory of a civilization.
