The UN Charter still calls Germany an enemy state. Not in spirit. In the text. The text that has never been changed.
In the winter of 1952, the Federal Republic of Germany applied for membership in the United Nations. The application was blocked. The reason, stated plainly by the Soviet Union, was that under Articles 53 and 107 of the UN Charter, the organization had no obligation to admit a former enemy state — and every right to take action against one without the normal procedural constraints that protected other nations.
Germany eventually joined the United Nations in 1973. It has since served on the Security Council four times. It has provided a President of the General Assembly. It contributes billions to the UN budget and positions itself as one of the institution’s most committed advocates.
The articles have not changed.
Every defeated Axis power received a peace treaty.
Germany did not.
What the Document Actually Says
The Charter of the United Nations was signed in San Francisco on June 26, 1945. Germany was still technically at war — the formal unconditional surrender had been signed three weeks earlier, but no peace treaty existed, no German representative was present in San Francisco, and no German voice had any legal standing in the room where the new world order was being constructed.
Into that document, the victorious powers inserted three clauses now known collectively as the Feindstaatenklausel — the enemy state clause.
Article 53 states that the Security Council may authorize regional arrangements to enforce its decisions — but carves out a specific exception: action against “enemy states” requires no such authorization. Article 77 refers to trust territories, including those “detached from enemy states.” Article 107 states that nothing in the Charter invalidates or prohibits action taken against “any state which during the Second World War has been an enemy of any signatory” — and that such actions are beyond the Charter’s reach to question or overturn.
The phrase used in Article 53 to define “enemy state” is worth reading in full: “any state which during the Second World War has been an enemy of any signatory of this Charter.”
There is no time limit. There is no conditional. It does not say “was an enemy state.” It defines the category, and Germany sits inside it.
The Declaration That Changed Nothing
In 1995, the German government declared the enemy state clauses obsolet — obsolete. In 2005, the UN World Summit Outcome Document agreed. Heads of state noted the clauses were outdated and expressed their intention to remove the references from the Charter.
That intention has never been acted upon.
The United Nations Charter can only be amended through a specific procedure: a two-thirds majority vote of the General Assembly, followed by ratification by two-thirds of all member states, including all five permanent Security Council members. This procedure has been used exactly once in the Charter’s history, in 1965, to expand the size of the Security Council.
No amendment process concerning the enemy state clause has ever been formally initiated. Not in 1995. Not in 2005. Not since. The German government’s position — that the clauses are “politically obsolete” — is a statement about intent, not a change in law. A law declared obsolete by political consensus remains a law until the legislature removes it. Consensus is not amendment.
What this means, in the plainest possible language, is that the mechanism allowing UN member states to take coercive action against Germany — including military action — without Security Council authorization has never been formally revoked. It sits in the founding document of the world order, dormant, declared unfashionable, but legally intact.
The Timing Nobody Mentions
On May 11, 1945, three days after Germany’s capitulation, US President Truman approved Directive JCS 1067. The language was unambiguous:
“Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of its liberation, but as a defeated enemy state.”
The purpose was stated from the beginning. Not rehabilitation. Not reconstruction as an equal. Occupation as a defeated enemy — with all the legal apparatus that status required, built directly into the foundational document of the new international order before the year was out.
It was under this same fully operational legal architecture that Allied Control Council Law No. 46 dissolved Prussia by administrative decree on February 25, 1947 — eight hundred years of history ended by a document no German institution had the legal standing to challenge. That story deserves its own article.
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Join Now →The Zwei-plus-Vier-Vertrag — the Two Plus Four Treaty signed in Moscow on September 12, 1990 — is considered by German legal consensus to have granted the Federal Republic full sovereignty. Article 7, Paragraph 2 states it plainly: “The united Germany shall accordingly have full sovereignty over its internal and external affairs.”
That same Germany continued to occupy the UN enemy state category, formally unchallenged, for the next thirty-five years.
And here is the detail that stops the careful reader cold. In August 2013 — not 1990, not 1991, not even 2005, but 2013 — Angela Merkel announced in the Stuttgarter Zeitung that Germany had finally achieved full sovereignty in “this last area” through an exchange of diplomatic notes with the Allied powers that formally dissolved the remaining surveillance rights those powers had held over German communications since the 1950s.
Sovereignty, apparently, arrived in installments. The final delivery took until 2013. Nobody held a ceremony.
The Question Nobody Is Asking
Germany has spent eighty years constructing an identity as the world’s most committed multilateralist — the nation that learned from catastrophe, that subordinated its interests to international institutions, that chose law over power as a matter of philosophical principle.
That identity is housed inside a legal architecture that has never been fully resolved.
This is not a fringe reading. The Wissenschaftliche Dienste des Deutschen Bundestages — the official research service of the German parliament — confirmed in its own documentation that the formal amendment procedure for removing the enemy state clause has never been initiated. The German constitutional scholar Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider has written extensively on the gap between declared and actual sovereignty. The legal debate is real, acknowledged, and quietly set aside.
The mainstream position is that none of this matters practically. The clauses are a dead letter. Reasonable people do not invoke them.
But consider the specific shape of this argument. It says: the mechanism is there, but no reasonable actor would use it. It depends, entirely, on the continued reasonableness of the actors. It is not a resolution. It is a gamble made on behalf of a population that was never told the gamble was being placed.
When a nation builds its entire postwar identity — its sovereignty, its legal standing, its participation in international institutions — on a foundation that was never formally cleared, it has not achieved sovereignty. It has achieved the performance of sovereignty, sustained by the goodwill of the parties who hold the unrevoked clauses and choose, for now, not to invoke them.
Goodwill is not a treaty. Consensus is not an amendment. And a ribbon that looks like nothing can still hold.
The Plan That Was Never Abandoned
In September 1944, US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. presented Roosevelt with a proposal to strip Germany permanently of all industrial capacity — to reduce it, in his own words, to “a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character.” The plan was officially abandoned after fierce internal opposition. The official version is that it died before the war ended.
Then consider the shape of what followed across the next eighty years.
In September 2022, the Nordstream pipelines — Germany’s own energy infrastructure, built to secure affordable gas for German industry and German households — were destroyed by sabotage in international waters. The German government opened an investigation. It closed without findings in early 2024. Within months of the destruction, Germany was importing American liquefied natural gas at roughly three to four times the previous price. BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, began relocating production — to the United States. The German Foreign Minister called the energy crisis “an opportunity.”
Volkswagen was subjected to US legal penalties exceeding thirty billion dollars — a figure that dwarfs anything imposed on American manufacturers for comparable or worse conduct. Bayer was steered into the Monsanto acquisition through a web of US advisory firms and destroyed by American litigation, as we have documented elsewhere. Germany’s last functioning nuclear power plants were closed in April 2023, in the middle of an energy crisis, for ideological reasons no serious engineer endorsed. The car industry that survived two world wars, division, and reunification is now closing plants for the first time in its history.
Henry Morgenthau’s plan specified de-industrialization by decree. What has occurred is de-industrialization by regulation, litigation, and energy policy — arriving at the same destination through mechanisms that leave no fingerprints, require no occupation authority, and can always be attributed to market forces, democratic decisions, or the inevitable march of progress.
The enemy state clause was never removed from the Charter. The Morgenthau plan was never fully implemented by force. Both remain, patient and intact, in the architecture underneath.
This is the first article in a series on what Germany actually was, what was done to it, what was signed, what was promised, and what none of it means if the foundation it stands on was never cleared. Next: what Germany was in 1913 — and why that made it a target. https://www.maier-files.com/what-germany-was-and-why-that-made-it-a-target/
