The European Unionâs Evil Pedigree â Berlin 1942 Posted By: Rodney Atkinsonon: July 05, 2012 http://freenations.net/the-european-unions-evil-pedigree-berlin-1942-2/
INTRODUCTION by Rodney Atkinson: The most precise blueprint for the structure and indeed the protectionist and corporatist political economy of the 1957 founded âEuropean Economic Communityâ which we now know as the European Union, was the publication in 1942 in Berlin of the âEuropaeische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaftâ of which two of the most significant lectures are here translated by Edward Spalton. Those who thought that the âbuilding of Europeâ in the 1950s could in no way replicate the German dominated Europe of the 1940s may now be reconsidering their optimism. The years since the second world war have culminated in a rich German State, dominant German industry and a European Union run by Berlin while most EU countries seem politically powerless and approach bankruptcy.
Nor can this dominance be regarded as accidental. It was Helmut Kohl who said âThe future will belong to the Germans ⦠when we build the house of Europe.â and it was Adenauerâs Minister of Commerce, Dr Seebohm (anticipating the British Governmentâs favourite phrase âBritain at the heart of Europeâ!) who asserted that âGermany is the heart of Europe and the limbs must adjust themselves to the heart not the heart to the limbs.â It was a German Christian Democrat Party paper in 1995 âReflections on European Policyâ which issued the threat: âIf European integration were not to progress, Germany might be called upon by its own security constraints to try to effect stabilisation of Eastern Europe in the traditional mannerâ
As Walter Lippman wrote in the Herald Tribune in 1947 âIf thirty years hence Germany dominates Europe and thus holds the balance of power between Russia and the English speaking nations, German historians will not count this war as a true defeat.â This is the situation 60 years later and it did not come about âby accidentâ. And if those who genuinely sought a different Europe ignorantly reproduced so many of the characteristics of 1940s Fascism and Nazism then their naivety is as unforgiveable as those Nazis who âset the pointsâ for post war Europe, knowing precisely where the train would arrive!
Europaeische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft (EWG) European Economic Community (EEC) by Edward Spalton â a personal view June 2012
With increasing stresses and strains in the EU, German dominance of Europe is emerging as an incontestable fact. The EUâs own account of itself completely omits the attempt at creating a pan European bloc under this title, devised not by Monnet and Schuman but by the ideologues, economists and industrialists of the Third Reich and their collaborators. They too envisaged an era and area of harmony where the peoples of Europe would co-operate fruitfully under a New Order in a large area economy (Grossraumwirtschaft). The concept was launched in 1940 soon after Dunkirk and by 1942 was the subject of a high level gathering of what might have been termed âthe Great and the Goodâ in a more normal society. In 2002 I translated the introduction and lead paper of this series of lectures. It was published as a booklet by the Democrat Press, a publisher based in the labour and trade union movement.
By one of those very long coincidences, I first heard about what is now the EU when I was in the lower sixth on a school trip to Hanover in 1958, the year after the EECâs founding Treaty of Rome. âHave you heard about our Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft?â asked my German host âIt will guarantee our living standardâ. When we got back home our teacher explained that the word meant âEconomic Communityâ and it had been created by a treaty between Germany, France, the Benelux countries and Italy the previous year. Not knowing anything of its structure, we thought it was a hopeful sign for future peace and prosperity in Europe. As several other boys had been told the same thing by their hosts, it was obviously something which our German friends had learned in school. Our teacher remarked on this and said it showed a difference in tradition between our countries. We would not be taught such a political opinion as fact in a British school.
The main paper which follows was delivered by Walther Funk, Reichsminister for the Economy, President of the Reichsbank and Minister for Post-War Planning. An ebullient communicator with a background in commercial journalism, he had previously been Chief Press Officer and State Secretary under Goebbels at the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Funk escaped the hangman at Nuremberg although his colleague Sauckel did not. He was released from prison in 1957 on grounds of ill health and quickly found employment in the educational life of Lower Saxony. He lived in Hanover until his death in 1960. So it is very likely that our German contemporaries were so completely âon messageâ concerning the new EEC because Herr Funk was continuing to promote his project, albeit in a rather humbler office than the one he held in 1942!
By 1957 Professor Doctor Heinrich Hunke, who wrote the introductory paper for the 1942 lectures, was already influential in the politics of Lower Saxony. Most probably this explains why the former Reichsminister Funk obtained official employment so quickly after his release from Spandau prison.
If you disregard the references to contemporary events, the rationale for European integration and most of the policies put forward by Funk and his colleague Hunke will be familiar to anybody who has studied the activities and publications of the post war EU Commission or the arguments advanced by the European Movement. The similarities of concepts and vocabulary are too striking and numerous to be merely coincidental.
Monnet and Schuman were certainly not fascists but, to take a metaphor from cricket, those who could be described as second order batsmen and second eleven promoters of the EEC project had often been deeply involved in the first Nazi attempt. The use of the same title for the project â âEuropean Economic Communityâ suggests that the founding fathers of the EU recognised that there would be a degree of brand recognition and loyalty to the vision of the Nazi project amongst the political classes, which could be carried forward to its post war revival. Some of the more prominent of these personalities are described in Rodney Atkinsonâs youtube video on âThe Nazis and Fascists who founded the European Union and their influence todayâ and on the website www.freenations.freeuk.com there is substantial documentation of the true nature of the European Union and its indisputable tendency to re-create the Europe of the 1940s with contributions from all over Europe.
In their intense, far-ranging investigation of the origins of the EU âThe Great Deceptionâ, Booker & North trace the idea for the central, basic, bureaucratic structure of the post war EU to Monnet and the British civil servant, Arthur Salter. They had both been frustrated in the Twenties by the difficulties of achieving international agreements and came up with the concept of a supra-national, unsackable, expert, technocratic secretariat-cum-executive with the sole perpetual power of initiative in a standing council of European nations.
Able to take the long view and freed from the vulgar necessity of achieving democratic consent, the âwise menâ of this Commission would drive the European unification project forward in the interest of all the people of Europe, regardless of national differences or public opinion in any one country or all of them. This was not at all a Nazi idea. It was, of course, massively authoritarian and arrogant to believe that such supermen existed â with the wisdom to guide and steer the destinies of the nations of a continent. The Commissioners frequently turned out to be rather shoddy, failed politicians in their own countries. The real power lay with their permanent civil servants. In setting out this organisational scenario , Booker and North were dismissive of the idea of any Nazi input or connection with the institutional structure of the post war EEC.
The Nazis did not invent any really new ideas. They continued a view of the world (Weltanschauung) which has predominated amongst the German political class since before Germany became a single nation and continues today. The methods change but the objectives remain remarkably constant. They saw their national destiny (Schicksal) as defined by natural resources and geography (plus the vitality of the Volk (people)) and devised a combined academic discipline, geopolitics (Geopolitik) to give it a rationale. It was a Common Market, a customs union (Zollverein), which brought the many German states together into a single, large area economy (Grossraumwirtschaft) in the 1840s.
Not only did German politicians aspire to such a single economic order amongst Germans; they believed that Germany needed the resources of the peoples of Central Europe (Mitteleuropa) and the Balkans under German control in a single living space (Lebensraum). This would provide a market for German manufactured goods and a source of raw materials. The similarity with the arguments put forward today for the advantages of the EU Single Market is inescapable.
Long before Germanyâs unification in 1871, the delegates at the revolutionary parliament, meeting in Frankfurt in 1848, decided that the Balkans (then part of the old Austrian and Turkish empires) formed part of Germanyâs natural economic hinterland. They also decided that no significant Slavic power should be allowed to arise in the area. In 1999 the EU/NATO powers followed this policy and ensured the destruction of Yugoslavia. Todayâs German politicians openly talk of exercising a âbenevolent hegemonyâ over Central and South Eastern Europe.
It is easy to see how these German ideas and world outlook dovetailed into the differently motivated, post war institutional structure, devised by Monnet and Salter and promoted by Monnetâs front man Schuman. In 1971 even the Foreign Office mandarins described this authoritarian, technocratic system as âbureaucraticâ and its workings as âremote and unmanageableâ â and they were working for Britainâs subjection to it!
Dr. Hallstein, the first president of the EEC Commission, had been a member of at least six Nazi organisations and had successfully completed a Nazi leadership training course. So, as an academic promoted under Nazism, he could hardly have been unfamiliar with the thoughts of Reichsminister Funk. General de Gaulle wrote of him âIf Dr. Hallstein is a sincere European, it is because he is first and foremost an ambitious Germanâ. As State Secretary at the West German Foreign Office, Hallstein had been responsible for the âHallstein Doctrineâ which denied German diplomatic recognition to Eastern European states which recognised the communist regime in East Germany. A major effect of this was that Nazi war criminals were not extradited to face trial in Eastern European countries where most Nazi atrocities had occurred. They were free to continue their careers in the civil service, police, politics, local administration and business.
The EU bureaucracy has a powerful life of its own. Until recently, EU institutions and policies have often served as a cloak for long-held ambitions of the German political class. Now that the mask has fallen, we shall see whether the future of Europe will be German or European and whether the European Union itself will collapse alongside its once eponymous, unlamented, wartime forerunner.
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